Fighting with markets (and software)

Despite being moderatly quiet on the blog, I am still busy in Eve.

My current project that I don't understand anywhere near well enough is how to use the Crest API, for pulling market information.

What I used to do.

I had previously used google docs and eve central's API, but google docs are flaky on something as small as my PI spreadsheet, and is unworkable for a full market listing.

What I am currently doing.

I use Steve's python based crest downloader to pull down all buy and sell orders for a region ( https://github.com/fuzzysteve/CREST-Market-Downloader ). I have some success, but what works reliably for him in pulling down an entire region of market orders in 15 minutes, takes 4 hours for me and only works 1/3 or the time.

I also pull down my current asset list and market orders using jeveassets, peeking into both corp and personal assets.  Despite having my own division in the corps that I am currently in, I have to filter out 'others' assets from my own. (using sql per below)

While I am no wizard at either Perl or Java, I am very good at SQL.  So I upload these 2 data sets and put them into a MariaDB instance (MySQL fork/clone - but much less hassle to download)

Knowing how to map item ids to names, groups, categories and meta levels is useful.  For that I use Steve's SDE dump, and as MariaDB/MySQL is my preferred database, https://www.fuzzwork.co.uk/dump/mysql-latest.tar.bz2 works well (other databases and versions in the same folder).

With all of this, a final SQL script can show me, by whatever market group I want to filter on, what my current stock counts are, and what is currently on market, the local price (if any), the jita price, my markup.

When this comes together, it works well.  When it doesn't it is a pain.

Alternatives

Evernus is a reasonable alternative for some of this functionality and I have looked at it.  It is not enough.

I cant work out how to make it show me all the skillbooks missing off the local market, then swap to look at either T1 or T2 ammo, then flit to the next part of the market I am interested in.  I have  2 tycoon and 1 wholesale level pilots, but there are 400 different skillbooks alone, and I have less than 700 market slots. If I was better at working out what was needed, I could probably make sure that was there, but have little chance of stocking everything wanted.

I got mildly excited by seeing Evernus Alliance Market ( https://bitbucket.org/krojew/evernus-alliance-market ).  It looks to be a good group logistics tool, and despite being written for a Linux environment, with a bit of fiddling, got it installed on a windows instance (there are a couple of evernus 'bug reports' with tips that I found useful ).  But .. it too didnt have the functionality I needed, much of which is in Evernus (including a quick crest sales/buy orders download).

The future

I am (mostly) enjoying the challenges of doing nullsec trading, but I want better tools.  Evernus is an open source software package, and I am in the process of downloading it plus the tools required to enhance it.

The alternative newbie wormhole experience

Another blogger has a grand idea on how to set up in wormholes for new corporations.  What I like is the defence force.  What I don't like is that such a defence force is currently lacking the backing to make it happen.  It seems a very expensive plan.

For the last 2 weeks the Foo corps have not been recruiting, as we been under wardec.  Now a highsec wardec is not much of an issue for existing wormhole players.  We do our PI and sites with a certain level of paranoia, as it is wormhole space and there are cloaks everywhere.  What a highsec wardec does mean is that we potentially have pilots actively trying to access our 'special secrets', namely our wormhole entrances.  Then a stupid CEO logs out in the entrance highsec system and can be found with locator agents.  Such a stupid CEO might just share the same surname with this blog.

For those players looking to set up something similar to what we are running, the costs are roughly as follows:

• 300M for a bookmark to an empty system  (wormholesales.com)
• 1B for a large tower and fittings
• 1B for customs office gantries and upgrades
• 500M/month for fuel

For the large tower fittings you will want:

• 1 Personal Hanger Array.  This provides a small amount of secure storage to pilots, for sleeper loot, ammo, fittings.
• 1 Large Ship Assembly array (or X-large, probably does not matter either way: they hold the same volume). This provides bulk 'secure' storage to 7 players (i.e. one or more pilot/player)
• 1 SMA that is online for holding ships and refitting.
• Optionally a second off-line SMA, requiring elevated privileges containing defence ships, a large industrial with spare guns and fittings, and a hoarder with spare ammo.  Advantages are that it is secure storage.  Disadvantage that is makes your POS look 'expensively full of loot'.  According to my tests on duality, this SMA can be onlined even if the POS is re-inforced, and new guns (not missiles) can be onlined and restocked.
• Optionally 1 Mobile Laboratory and/or Advanced Mobile Laboratory charging 10K/hour for ME and Copy slots.
• Guns and hardeners to suit.  Look at http://talocanunited.com/wordpress/designing-a-pos/ and http://talocanunited.com/wordpress/pos-permissions/ . Have at least sufficient guns so that even if the POS is re-inforced, you can use your entire powergrid on newly onlined guns.  Consider even more guns that this.

