Whiskey Tengu Foxtrot?

What to do with all that ISK I have in my wallet?

A few weeks back I was sitting in EVE Online.  Star Trek Online was down and I had had all of the WoW I could take for the day.  So there I was in New Eden wondering what to do.

I started thinking about one of my predictions for 2010, that strategic cruisers would become a common sight.  Of course, some people objected to that right away, saying that they were already a common sight in their neck of the woods.  That area is usually called 0.0 space, and my friend Meclin did confirm that the tech 3 ships were in fact not a unique sight out there.

I had never seen one however.  But then I, like a majority of EVE players, never go into 0.0 space, so I would dispute that they are a common sight.  I see most every ship hovering around Amarr station, so that is my measure for what is a common sight and what is not.

Of course, sitting there with no real plan and a bunch of ISK, I figured that I could make my prediction come true by buying my own strategic cruiser.  Money + boredom = expensive new experiment!

The first thing I needed was the basic skill. Easy and not too expensive:

Caldari Strategic Cruiser – 1,350,000 ISK

You only need the first level of skill to qualify for the ship.  That takes just a few minutes.

And then there was the ship itself.  The Caldari strategic cruiser is called the Tengu, which is what lead to the title of the post.

Tengu: 207,000,000 ISK

So I rushed off to assemble the new ship to see what it looked like.  Only there was a problem.

You can’t just fly the ship without its subsystems.  Heck, you cannot even assemble the ship.  You get this message.

There were subsystems available, but of course that requires more skills.

I had to run off and buy those.  They were 4,500,000 ISK each, and I needed five.

• Caldari Defensive Subsystem
• Caldari Electronics Subsystem
• Caldari Engineering Subsystem
• Caldari Offensive Subsystem
• Caldari Propulsion Subsystem

This is how it goes with me and EVE.  Every impulse buy inevitably requires me to come up with at least another skill and some additional equipment to support the purchase.

The skills were quick.  I injected all five and queued up the first level for each, then went to Amarr to look for subsystems.  All the subsystems for the Tengu were available, but which to choose?

Fortunately in EVE most buying decisions are not irreversible.  Very few items are “bind on equip” if you will.  Ships, ship fittings, and the like can be repackaged and resold on the market.  So I picked five likely looking fittings without much in the way of research, dropping about 120,000,000 ISK in the process.

I was then able to assemble the ship.

Now I just had to activate the ship and take her out for a spin.  But when moving my pod to the ship I got one last warning.

Oh yeah, if the ship gets blown up, you lose some of your subsystem skill points.  Something of a dis-incentive to train them to level five I suppose.

But, at last, I was able to get into space with the Tengu.

Ship Name: Whiskey Tengu Foxtrt

Like a lot of Caldari ships, her beauty is more in her technical specifications than in her appearance.

Only then did I start looking at possible fittings for the Tengu.  It looks like I’ll need to work on my heavy missiles skills so I can mount tech II launchers, since the Tengu is limited to cruiser/battlecruiser modules.

Another hobby ship with which to tinker.  Time to get out EVEMon and the EVE Fitting Tool to plot out a possible level 4 mission runner fit.