More PI

And it's now 6 days until long skill day. So I've been digging deeper into the mass of threads about the latest version on Sisi. The interesting thing I noticed is the raw material/planet type map is firming up. The basics look fairly solid now. Each type of planet can have 5 different resources. There are 7 types of usable planets (Shattered planets are not usable apparently). There are 15 raw materials. 3 of these are available on a single type of planet. Once you have all these 3 types of planets you only need 2 other planet types to have all resources covered.

To get Autotrophs you need a Temperate planet.
To get Felsic Magma you need a Lava planet.
To get Reactive Gases you need a Gas planet.

Once you have these 3 planet types though, there are only 2 resources you don't have available. These are: Planctic Colonies and Noble Metals.

To get Planctic Colonies you need an Ice or a Ocean planet.
To get Noble Metals you need a Barren or a Plasma planet.

Assuming ice and barren are going to be more common than Ocean and Plasma this means that with the following 5 planets you'd be able to get all 15 resources:

Temperate, Lava, Barren, Ice and Gas.

So then the question was: can I engineer it so that I'm getting 3 resources from each planet?

Temperate: Autotrophs, Complex Organisms, Micro Organisms.
Lava: Felsic Magma, Non-CS Crystals, Suspended Plasma.
Gas: Reactive Gases, Ionic Solutions, Noble Gasses.
Ice: Planctic Colonies, Aqueous Liquids, Heavy Metals.
Barren: Noble Metals, Base Metals, Carbon Compounds.

Well well well, what do you know, you can. Now this does not guarantee quantities and what not. But at least with the 5 planet types listed I am guaranteed that I'll be able to make all tier 4 end products as well as the intermediate products. This means that with a single character one would be able to manufacture anything that can be built with PI. This is good.

My suspicion that we'll be seeing a large amount of POS warfare right out of Tyrannises gate. Up until now if someone had his POS blown up he just got one from the unlimited stockpiles in high sec. Whether those stockpiles are going bye bye right away or after a few weeks is irrelevant. Once the NPC sources go bye bye POSes (and their modules) will need to come from the PI side of things. Depending on adoption of PI by the player base this could provide a "shock bottleneck" effect. Say [IT] or [PL] or [.-A-.] goes on an anti-POS offensive in enemy space. Specifically targeting moon goo towers. We'll find out very fast whether the big alliances stockpiled their towers. Once those stockpiles run out replacement towers will be coming out of PI. This could provide a bottleneck to replacing destroyed towers. Large amounts of alliance funding come out of moon operations. Should those income sources turn out to be much harder/more expensive to replace than previously this could prove to be seriously problematic to the large space holding alliances. And anyone else who is a serious tower consumer (High sec research, wormhole residents).

It's going to be very interesting to see how sustained the effort is going to be to produce PI products from the player base. Some good large offenses in 0.0 though and we could see rather asymmetrical demands for PI products. Think of it this way: More towers get destroyed -> less fuel needed for current towers, but more towers needed. As the towers go out, fuel usage goes up. If a lot of moon towers get destroyed -> T2 moon goo goes up as well as tower demand -> T2 production goes down and less need for Non-moon related goods for T2 production.

It looks like we'll get a balancing act within the PI products with lower demand for intermediate products when there's high demand for end products and high demand for intermediate when there's low demand for end product. The question is: will the replacement rate of towers match the destruction rate? Spikes? Ah EVE the endless complexities you bring.

Incidentally I suspect that the usual suspects are in full blown hoarding mode atm. This is one of the major reasons I suspect that we'll see an immediate removal of all NPC goods involved from the marketplace. CCP can depend on the hoarders to tide things over until production picks up. The other thing is that this is also going to make for two classes of pilots - location tied and mobile. Most of the pure PvP players will probably not be getting into this for two reasons. One it's carebear stuff (stigma attached) and two it ties you to a location.

One thing I just thought of though: Do you need to be within range of a wormhole system to decommission a PCC? If so people who "loose" a wormhole they have PI in may find themselves at a massive dis-advantage since they would be unable to put down new PCCs until they decommissioned the existing ones... it could make PI unusable for a character.