The divisions in the SMA can be hired out for those doing large amounts of PI and mining, plus those looking to store expensive ships securely.  Somewhere in the vicinity of 50-100M / month is reasonable.


You will probably want to own your own customs offices. On a structure bash; you can never have too much DPS.  They are boring.  At 700 DPS, a pos bash is an all night affair.  At 3000 DPS it is a couple of hours. At 5000 DPS, it is 'short work'.  Consider the merits of taking the time to roll wormholes vs the time lost by leaving a scout on the wormhole.  This is a challenge for a couple of newbie pilots.  3 afk cruisers (vexors or coercers) with drone and laser dps can do the job, albeit with a certain risk of ending up in highsec with a replacement


In 2 of our 3 wormholes, we blew up the existing customs offices, and replace them with our own.  In the third wormhole, we purchased the POCO's in place from a corp that we thought was 'zombie' but had a 'low profile' approach.  It was so low profile we thought that it was abandoned and moved in.  We paid a little over the replacement price for the Poco's, but did not need to spend the time to bash them down.

POCO tax can be set wherever you want it.  As a simple option, roughly 5% tax is considered OK by most pilots.  You can have a lot more tax flexibility if the corp that owns the poco's is not the corp with the pilots.

In terms of defence, having big friends is useful.  Gevlon found Noir to be good hired friends.  He also found that his dread was a trouble magnet.  I previously found Daktaklakpak. a wormhole PVP corp looking for something to kill to be valuable.  A large POS and a small wormhole are a daunting proposition.  Gevlon's fleet took 4 hours with a dread.  Not many pilots are willing to devote a 1B ship to evict another pilot on the off chance that they might have something worth looting.  If you ever do have a hostile dread attacking in a low end wormhole, advertise it.

Having ships set up to fight at a moment's notice is also needed.  Having ships to escape a blockade (covops frigates and haulers, interceptors) should be considered high on your todo list.

You must be able to 'eat' ship losses; they are a fact of life.  Sometimes you will be the cause of other pilots losing their ships.  Bashes of properly set up POS with fuel happen far less often.

The thing I most dislike about Gevlon's plan for wormholes, is that "replacement tanking" is cheaper.  We are in our wormholes for the long term.  I would replace my entire infrastructure several times over by not paying his rates.  We are however interested in mercenaries to defend us when there are significant fights to be had, and are willing to enter into 'mutual invite' best intention groups.

The single biggest risk for any wormhole corp is having a CEO that is prepared to worry about logistics and keeping the POS fuelled.  This a far bigger risk than setting up an undersized POS, or hostile fleets or awoxing.  I have seen corps suffer due to invasion. I have personally seen more corps die to lack of fuel.

The Foo style of wormhole corp does rely on a moderate level of trust, but certainly not excessive.  It certainly seems more reliable than trusting that highsec customs offices will have a reliably accessible customs office with a reasonable tax rate.


If you would like advice on how to set up the same style of corp that we have, please contact me; either on this blog as a comment or in game (DoToo Foo).

The costs of POS research

TL:DR; POS are great for research, but be prepared to spend 10K/hour for copy and material efficiency slots.

The Foo Corporations run research modules in our POS, in both highsec and wormhole spaces.

This post looks primarily at the costs of research POS, rather than their benefits.  I wrote some of these up in this post.  In summary of that post, the benefit of POS research is the ability to get nearly 4 times as much research completed rather than using highsec stations. (I can't speak to null research slot access, not having any experience there).

A hypothetical research tower

Lets take a hypothetical medium Caldari POS, using http://eve.1019.net/

Caldari towers are generally used for dedicated researdch POS, for the increased powergrid.

This contains 5 Mobile Laboratories, 2 Advanced labs. 
Each Advanced Mobile lab has the following slots:

• 3 copy (time multiple 65%)
• 2 invention (time multiple 50%), 
• 2 material efficiency slots (time multiple 75%)

Each Mobile lab has the following slots :

• 1 copy (time multiple 75%)
• 5 invention (time multiple 50%)
• 3 material efficiency slots (time multiple 75%)
• 3 production efficiency slots (time multiple 75%)

So, our hypothetical POS has  :

• 11 copy slots
• 29 invention slots
• 19 material efficiency slots
• 15 production efficiency slots

The copy and material efficiency slots are in high demand in empire space, with many of the NPC slots having queues of a month.

