@Spiff Welcome to PrUn!
I presume that you have started on the planet Montem. Your EXT and SME are a great start!
An EXT on Montem can produce 20.3 LST and 14.7 FEO per day at 100% efficiency. This is taking into account using luxury consumables, which is not always profitable. A more realistic production efficiency is 79.44% which may be achieved by providing RAT, DW, and OVE for you pioneers. An EXT on Montem would thus produce 16.17 LST and 11.67 FEO.
With the current prices for RAT, DW, and OVE, a single Pioneer costs 5.94 NCC per day. This means that your consumables costs for an EXT is (5.94 * 60) = 356.4 NCC per day. If you were to sell your production to the Market Maker, you would gain 590.97 which means that an EXT will generally always produce a profit for you. However, you want to maximize your profits.
There is a large FEO request order listed at a price of 55 NCC. For LST, you can sell them for 50 NCC really easily. These 2 price points will form an anchor for us to do further calculations.
If you just sold your FEO and LST, you could make 1450.35 in sales per day, which will yield profit > 1,000 NCC for this facility - which is a great target to use.
However, you also have a SME. This means we can generate further profits. We still want to maintain the profits of the EXT, so we use our anchor price for FEO - 55 NCC.
You will want to use the recipe that has FLX requirement to maximize your output. Your SME requires 50 Pioneers, so we’ll spend 267 NCC on them. Your inputs are FEO (55 ea), O (75 ea), C (400 ea), FLX (165 ea). At 79.44% production efficiency, we get 1.797 cycles per day from our SME.
So, our costs for the SME per cycle are:
148.58 on consumables (267 / 1.797)
330 on FEO (we make it ourselves, but we need profit)
400 on C
75 on O
165 on FLX
Which makes our sum cost per cycle 1118.58.
We make 4 FE in that cycle, so the unit cost of FE is 279.645
Now, each day we make (4 * 1.797) = 7.188 FE.
With a target profit of 1,000 NCC per day for the SME, our target price is (1000 / 7.188) + 279.645 = 418.77.
Thus, our colony’s profit per day is over our target of 1k NCC per facility and its doing great! At this rate, roughly every 7-10 days you may be able to construct a new facility.
Of course, lower input prices and higher output prices will only increase your profits!
If it were my colony, I would build a PP1 next and start producing BSE and BBH. Making your own prefabs makes expansion far cheaper. At this point, you could start following my initial reply.
All the best!