MUFG Interest/Duplication Rates

Thanks to the tireless effort of the Ingress community we actually have a solid(ish) answer to the question. As described here, full kudos to everyone who helped

  1. Duplication rates do not vary among different types of items.
  2. All capsules of a player trigger one duplication event per day at a random time. All capsules duplicate at the same time. At the moment we are not sure when the exact time is, but an educated guess says 00:00 UTC.
  3. Unloading the MUFG capsule doesn't affect duplication, the only thing that matters is the contents of the capsule at the specified duplication time.
  4. Every item in the cap has a approximately a 1-1.5% chance of duplicating itself.

This means that:

  1. If your capsule has already had its duplication event for the day, you can safely unload it.
  2. The optimal load for an MUFG is 9596 items.
  3. Assuming the capsule is optimally loaded you should get (on average) 1 duplicated item per day.

Again full credit goes to Petr Morávek, I've only reproduced his findings here, to prevent a link only answer.

Update:

There's been some discussion on Reddit about this, and then some hard data collected by totally obsessed dedicated agents that discuss tactics about MUFG loadout, but it comes down to how frequently you can check your MUFG for duplication. The reddit post in question can be found here but it basically says the following:

  1. Optimal loadout is 96 items (based on math)See update below
  2. If you have more than 97 items, consider splitting the load between 2 MUFG's to avoid filling it when duplicating
  3. If you can't check your MUFG every day, fill it with 90 items and check once a week.
  4. If you're leaving your items with an inactive friend, fill it with 75 items and check back in a month.

Update 2:

If your capsule is storing Very Rare gear, then the optimal number of items is 98 even if you are checking your capsules every day. This is due to the reduction in duplication rates for VR gear put in place a month ago. This is only if you're breeding VR gear, this doesn't apply if you're breeding common or rare gear.