Reflecting on Reaction Towers

One of the original reasons I started up the IPO almost 6 months ago was to raise capital to get a good set of fulleride towers running. At the time, technetium (which is required in the fulleride reaction) was around 200,000 isk pu, so to get the reactors rolling I needed 125,000 units just to fill the silos, so 200,000*125,000 =  25,000,000,000 bill. But Im getting ahead of myself. Lets start at the beginning.

Why Fullerides? 

I chose fullerides because reactions that require technetium have the highest requirement for startup capital, presenting a high barrier to entry to enter production. Unless you have your own tech moon, you need to buy tech in Jita and as just mentioned, to set up my 10 towers, I needed 25b in tech alone.
Therefore the reactions involving tech products, having the highest barrier for entry, also tend to have the highest profit margins. You can get an idea of what profit is to be made by checking websites such as this one.

However, tech is a fickle material. With constant wars over tech moons, plus the possible constant threat of 'iterations' (such as the nerf we saw in august that over halved its price), there is considerable risk involved and prices (and profit margins) do jump around.

Tower setup and location

I set up my towers in Black Rise. Caldari lowsec is pretty crowded, but given that nearly all tech is traded through Jita, being close to that hub was important to me.

I had 10 large caldari towers in total. Caldari larges are the only towers capable of having the cpu to support enough reactors. You will need inside each tower: 6 silos, 2 reactors. You will have some powergrid left over for some small guns, but absolutely no CPU spare for webs, points, shield hardeners etc. So your main defense in lowsec is to be quiet and not piss anyone off. 

My setup was as follows. In towers 1-5 I had platinum (silo 1) and technetium (silo 2) reacting (reactor A) into platinum technite (silo 3). In silo 4 we have carbon polymers which react (reactor B) with the platinum tecnite in silo 3 to produce fullerides (which fill silos 5 and 6).

In towers 6-10, I had the same set up, but with hydrocarbons and silcates reacting to form carbon polmers, which in turn react with platinum technite to produce fullerides. 

Tower Maintenance

Every 3 days, you need to take a freighter or JF and tend to the towers. You alternate between either just emptying the fullerides or emptying fullerides and filling up all the ingredients again. The reason I have 2 sets of 5 towers is that the simple reactions (ie plat + tech = plat tech) produce 200 units of plat tech/carbon polymers per hour. Only 100 units are consumed per hour by the fulleride reaction, so the plat tech/carbon polymers that are extra can be hauled to the other set of 5 towers. That way I never need to buy plat tech or polymers off the open market. Thus people usually run reaction towers in multiples of two, with this complimentary setup style.

A JF is really a requirement if you plan on running two towers or more, or else you will spend all day going back and forth between station and POS. However, most imporantly, you will need it to haul materials and fuel back and forth from highsec to lowsec. 

Tending to 10 towers with a JF takes 30-45 mins every 3 days. Then add time for hauling, buying and selling materials. Once the inital setup, the profit for time spent is great, but as I said, the startup capital was pretty intense. 

The particular 10 tower chain I have was purchased from my old corp for around 45 billion. But since owning it, it has given me probably over 20b profit, maybe 50% more than that (I will have better numbers when I close this bond up, and have tallied up all my data). And that includes a prettty brutal period of loss when tech crashed in august. 

If you have any other questions of how to run, setup or maintain towers, feel free to poke me.