Building Battleships

As I wrote previously, it is time for me to take a step forward in EVE Online, to get past my comfortable and reliable battlecruiser and level 3 missions, and start on something bigger.

The first step was, of course, acquire a battleship.

Since I had mostly trained up the Caldari spaceship command skill tree, the choices for which battleship were pretty clear; either a Raven or a Rokh.

Either represented a chunk of ISK, with Ravens going for around 85 million ISK while Rokhs for close to 130 million ISK.

While the Raven, oriented as it is towards a missile offense, was probably the right choice, I did not want to dismiss the Rokh out of hand. Having flown a Cormorant for early missions, I spent a good deal of time and ISK upgrading my gunnery skills before I joined the cult of the missile launcher.

I wanted to try them both, but I did not necessarily want to buy them both. At least not outright at market prices. That would have drained my bank account.

So I decided to put in some time working for them instead. Working in the form of mining so I could build both of them and still have money left to equip them and, ever so important in EVE, replace them should I have a mishap. And given my track record, that seemed a likely scenario.

I went to the contract interface and found single use blueprint copies for a Raven and a Rokh, both of which had nice high material efficiency ratings (40 and 32 respectively), to ensure I wasn’t wasting too much material in their construction. And then I started sorting out the minerals.

How much material to make a battleship?

The Raven blueprint required the following materials (with estimated market price):

Isogen      118,942 Units  7,136,520.00 ISK
Megacyte      2,262 Units  7,690,800.00 ISK
Mexallon    476,370 Units 16,672,950.00 ISK
Nocxium      29,701 Units  3,267,110.00 ISK
Pyerite   1,901,569 Units  8,557,060.50 ISK
Tritanium 7,604,695 Units 22,814,085.00 ISK
Zydrine       7,085 Units 17,712,500.00 ISK

I probably placed the price of minerals a bit high, but I tend to use the price I could get for those raw materials, since that is the cost to me to use them for construction rather than selling them on the open market. So the total cost of my Raven was:

Materials 83,851,025.50 ISK
Blueprint 900,000.00 ISK
Manufacturing 1,910.48 ISK

Total 84,752,935.98 ISK

Roughly equal to the lowest priced Raven I could find on the market, but without draining my ISK and giving me the additional satisfaction of having built it myself.

So I went to work on the Rokh next. Materials (with price estimates):

Isogen       169,546 Units 10,172,760.00 ISK
Megacyte       3,038 Units 10,329,200.00 ISK
Mexallon     668,504 Units 23,397,640.00 ISK
Nocxium       48,770 Units  5,364,700.00 ISK
Pyerite    3,182,327 Units 14,320,471.50 ISK
Tritanium 10,816,225 Units 32,448,675.00 ISK
Zydrine       12,430 Units 31,075,000.00 ISK

By this point I had used up my stores of Zydrine and Megacyte and had to go purchase some on the market, so the Rokh required some cash out of pocket

Materials 127,108,446.50 ISK
Blueprint 800,000.00 ISK
Manufacturing 1,910.48 ISK

Total 127,910,356.98 ISK

A bit of a discount when compared to the cheapest Rokh I could find on the market!

So I have another 212,663,292.46 ISK worth of ships sitting in my hanger and my bank account remains about the same, sales and a few missions having offset most of my costs.

Now I just have to equip them and figure out how to fight them.

And when I decide which one I like, I’ll just repackage the other one and sell it.