I have one rep for ICS (the place I'm in) thats negative, the rest of my reps for ICS are all positive.. most of them 1-2+

Ok, so to attempt to figure out the factory numbers I equipped a character with a 50% ct of a small mining module.  at 0 extensions the module costs 600 titanium in a lvl 1 factory.  I tried it in a level 2 and 3 factory and there was no change.
this is a list of the costs with increasing amounts of extensions.  and the percentage of the previous number each works out to

0    600   
1    588    0.980000
2    577    0.981293
3    566    0.980936
4    555    0.980565
5    544    0.980180
6    533    0.979779
7    522    0.979362
8    513    0.982759
9    504    0.982456
10    496    0.984127
11    488    0.983871
12    480    0.983607
13    472    0.983333
14    465    0.985169
15    458    0.984946
16    451    0.984716

as you can see.. while it starts off as .98 per number it changes.  multiplying each number by .98 will give you the wrong answer many times.. can anybody make sense of this?

I'm having some difficulty with the numbers on this.. seems to be easy in the small numbers.. I tested out a small miner which normally costs 300 titanium.. CT was 50% so 600 titanium to make after the CT.. if I have 1 point  in my ME skills, it costs 588.. which is 2% less than 600.  but with a character with 14% ME (7 points) the same item costs 522 which should be more like 516.  Im not sure what I'm doing wrong here.
If it were 14% less than the original cost of the item, which kinda makes sense (otherwise you'd be able to get 0 cost with 100%).. it should be something like 550.    I guess its on some kinda infinite curve.. but I dont know how to figure that out.

Hiro

Care to throw a link? I've searched there and I've only found speculations, no hard rules or equations.

Ahh good someone else sees my problems.  I was hoping within a day of posting this thing someone would come forward and call me an idiot for not understanding how that works and give me the answer, but alas it has been more than a day and no such troll has come forward. 

  If anyone totally understands every factor that goes into making the final Material effeciency number, let me know please, I will put it in and call it Hiro and (your name)'s ore calculator, and it will be way more useful. 

   If you dont understand that, but know a little (more than just the ME on the CT) post it here and I'll try to incorporate it.  Otherwise I'm going to have to put points into industry to figure it all out, being a combat character that will make me unhappy. 

  As it stands right now, the easiest way to make this thing accurate, is to make a cheap CT yourself in game, see how much it costs, then adjust the factory effeciency on my sheet until the numbers match up.  After that you can assume that number is spot on correct for any CT you have of the same effeciency rating.  I'm not sure if you can just say a 5% more effecient CT is going to be 5% more effecient mineral wise after that though... I think the extensions modify the CT effeciency by a percentage, as I think does the factory effeciency. 

Ideally, I want this to eventually allow you to put in your relevant extension levels along with your CT effeciency, and then it will produce the exact same numbers you get in game (probably a line for each level of factory).  Along with how much extra you are going to need for less effecient future runs.
   
At any rate, you are correct I need more data.