The production efficiency slots are not generally overwhelmed like copy or ME research, but are still useful, due to the time multiple bonus.
The time multiple is a bonus; reducing the total time for any jobs with that mulitple;  eg 4 days of materiel efficiency research in an NPC station would only take 3 days in a POS.


The invention slots are only useful for long invention jobs.  They are a pain to use, as everything needs to be in the POS (BPC's, decryptors, datacores, parts etc), as well as the inventor.  In an NPC station, the pilot doing the inventing can be systems away according to your Scientific Networking skill.

I do not feel the need for 'fast' invention jobs, when for everything other than ships, it only makes an hour difference, especially as my invention pilot does more than sit at the POS all day.

The only time we use our POS invention slots are for ship invention as it takes days rather than hours.  For everything else would rather leave these idle and pay for NPC invention slots.

Number of researchers per tower

A researcher with Advanced Laboratory 4 can do 10 concurrent research jobs.  To fully utilise this medium POS, we need 3 full time researchers to use the copy/material slots; another 2 researchers to use the production efficiency slots; and will potentially soak up some invention slots with the remaining research slots.

So, as a rough idea for number of researchers by tower size:

• A small caldari research tower supports roughly 2 full time researchers.
• A medium caldari research tower supports roughly 5 full time researchers.
• A large caldari research tower supports roughly 10 full time researchers.

Costs

For costs, I look at the copy and material efficiency slots, with the other slots being a low value bonus.  A medium tower takes 20 fuel blocks / hour.  As of this post, approximately 15k ISK /fuel block.  So for fuel, we need 300k ISK/hour.  Assuming 100% utilisation (which is harder than it seems); across 30 (copy + material efficiency) slots; this is 10K/slot/hour in fuel costs.  This compares quite poorly to highsec research direct costs, but are available now.

A highsec tower has an additional requirement of 1 faction charter per hour; current value of 3k Isk/hour, or about 1% of the fuel costs.  This is so small, that we ignore this cost in our price setting.

Researched BP's

I am currently building up a set of researched and copied BP's, both for use and for sale.  Many BP's can be sold researched well in excess of these costs, if somewhat slowly.  I have not had much luck selling blueprint copies, and seeing some main region copy slots only having 3 or 4 day wait suggests that the demand is not as strong on copy slots as it is on research slots.

In summary.

If you want to spend 500 ISK/slot/hour on research, but are prepared to be limited in access to slots; NPC station based research works for you.

If you have a consistent demand/use for ME or copy slots, and 10K ISK/slot/hour is not an issue, a research tower may be in order.

A manufacturing business on the side

Apart from my wormhole PI and research, I have a started a little manufacturing business on the side.

I am building up my collection of blueprints. I am limited:

• in my personal research ( is *this* blueprint worth making?  No?  well what about that one?), 
• In research slots.  I have a lot of available research; but even after I cut down the research I put into each blueprint, I still have as many incompletely researched BP's as I have researched ones.
• in ISK. A set of racial destroyer blueprints worth 8M each is OK, cruiser blueprints cost 80M each, and battlecruiser blueprints are more than a plex each; yet I keep growing my collection.  Some blueprints down the line are horrendously expensive.

R.A.M. parts, construction components generally have good returns, and ok margins, but I am often sitting on these even when I am cheapest on the local market; or I buy out all the source material and it becomes unprofitable to make.

Small T1 ammunition has good % returns; but at 50 ISK/hour profit, is only something to be done if I have nothing else better to do.  It's advantage is very low entry and resource requirements.


T2 rigs are even worse.  I have some blueprints that looked OK to build while inventing them (apparent 40% profit, Millions of Isk/hour making them); until I bought up all the supplies, until they start to make small T1 ammo look good.



But there is one blueprint that I have that keeps itself very busy.  I know what it manufactures will be receiving a comparative nerf real soon now, so I keep promising myself; 'this batch will be my last'.

It has easy to supply mats, the demand outstrips my ability to supply, and the profits, while not stellar are still solid.  Evehq based on eve-central Sinq Laison pricing says Unit cost: 1.63M; Unit sales price : 2.35M.  Profit per hour : 310K; though I have been a little sharper in my pricing.  Most importantly, I am selling them faster than I can make them on my (so far single) blueprint.  Customers come to my system rather than having to haul product to market.

