There's only so much you can do to increase the cargo capacity of a Bantam, while keeping it cost-effective. It makes little sense training the skills needed to instal rigs, especially since the astronautic rigs for increasing cargo space may cost anywhere near 1 million ISK. You're better off just waiting out the skill training till you're able to fly an Osprey.
However, one way to increase the profits is to eliminate the travel time between the station and the asteroid belt. You can jettison whatever is in your cargohold and that jetcan floating in space can then be used as storage, transfering the ore there as you mine more and more. The jetcan will last in space for about an hour and a half until imploding (or until you leave it empty), but it's better to keep it under an hour just in case. Then, when you've mined enough ore to fill the cargohold of your industrial ship, you can switch ships and bring all of the ore back to station in one go.
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| Caldari Industrial Badger at an Asteroid Belt |
In keeping with my original intention of being very mobile, going to whatever place has the best prices for ore, I was hesitant on using two ships at once. However, the cargohold of a Badger is big enough to haul a repackaged Bantam along with all of its equipment. That means I can carry all of my stuff to whatever system I desire. The mining ship has to be repackaged though to be able to fit in the Industrial ship's cargohold.
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| Repackage the ship / Transfer the equipment and Bantam to Badger's cargohold / You're set to go |
To use the Badger, I had to purchase and train the Caldari Industrial skill to level I. That was the most expensive skill purchase to date (270k ISK), but more expensive skill purchases are on the way no doubt.
After timing myself and doing all sorts of calculations to figure out the ISK/hr income rate (read about it here), I found out that when I used the jetcan and hauled the ore with the Industrial ship, I was gaining additional 454876.43 ISK/hr. That's quite a considerable amount this early in the game.
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| Bantam Jetcan-mining - Enough ore for one full hall with a Badger |
I was definitely lucky not to encounter any pirates and can-flippers. Otherwise, I would've lost all of the ore I spent the 30 minutes to mine. Added risk means more reward if everything goes right. With that kind of income, the 270k ISK that I spent on the Industrial ship skillbook quickly payed for itself.
Using the jetcan method would still let me stay mobile and mine in systems that are 0.8 sec rating and higher. Using Secure Containers, while much safer, would mean that I'm stuck in the system until I can haul all of the containers to the new place. I wouldn't be able to mine in 0.8 and higher sec systems either - you can only anchor Secure Containers in 0.7 systems and lower.
Aside from rampant high-sec piracy, the other issue I see with jetcanning and hauling the ore with an Industrial ship is the fact that I will be flying an Osprey (Caldari Cruiser) in just over a day. The volume that a repackaged cruiser takes up is 10000 m3 - much bigger than Badger has, even with expanded cargohold equipment installed. I would probably have to use Badger Mark II and would likely need to purchase and install rigs in addition to expanded cargohold equipment.
But that will all be figured out in time. The Osprey sports a much larger cargohold than a Bantam. A new set of calculations will have to be done to determine the profit margins and whether the risk will be worth the reward.
The skill training for today was:
- Caldari Industrial I
- Caldari Frigate IV (still training from the day before)