Prognostication

As the third pilot in my alliance takes delivery of his Proteus, and with 3 Tengu in the slips, I take time to ponder the state of the T3 Project my alliance is running. With the changes to both the reverse engineering and manufacturing sides of the equations in the wings, we've put a halt to new manufacturing and reverse engineering. As I am sure other manufacturers have also done. Mainly because of the Carbon86 and Neurovisual Interface Matrix issues.

I'm currently slowly planing what levels of various Polymers we will need in preparation for the resumption of manufacturing. We may go ahead and start manufacturing T3 Components that are not affected by the upcoming changes. The nice thing about this pause in manufacturing is that it gives a bit of time for more of my industrialists to get better subsystem and hull coverage.

So how has this pause and projected changes affected the market in Jita you ask? Well the market manipulators went into overdrive. They spotted the window of opportunity created by the halt in new T3 construction prior to the changes taking effect and are manipulating the subsystem and hull prices higher until the changes hit tranquility.

For the long haul, there's going to be a hull shortage and a subsystem oversupply. That much is evident. We're getting BPCs in about the right ratio of 20:1 but they are only being lost at a 5:1 ratio.

However, given the reduction in cost of the individual hulls represented by 10 run BPCs coming from malfunctioning relics (a significant portion of the current cost of a hull is the BPC that it is made from) and reduced dependence on bottleneck polymers and salvage, I can easily see the day where a T3 ship OF CERTAIN CONFIGURATIONS, will be in the 300mil to 500mil range. But even with that, there will always be other configuraitons (FOTM ones) that'll cost 1-2 bil. This is inevitable.

The realy interesting part is that as more and more of the industrial base is at least capable of manufacturing T3 ships, we should start seeing an upswing in manufacturing of T3 subsystems and hull on the other side of the patch. The biggest problem so far has been skilling up to be able to manufacture the hulls and then getting a reasonable supply of the bottleneck items. With the changes coming up, he salvage situation should even out a bit (after a few weeks), and time taking care of the ability to manufacture the T3 stuff means that we should have a much more ballanced supply situation and a much larger pool of T3 hulls and subsytems BPCs to manufacture from.

But the T3 market is still going to be hosed for the next 3-4 weeks.

One of the great things, from my point of view, is that gettign the skills in place to manufacture T3 ships and sub-systems has resulted in some rather serendipitous completion of T2 manufacturing skills. I've been able to use T2 small and medium projectile turrets for a while now. I can finally invent and manufacture said turrets. And all the ammo for them. 14 x Barrage M BPCs will enure that. This recent spate of T2 goodness has but a bit of "pressure" on my datacore reserves however (read - wiped out certain ones) and I needed to swich around some of my research agents. That's par for the course in EVE.

I'm looking forward to laying off the T3 manufacturing skills for a bit come early July. Get some ship handling skills in, gas mining, Salvaging 5, etc etc etc....

My alts also are going to run on rails for the next little bit as well. Once the main alt finishes scanning and refining and POS gunnery, one of my research alts will be going down the invention road, while the other two will get advance lab ops to 4.