I have been making Iteron Mark V's.  Simple, yet effective.  Often destroyed (oh how I know that), yet still a solid work horse.  Received a significant 'implied buff' recently with the reduction in skills required to fly it.  14 days of research in a POS to get the blueprint to 6ME, 2PE (which is my current BP).

Caveat venditor. This ship is going to receive a significant 'implied nerf' very soon.  The ship itself will be untouched; but all the competing ships will be superior for specific cases.  Whether the other ships have more cargo, faster yet better tanked, or get special cargo holds, everything will be better at something. 

I will probably still fly some Iteron Mark V's.  They still will be a good general purpose t1 industrial, but Eve is not a game for general purpose.  While I am not one normally given for market patch speculation, I do not see great days ahead for this ship's prices.

But then, there are other ships in this category that will be buffed soon.  I think I mentioned that I am currently research limited?

Self Sustaining Low Sec POS? Sure, why not!

WARNING: LowSec is a dangerous place to leave Assets hanging in space. This is not intended for a beginner in EVE Online, as you can and will lose your stuff in LowSec if you are not prepared. Take all necessary precautions when attempting to do the following!

Running a POS in LowSec takes some preparation and planning, but it can be done by a careful player and is very rewarding.

What do you get from a LowSec POS? Most people will point out the private research slots and the bonuses to research and production which are a huge advantage for the research of "big stuff" or copying blueprints. But there is more: LowSec POSes additionally give you the opportunity to get moon minerals and react them as well as booster production, which is similar. Here is a POS setup that allows a large variety of operations in space < 0.4:


Gallente Control Tower, Large:
1 x  Assembly Array - Component
1 x  Corporate Hangar Array
2 x  EW - Stasis Webification Battery
2 x  EW - Warp Disruption Battery
2 x  Mobile Laboratory
1 x  Moon Harvesting Array
1 x  Reactor Array - Simple
2 x  Shield Hardener - Explosion Dampening
2 x  Shield Hardener - Heat Dissipation
2 x  Shield Hardener - Photon Scattering
3 x  Silo
3 x  Turret - Hybrid - Railgun, Large
4 x  Turret - Hybrid - Railgun, Medium
1 x  Turret - Hybrid - Railgun, Small

These are only the modules that are Online, with additional offline modules you can switch out production types or lower/raise defenses as you think it's needed.

Your numbers will vary from here on, so please run your own math and note that I'm assuming 30 day cycles (a "month"). I'm also only using thumb figures, really: Run your own math and you'll see that I'm using rather conservative figures.

A setup like this costs around 900M including Ammo and Strontium for timing in case of an attack. It also requires 28,800 Fuel Blocks every 30 days for fueling which comes to around 450M/month.

It gives you access to 6 ME / 6 PE / 2 Copy Slots / 10 Invention Slots,  produces 72.000 Units of Moon Mineral and can use a simple reaction yielding 144.000 Units of reacted materials.

Assuming a low grade moon mineral at 5000 ISK per Unit generates 360M ISK and requires you hauling stuff only a couple of times a month. Let's also assume the reaction we can do is for Prometium, which requires Cadmium and Promethium. This will cost 504M for one month and yield Prometium worth 835M giving a plus of 331M. It requires action  4 times a month to haul input/outputs from station to POS. Effectively, this tower, simply by running the reaction and the moon harvesting, brings in 241M a month so it has paid for itself within 4 months. Add to that production profits and research makes it well worth having something like this.

But there is a problem: Logistics. It's no good to set up something like this without getting your stuff there and back to a trade hub. Cloaky haulers can work but require more effort, and not everyone has a Jump Freighter. Enter: The Hauling Services of New Eden. Assuming you contract stuff in and out only once a month from a nearby system you can get your stuff from HiSec to the LowSec station of your choice for around 120M per round trip. Even then you would be up 121M and still had access to all the other features of the POS.

Of course this all assumes you didn't disturb any locals that consider the system you live in "theirs". That's why I'd recommend getting to know the system and its residents. There are many LowSec system to set up a POS, just find a quiet system with a station and production facilities if your plan requires them and keep a low profile. People will blow up your assets because they consider you an invader to their home.

You can also run two simple reactions on a POS which is a bit more risky because you need to offline defenses, but with smart selection of the reactions you are running you can easily make a PLEX worth of profit from a POS like this.

