As mentioned, I am giving Mabrick’s proposition a shot.  From the latest post, there a few things I am unsure of, namely, if his 500m isk/month claim was based in HS or WH space.  But, here are the conditions of my experiment:
<div><ul><li>Skills:  </li><ul><li>Command Center Upgrades 4 </li><li>Interplanetary Consolidation 4 </li><li>Planetology 2 </li><li>Remote Sensing 3</li></ul><li>Production</li><ul><li>Final Product: Robotics</li></ul><li>Planets:</li><ul><li>2 Barren R0 > P1</li><li>2 Lava R0 > P1</li><li>1 Barren Production Planet P1 > P3</li><li>All planets are in one High Sec system with standard Customs Office rates.</li></ul></ul>A few other notes.  I am not taking up the challenge as presented mainly because I don’t want to move the alt, and it has about 30m skill points.  Those are almost entirely in mining, production, and recently combat.

<div style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div>Here are the Planetary Management skills, IC 4 will be done soon:
<div style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div>Here are the planets, pending the production planet due to IC 4:
<div style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div>Here is the pattern used for all of the R0 > P1 planets:
<div style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div>You’ll notice that the extractors are much further from storage than Mabrick indicates.  This is because HS planets have crap for resource distribution, so the R0 > P1 chain is located central to the hotspots I judged to be closest together on each planet.  Notice the bands I used on the scanner, to give you an idea of the resource density here:
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Mabrick contends that something around 500m isk is viable each month.  Many readers disagreed.  Given my skills, I’ll shoot for 50%-75% of his estimate.  Thats 250m to 375m isk in one month.  I’ll start my timer from the day I get the production planet up and running.  I am going to have ~2 days of P1 production already created by the time that happens, but given the nature of resource depletion, I’ll use them and consider it to be a wash.

Initial Costs:
<div><ul><li>Setup of 4 planets with level 5/6 Command Centers: $23,720,000.03.</li></ul></div></div>