Artisan Archive

OQ isn't an indicator of general quality, it's a completely separate stat. For items that don't depend on in, you could use1000 OQ resources and still get the same results.

If you look at the item description in the crafting tool on the resource selection screen, you'll see something that looks like this (from a droid battery, numbers from swgcraft.com since I'm at work):

Experimental Quality
Charge
Conductivity: 100%

The "Experimental Quality" is the name of the category when you experiment on it. "Charge" is the item's stat that gets affected. "Conductivity" is the resource stat contributing to that stat. So to get a good charge on a battery, you need to use metal with a high conductivity (generally copper). 999 OQ / 500 CD metal will come out worse than 1 OQ / 999 CD metal.

The experimental "cap" also depends on the resource stats. For single-stat items like this, just take the stat's value and divide by 10. So a 540 Conductivity metal can't be experimented above 54%. A 750 Conductivity can only get up to 75%, and a 999 conductivity can only get up to 99% (apparently, all decimals are roundeddown).

Resources that don't have the contributing stat (like the low grade ore in batteries) generally don't bring down the maximum, although this is handled on an item-by-item case. So you can use crappy ore and good conductivity metal and get the same results as uber-ore and the same metal.

Things get a little more complicated when you have multiple stats (CDEF pistol damage depends 50% on OQ, 50% on conductivity) and multiple resources contributing to that stat, and if you feel like wading through a lot of math I can post more on that.