Summary: A LowSec POS can be a valuable asset for any player, can be set up to be cost neutral, and brings a lot of variety of play styles onto the grid.

Modularizing Production and Industry Part I

This is an introductory post to a small series of posts for industrialists. It is aimed at more experienced players, so I will not explain what a BPO is or how to get them, and also not venture into the basics of production. It will try to show you how to modularize your processes into easily manageable parts, allowing you to upscale your operations vertically and horizontally. So, let's get to it!

Producing Items from others is one of the key factors driving the economy in EVE, be it by refining Ores, building Ammo, Weapons, Ships up to the production of Capitals and Supercapitals.

When you begin your work towards becoming an Industrialist, I strongly advise you modularize your processes. This has a couple of advantages:

1) You can outsource your defined modules.
2) It is easy to upgrade them separate from each other.
3) You are able to identify and parallelize bottle necks.
4) Within a growing group of friends, each individual can specialize in a distinct part of the production process.
5) It becomes easier to keep the books straight, especially when more than one person is involved.
6) You can add "rewards" for completing specific modules, making it possible to share your profits depending on who completed which module.

In future posts, I will explain these modules with 4 examples:
1) Tech 2 Items: This is essentially the same as Tech 1 Items, but also explains the Invention part.
2) Capital Ships: These explain the process of building normal Tech 1 ships as well, but adds to it the need for component blueprints.
3) Jump Freighters. Tech 2 Ships that combine a lot of things in the above two processes.
4) T3 Ships. A bit more complex than T2, and with a couple of twists.

Now, here is a list of generic modules that are required in production of items, be they T1, T2 or even T3. Some can be skipped for some production types, but overall you will have to think about them one way or the other. I'll only scratch the surface in explaining them, there will be more detailed posts about each module. My advice is to plan the entire production process from scratch, and then swap different modules in and out based on your efficiency.

1) Making a plan.
Having a plan is a smart thing, but production plans in EVE can get extremely complex for Items further down the line. Basic Ammo requires only little ISK, Skills and has only a few steps, whereas Tech2 and Tech3 production requires specialized equipment, tons of ISK and Skills. So plan ahead your supply lines, time frames and eventualities that may arise, and of course the skills required. The next post in this series will cover how to make a complete plan and factor in costs in a manufacturing process.

2) Running the numbers.
Now that you have a plan, check it again. There are a lot of costs involved in producing an item from start to end. This is where you decide which modules to swap out from doing them yourself to others. This mostly refers to buying BPCs instead of BPOs or purchasing intermediate items instead of constructing them yourself.

3) Acquire skills.
Time to start acquiring skills for your production needs.

4) Find a production site.
Depending on what you are building, this can be easy or very, very hard, especially when you are researching yourself or building ships that require NullSec space.

5) Get finances in order.
You should be aware that by this time you should start getting the ISK you need for your plan, if it is locked in some other fashion.

6) Set up your production site.
 Again, this can be easy or hard. This and the next step will swallow most of your base investment in your plan, so better have it right!

7) Acquire Blueprints (BPO or BPCs).
BPCs are easy, and can be bought from the market, BPOs cost a lot and need to be researched. If you opted into T2 or T3, Invention and Reverse Engineering will kick in and you'll have to spend a lot of time here.

8) Get base ingredients.
BPOs are researched and you can finally go out and buy the base ingredients.

9) Transport ingredients to production site.
This module can usually be outsorced easily. But if you want to be efficient, consider Mineral compression. If you have a logistics network, a lot of ISK can be saved, since transporting a lot of m3 is expensive, especially if you need to get to LowSec.

10) Build Items.
Time to start reacting, building and building. May be as simple as plugging a BPC into a station slot up to multiple stages of construction for Capitals or T2/T3 ships.

11) Move Items to destination for sale/use.
Something people often forget is that they have to get their finished product back to where they can sell it. Hope you thought about that in your plan, or else you might have that Capital Ship sitting somewhere in LowSec where you can't sell it for a good price.

This ends this part of this series of posts, I'll go into a lot more detail about the entire T1-3 process, and then follow up with detailed explanations of these 11 modules and how they can be managed or implemented.

Fly safe,

OutOfBound

A market finding process

Someone I know (not me) sent me an in game mail, railing against excessive market prices.  I have suppressed who, what and where, but the sentiment applies regardless of those things.



So, we had a decent hisec connection through our not busy c2a, so I was thinking of bringing in a bunch of ...stuff. 

