Making money in unknown-space

So some of my friends have been saying to me "Kel, that wormhole thing sounds interesting, but how do you make any money out of it?".
So I figured it was time I pull a finger out and try to explain to everyone how we make ISK in a wormhole.

First let me point out that around 80% of all your ISK will come from T3 ship and sub-system production. Even if you personally do not make or build any T3 ships or ship parts you will be gathering the materials to make them as part of your PvE activity's. The only income you won't make from T3 ship production is the tags dropped from sleepers.

That leads me to Sleepers. The advanced, ancient drones of a long long civilisation, still tending the derelicts of their masters. These drones are paradoxically more advanced than our ships, and less advanced. They do not posses shielding technology, but are equal or superior to neweaden technology in just about every other way.
It is from Sleepers that you will gather the 2 main income sources for the wormhole explorer. Tags and salvage; tags are drops given by all Sleeper ships, they come in the form of data banks, AI nexus, and ancient coordinates databases. These items can then be sold to NPC's in known space, usualy research corporations who put up buy orders for these items.
The salvage comes in too many flavours to mention and I can only assume they are all used in T3 production at some point, however the most valuable and coveted are the Nano Ribbons. Nano ribbons are worth several million isk just for 1 unit, so 95% of your haul is determined by how many nano ribbons you managed to find. Nano ribbons are completely random by the way. If you salvage 10 sleeper wrecks you might get 1 nano ribbon, or you might get 30, its all up to the loot fairy at that point.

So lets talk about gas. I had some spicy burritos from Mad Mex the other day and let me tell you! I know gas. Gas comes in the form of LADAR sites scanned down in wormholes. Unlike knownspace where gas is harvested to make boosters, in WH-Space gas is used to make polymers, polymers are in turn used to make T3 ships. Gas comes in all sorts of flavours and I haven't really stuck my nose into gas harvesting because gas harvesting requires the skill - gas harvesting. That said, I am told that C320 and C540 are the more valuable fullerite clouds to harvest.
Unlike other forms of mining all one needs to harvest gas is the required skill and a gas harvester. If you plan to move into a wormhole at any point in the future you should invest in gas harvesting level 5. This will allow you to not only fit the max allowable number of gas harvesters (5) but also allow you to use tech 2 gas harvesters which are apparently almost twice as effective as T1 gas harvesters.



So those are how to make the money, but its not the full picture. See, if you're doing anything in a wormhole, chances are you probably don't want to be doing it alone. This goes double for people living in class 5 and 6 wormholes, the most dangerous unknown space you can find. These wormholes cannot be soloed. You will need more than 1 ship, which means you need a fair system for distribution of wealth.

Other people may have different methods but here's how we at Lycosa have been doing it.
For showing up, you get 1 share. For every alt you bring, you get a half share. The fleet commander is eligible for a bonus share, but other than that, everyone gets a single share in the profits, plus a bonus half share for every alt that they can bring.
The system isn't perfect, but its close enough that everybody seems happy with it. At the end of the night the loot value is calculated and then spreadsheets tell us how much everyone should get. Usually the corp will then pay everyone out (effectively buying the loot from us) or we wait a few days and get paid out then. Sometimes it wont be the corp to pay us out but a T3 producer or some other philanthropist, it doesn't much matter to me, we get paid a fair wage either way and considering that most of our T3 producers are corp leaders anyway its more or less the same thing anyway.

So that covers it! How I make money in the wormhole.