The most important lesson from my experiment as a Constructor was that you need not only look at how profitable a certain production is, you also need to check how much import and export it necessitates. The more cargo you need to transport back and forth between your base and the commodity exchange, the more important the distance between the two becomes. So for Constructor a base in the Moria system is a huge advantage. Fortunately for my main account, Victualler on Verdant, being 5 jumps away from Moria is not a big problem. A lot of what I produce, like water and agricultural products, is used directly on my base to make higher-value products. And I don't need to import very little, mostly consumables, and even there I make two of them myself.

But in my previous log, I was hesitating between building another water rig, or building another oxygen collector. With what I learned since, it turned out that making a lot more oxygen would not have been a good idea. While a single collector on Verdant at today's prices makes over 2k profits on its own, it also produces 40 tons per day of oxygen to export. If I scaled my base up to maximum oxygen production (for an area of 500), I could run 19 collectors, but would produce 750 tons of oxygen per day. With a ship holding only 500 tons or 500 cubic meters of cargo, and needing 3 days for a round trip to Moria, I simply wouldn't have the shipping capacity to do that.

On the other extreme, if I built up my base to maximum drinking water production, with 21 rigs and 9 food processors, I would make about the same profit (40 k net profit a day for a full base), but only need to ship 50 tons of product per day. I'm not demolishing my collector, but for the moment I'll rather build more rigs. With the profits I made since the last log, I am now at 1 collector, 3 rigs, 2 food processors, and 1 farm. And while previously my food processors were making drinking water only 17% of the time, that production is now up to 55%. And I am still producing and excess of basic rations, that I can sell as well. So my net profit per day with this setup is 9k, which is already pretty nice for a company that is only 20 days old.

I must admit that joining a corporation helped. With my base only needing one ship for import and export, my second ship is frequently doing shipping contracts for other players in my corporation. And my corp mates pay better than the shipping contracts available on the free market. The additional income from shipping helps me to finance the next building faster, and that sort of growth is self-accelerating. After accumulating production for a few days, I have a ship on the way to Moria with 50k worth of cargo. I'll need to restock on 12k worth of consumables, but I can still afford another rig and a 4th pioneer habitation from that.