Refining issues

Well I managed to find a good belt in high sec. Of course the minute you find a good belt in high sec you can immediately deduce there is a problem with it. Indeed there was. As experienced miners will tell you 0.5 systems without stations usually have more intact belts. This is because a lot of miners are lazy. This one I found does have a system next door that has a station. There is a problem though. The station is an Amarr station. Well that explains the belt.

Now as you may surmise, most pilots in Minmatar high sec have high status with Minmatar corporations. Which is normal. This means that systems that must rely on stations without Minmatar NPC corp stations in them are not very popular. The first mining op I did, I shiped all the ore I mined 4 jumps to my usual system. Although this did get all the minerals from the ore I brought in refined, it was not a cost effective way of doing things.

Last night I did a small mining op and melted 1/3 of a belt. I decided that the time saved refining in the Amarr station was worth the taxes that they charge me since it saves on the number of back and fourth trips I need to do. Please take note that I'm talking about myself AND my alt and we both are using rigged ships with about 29k m3 capacity. With GSC to boost up their internal capacity to about 36k m3. After refining I was able to get all the minerals (using both ships) to my manufacturing station in a single trip. Much more acceptable.

Just to give you guys a feel for the order of magnitude of such an op, My take home ore ended up being worth about 25.6mil on the metropolis market. But the minerals taxed by the npc corp were worth 1.1mil. There was an enormous savings in time involved however. This means that I can be out mining much faster and for much longer so my overall NAV goes up faster. I would have prefered to have all the ore but that cost too much in time.

One solution I may look into is getting my alt into a freighter. The problem with that of course is the investment in isk. If I didn't plan on buying the alliance BPO I'd probably do it. It's an option for down the road anyways. With a freighter there would have been no problem simply loading up all the ore and in one trip getting it to the production station.