EVE Online at Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMOG Gamers to the Next Level!

One of the most common large-scale production projects in EVE Online is building battleships. These massive ships are the workhorses of EVE Online and are used for everything from running missions to solo PvP. This guide explores one way to mass-manufacture the Raven, a popular Caldari battleship.

To many players, building battleships represents one possible end-game of industry. Constructing these behemoths requires skills, ISK, minerals, and time. But it all pays off in the end. As we shall see. Fair warning: because of the amounts of ISK involved, this is a project intended for richer EVE players, though not necessarily older ones. A player that has accumulated a nice kitty of ISK in his first few months could quite conceivably embark on a project like this. Rewarding this kind of acumen is one of the beautiful things about EVE Online: if you are successful in business, you need not let skill points hold you back.

Why Build Ravens?

Mission runners love ravens, and industrialists love making them for that reason.

The raven is a contender for most popular tech I battleship in EVE Online. It is famously considered to have the best short-term tank from among that ship class, and can use its powerful missile launchers to inflict any single variety of damage desired. This is a powerful combination: the raven can run combat missions against any faction and rat NPCs or run cosmic anomalies in any region of null-security space with roughly equal proficiency. While other battleships and weapon systems might not be effective, the raven can cope and often excel in almost any mission situation that another battleship could.

Using an apocalypse with lasers (that inflict primarily EM and thermal damage) will not get one very far in missions against the Angel Cartel. Nor, for that matter, would one do well ratting NPCs in asteroid belts or cosmic anomalies out in Angel space. The raven, however, could do either as easily as it could handle Blood Raiders, Guristas, or what have you.

This aptitude has made the raven essentially the standard for running level four missions. Because it is so popular, it is natural that a player seeking to build battleships would gravitate toward them. Between 100 to 200 ravens sell in The Forge, each day, making it a very active market. Clearly, there is profit to be made here.

The Business Model

The basic idea is to buy large amounts of minerals and turn them into battleships in the fastest, cheapest way possible. The blueprint and freighting are outsourced to allow you to focus on other things. Your chief concerns when running this business will be getting enough minerals to keep your blueprints working and selling the finished hulls.

Skill Requirements

As with any large industrial project in EVE, it is a good idea to train the Production Efficiency skill to five, and to train the Industry skill to four or five. The former eliminates waste due to low skills and the latter increases the speed with which you build things.

Investment Costs

In order to manufacture battleships, you will need blueprints. There are essentially three options:

• Buy A New Blueprint: This blueprint will need at least three months of research to be competitive, and will likely take longer than that due to how clogged research slots tend to be. Not recommended unless you have already been doing this for a while.
• Buy An Already-Researched Blueprint: These tend to be horrendously overpriced, and will not help you too much because a single blueprint will only allow a single slot to work. Be sure to figure out how long it will take for you to earn enough ISK to pay for the blueprint. At a guess, you will probably need to make about 1800 ravens for this to be worthwhile, though of course you can resell the blueprint when you are done.
• Buy Blueprint Copies In Jita: There is no shortage of raven BPCS available. They tend to run for around 700,000 ISK per run, though buying in bulk can reduce this. Using BPCs does make a deep cut into your profits, but may be the only way to avoid over-investing and tying up huge amounts of ISK for years.
  

The latter option is most highly recommended, at least until you are absolutely 110% sure that making battleships is what you want to do for the next year.