Bases aren't even that good of an investment for a solo player lol. All the resources you sank into refining HRCs could have been spent buying the HRCs and moving them, and you'd have made more money.
Opportunity cost is the killer of refinery base profitability.
To get your HRC "free of charge" for a single 5ker trip, you have to mine the ore (Let's assume 2 runs on a 5ker, or a single one on a Hegemon takes 10 minutes, this is pure travel time, so 600.), and then you have to pay for fuel. Let's assume you got it from Freeport 8, 28 credits/unit of MOX, needing 23,8k worth of MOX to make your 5ker's worth of Aluminium, needing 1700, so divide the travel time by 3 for your 5ker (240/3). Then there's more travel time. Industrial Materials at 22 per unit, needing 765, so divide travel time by six, from Frankfurt to need only 9 cycles of the base refining instead of 10 is another ~10 minute run. (600/6)
This is already thirteen whole minutes added to a run, in what is already around a half-hour trade route. This isn't taking into account the time the base takes to eat the materials to make your Aluminium (it consumes ~50 of every mat every 20 seconds, so that's up to 50 minutes you're waiting for the "free" ore, assuming you mined it yourself, to refine).
This averages out to you needing to do about an hour of work to get half an hour's worth of trading. This isn't even taking into account the cost, in materials and opportunity, of building the modules and upkeeping the base and its crew.