As I was browsing the necessary pieces, I became angry at the massive margins in ... both trade hubs on all the pieces I was about to buy, both over production cost and between buy/sell orders ( basically, buy orders at production cost, sell orders 40-50% above that).

My response was to start plotting how to free up enough capital to buy the necessary BPO's to produce all those pieces myself, and then to produce the same pieces to sell at those margins.

Then I realised that's my market-finding process, and had to laugh.

Fuel blocks - my introduction to manufacture

Fuel blocks are relatively large, uninspiring, and needed by owners of towers everywhere.  You can't put up a player owned station in the highest of highsec, it needs to be in a system 0.7 or lower.

Many tower owners make their own; some haul from a trade center; and some are sufficiently busy that they want to buy local.  To keep the lights on (or the shield up), every small player owned structure (POS) you see need 10 blocks per hour; every medium 20, every large lower 40.  So every large tower is (in round numbers) 30,000 / month (assuming I have done my maths right).

They are a great introduction to manufacturing.  A low entry cost, I have found perfect material efficiency blueprints available via contract for 20M (or find someone to research one for you - it should be cheaper).  They are profitable to make.

I have been making ISK not just from selling expensive product, but also from buying cheap.

I use http://eve-central.com/home/market.html to work out where to both buy and sell items.

First of all you need:

• A blueprint.  Ideally these will be researched to 40 Material Efficiency.  You can buy both researched Blueprint originals and blueprint copies.  Alternatively if you have access to a material efficiency research slot (most likely a Player owned station), NPC Thukker Mix stations sell the original blueprints.  I like my BPO's (blue print originals) in highsec for the larger run sizes, but copies into our wormhole.
• Some production skills and production efficiency skills.  I don't like learning level 5 skills unless they unlock later skills, but have just finished production efficiency 5 just for these blueprints.
• A place to build your product.  I chose an NPC station, close to low security systems, and a null security pipeline and out of the major trade hubs regions.
• A big transport ship.  I get by on my Iteron Mark V with cargo extension rigs and extended cargo holds, full of giant secure containers (about 49k m3); but it is a compromise.  I see a freighter in my future, and sometimes hire them for haulage.  The cargo is bulky, but the Iteron Mark V's walls are thin (nothing to see here, move along, don't target me, arrgh quick run away, dock, rename ship and swap alts for an hour or 2).  I have not lost a single ship for this, but have often been targeted, generally on my way into Niarja.

 Rather than list all the components (which you can see on your blueprint), I have categorised them as:

• A 'racial isotope' (eg hydrogen isotope), farmed from mining ice products in the correct regions of space then refining.  Roughly 40% of your costs.  Look at prices around the faction's region, including major trade hubs.
• Other ice products farmed from ice anywhere then refined; (except wormholes.  No ice in wormholes.  Nerf ice mining in known space!). Roughly 15% of your costs.  No real pattern about where I buy these; but hardly ever in Jita.
• Planetary Interaction components.  I buy these away from the major trade hubs. Roughly 45% in costs.  I buy these away from the major trade hub districts (though often Rens has good prices).

I mentioned it before; but I will again.  Use an out of game tool like Eve Central (there are others) to work out what where you are buying.  Limit your search to regions you are prepared to buy from (empire regions for me), and you can exclude order sizes below what you are prepared to look at.  If I need 200,000 units of a racial isotope, then I will not bother with a 100 unit sell order even if it is really cheap.


Each of the racial towers have their advantages, and to be honest, I am not really sure what they are.  That's OK, what I do know is that there is demand for out of region fuel blocks, and buyers are willing to pay a premium for that fuel.  In Jita for Caldari fuel blocks, margins might be paper thin, but margins of the other fuel blocks are often much more.  In Hek, margins for Ammar fuel blocks were about 25%.  Off the beaten tracks, my margins are about 40% (with admittedly slower sales).

An obvious alternative to manufacturing the fuel blocks is simply to transport input materials and/or finished fuel blocks.  As a number pulled out of the air, my current profit is 70% of the profit is transportation of either material or fuel blocks from high supply stations to low supply regions; with the remaining 30% coming from manufacture.

Stockpiling mats for a few runs would also be a good idea that I am currently failing at. I have another distraction that is costing me ISK; Interbus 3, Foo Holdings 3.  It appears that some some gangs are grinding Interbus standing (what else could it possibly be?)

As an introduction to manufacture, or even for a haulage business; fuel blocks are a great start.