Back in the day, players who needed to get a hunk of minerals somewhere (say, to 0.0 to build a titan or whatever) could manufacture certain items with volume substantially less than the minerals that comprise them. The idea was to haul those items instead of the raw minerals, then recycle them at the destination, saving time, effort, manpower and, probably, jump fuel.
Does this still work, and if so, what's a decent compression ratio these days?
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Silas Sanyasi
[ Moderator ]
Evelopedia has this on mineral compression:
Demand for mineral compression has fallen with the advent of jump bridge networks, which make it much quicker and safer for well-established alliances to move large cargoes long distances across 0.0 space. However, it remains a useful option for some smaller producers operating in less developed areas, and there is still at least one active independently-run compression service.
The focus of most current methods is on dreadnought-sized ammunition, and the few remaining modules that have worthwhile compression ratios and short build times. Builders of supercapital ships, however, have been known to purchase carriers in bulk, jump them to the build location, and reprocess them into capital ship components. Although this is a time-consuming and expensive process, it can be outsourced, and it removes the need for a large number of dedicated component build slots in the destination system.
I know of at least one active compression service, so there is still demand for this, even though it may have decreased over the years.
Ilya Konovalov
[ Editor ]
I've heard that you can build a lot of missiles, load them into industrial ships, then put those ships into carrier maintenance bay and that would give you a huge mineral compression rate.
Even if you do, you still lose the same amount when reprocessing “compressed” materials.