I'm currently a fairly high skilled mission runner / carebear type that has rarely ventured out of hisec space. On top of typical amarr skills for running a very well fitted paladin and legion, with 5's in almost all relevant skills, I also can fly a well fitted crane (for hauling) and hulk/mackinaw.
I would like to crosstrain into industrial skills and after spending an hour chasing around my home region looking for BPC copy facilities, I decided it would probably be better to set up a POS for copying, invention and maybe some light manufacturing.
I would only want it to be lightly profitable, maybe making 400m isk per month, but if it requires a research alt then I would like it to be able to generate 600m+ isk per month to pay the alt's subscription.
I have done a lot of research on this to decide whether I wanted to pursue it further, but I wasn't able to find much, if any, information on the current climate, as all of my information was 6 months to 3 years old.
What's the current economic feasibility of building a POS in 0.7 or so empire space?*
I've also heard that griefer corps, for lack of a better term, like to wardec and pop POS belonging to solo corps. Are other corps wardec-ing a real risk if you intentionally pick a moon that's undesirable for resources as you would just be using it for research?
*When I say economic feasibility, I'm basically asking if I will probably break even spending maybe 15-30 minutes a day on this with a fuel run every other week vs this just being a complete and total money sink and waste of time.
**Note on the maths:
A small tower should require a badger load of fuel blocks every 2 weeks, as my badger holds 20k m^3. Medium tower would need fuel every 7 or so days, and large 3.5-4 days.
edit
I noticed I just earned "popular question" for this topic, so I'll update it with more info.
I learned since then that you can have three alts for manufacturing and research on one account. A half decent POS can support enough slots to keep all three alts busy easily, even in empire.
If you research your markets well, research your BPOs well, and get a freighter, or even multiple accounts with freighters, then you can stand to make 10+ bil per month, with maybe 1 hour per day of work if you have multiple hauling accounts. A large POS costs <400m per month in fuel costs, so even if you're PLEXing 3 accounts, it's well worth the cost.
Also note, you can't moon-mine in hisec, so don't even worry about that.
Best Answer
I think determining the ISK viability of a POS will have to come down to you having to do some rough math on your own. The price of fuel can vary from place to place and from day to day. Not to mention, the amount of fuel you will need can vary depending on the size of the POS that you decide to deploy. Then you also have the variable of how much you can actually sell your BPCs for. Some BPCs sell for more than others, but again there's a lot of variables to work in there, and it's hard to track a base price for BPCs since they sell through contracts. In the end, I think you'll have to perform the profit calculations on your own.
In regards to your second question, I can say that there's a good chance you could get wardec'd by a PVP corp/alliance if your POS looks like an easy target. My alliance has dec'd small corps in the past solely to try to crack their POS, and we have several friends who do it as well. It's less a griefer thing and more about trying to make an easy profit.
That said, there are a few things you can do to make yourself a not so easy target. For one, try to set up your POS in a less well traveled part of space. Jita and Amarr are the two largest trade hubs in the game, so you'd probably be better off not setting up shop in Domain or The Forge regions. When you do chose a system to set up shop in, chose one that's off any major travel routes. For instance, don't pick a system that's on the route between any of the four major trade hubs of Jita, Amarr, Rens, and Dodixie. You can research a potential anchor system with Dotlan. Click the Statistics link for any system to see graphs detailing jumps, player kills, NPC kills, and pod kills. The less activity on those graphs, the less busy the system is, and probably the better chance you will have of not attracting anybody's attention.
Second, how you decide to configure your POS will make a difference in how attractive it looks to a potential aggressor. There are plenty of POS configuration guides listed online, so I won't bother repeating their info here. Instead, there are just a few tips that you should know. First, spread your defense modules around. The most common layout is groupings at the top, bottom, and four along the sides. To make things even more difficult, don't place your defense modules in groups at all, but instead spread them randomly around your POS bubble. Sieging POS's set up like this is a huge PITA as your fleet is constantly on the move to hit the next module. Going heavy on the ECM can turn away potential aggressors as well. It can disrupt a logistics wing's cap chains, and it can be an annoyance for the combat ships, constantly having to relock the current primary. Also remember that artillery will still fire even if the POS has been reinforced. You shouldn't rely on it as your sole gun type, but arty can be a headache for a fleet. Lastly, take the number of defense modules you think you'll need, and triple that number. Do the same for your resists as well. And anchor all of it. You don't have to online all of it. In fact, you won't be able to. But nobody wants to siege a POS in high sec if they think they'll have to spend hours shooting down 80 POS modules as well.
Lastly, the most important thing you can do is to make friends. With the upcoming changes to wardecs you, as the aggressed party, will be able to invite friendly PVP corps into the war free of charge to them. It will be quite a nasty surprise to the aggressing corp to suddenly find themselves fighting 100 pilots instead of 1 pilot. Having good reliable friends in EVE can mean the difference between keeping your POS and losing your POS.