Bork Day 2

Minerals. Since I am building a lot of my own equipment up front, I will need minerals. These I will get from two major sources. First, I can mine asteroids and refine them. Second, I can loot ships and reprocess the junk in to the base minerals, 

For the bulk of the materials I need, high-sec mining will be fine. Tritainium, Pyerite, Mexallon, and Isogen are all readily available in high-sec asteroid belts (0.5 or higher). Just to give you some perspective, the Magnate that I am going to build, those four materials account for 99.69% of the mass. 

There are four remaining materials I am going to needed on a semi-regular basis. Those are Nocxium, Zydrine, Megacyte, and Morphite.

Noxcium and Zydrine can both be found in low-sec space (0.2 or lower in either Hemorphite or Hedbergite ore) and racing in to low-sec this early on could prove challenging, not only because of other players, but the belt rats are very nasty as well. However, you can sometimes find small random spawns in high-sec spaces which should provide enough for most small projects. 

Megacyte can be found in Bistot or Arkonor ore in null-sec space (-0.6 and -0.7 respectively). Not only is this going to be dangerous to do but a single 100 unit load to refine or either ore is 1600m3 which right now would be almost 10 loads in my little rookie ship. More than likely the only source I will have for this material early on is going to be from reprocessing loot, but even then, the cheap garbage loot I am going to be getting. For my Magnate frigate, I only need 4 units of Megacyte. 

Morphite is going to have to come from reprocessing loot. The only other source of Morphite is to mine Mercoxit ore using special lasers and you need to go all the way to deep null-sec (-0.8 or lower). Just to add insult to injury, 100 units of Mercoxit has a volume of 4000m3.

The rare stuff was much easier to get in the past because Rogue Drones used to drop compounds that could be refined in to the rarer materials. This was affectionately called 'drone poop' but was removed from the game because it was a better source of rare materials than actually mining them with a barge, the process being referred to as 'gun mining'. 

One alternative solution to mining I will have to look in to is WH mining. I am not even sure if I could get away with it, but rushing in to a WH, finding the needed asteroids, and mining the ore before the sleeper spawn (or bad guys find me).