Tech two production seems intimidating and effort-intensive, but with a well-formulated business plan and a few skill points, you can turn out advanced ammunition and flip it, without much risk, and with only a minimal time investment. This means you can use your time in EVE Online for other activities that are fun or profitable, while your invention and production slots chug away, making you ISK hand over fist.

This guide series specifically deals with inventing the most popular tech two ammunition, "Scourge Fury Heavy Missiles", of which large volumes are sold each day, at inflated prices, even in trade hubs like Jita. It is a task of intermediate difficulty, and involves some skills with lengthy training time. This first half of the guide deals with inventing the tech two missile blueprint, while the second half deals with the actual production of the missiles.

Bottomless Market

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style="font-style: italic;">Scourge Fury Heavy Missiles are the most popular tech two ammunition in EVE Online.

On any given day, between five and twenty million scourge fury heavy missiles change hands in the Jita market. This dwarfs all the other tech two heavy missile markets and, insofar as I can tell, there are more of them sold than any other advanced ammunition in EVE Online. The price is much higher than those of other ammunitions with comparable ingredients, as well, owing to the high demand.

Why Do People Like Tech Two Scourges?

Scourge missiles are heavy missiles that inflict kinetic damage, which is important because the Drake battlecruiser has a bonus to kinetic-inflicting heavy missiles, as well as heavy assault missiles.

The drake is one of the most popular NPC-killing ships in the game, and rightly so. It is tough, easy to train for, and once filled up with ammo it can run cosmic anomaly encounter or just kill NPCs in belts for a long, long time.

Nor is the drake solely responsible. The Tengu, the tech three Caldari cruiser, can burn through missiles at an amazing clip. As EVE Online is, right now, tengus are probably the best asteroid belt NPC-hunter ship in the game.

Why Make Tech Two Ammo?

All ISK-generation issues aside, there are some advantages to making tech two ammunition, as opposed to ships or modules. The first and most important issue is that they are simple, involving only one tech two component, and some additional weird junk. Compared to making ships, which is easy to track. As long as you keep notes, even very rudimentary notes, you will not have a problem figuring out how much ISK you are making.

The other advantage is that tech two ammunition requires an unusually long time to actually make. Depending on your skills, producing an entire ten-run blueprint of Scourge Fury ammunition will probably take about four days. This is actually a good thing: it means that your production process is mostly hands off, and you are producing a valuable product for that entire time, without being involved.

Sure, you can make more ISK by making certain ships and modules, but not without a whole lot of added hassle, ingredient lists that will make your head spin, and checking in every day or even every few hours. But as far as minimizing problems and human interaction, it's hard to beat tech two ammo.

Inventing Tech Two Missiles

Inventing and making these requires a bit of a skill point investment, but is not so far out of the way for an industry-interested pilot, and in any case will act as a great low-effort ISK supplement for an otherwise busy pilot, because the build times involved are so lengthy.

The skills you will need to train in order to invent scourge furies are:

• Caldari Encryption Methods IV
• Electronic Engineering IV
• Rocket Science IV

You can probably get away with having these trained to just level III, but IV will give you much higher success with your invention attempts, and thus boost your profit rates. The people you will be competing with, on the market, almost certainly have their skills trained to level IV, meaning they could theoretically out-compete you. Just something to keep in mind.

The following are the major pre-requisites for the skills above:

• Science V
• Mechanic V
• Electronics V
• Hacking II
• Electronics Upgrades III

Pretty intense requirements for a new player, but consider that this is something that can bolster your ISK intake without too much effort, for the rest of your EVE career. Also consider than many of these skills will be useful for other tasks, or for generally improving your EVE character.

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style="font-style: italic;">Invention is a snap, once you have the basics down.

Science V will allow you to eventually use a black ops battleship jump portal generator, allows you to make use of research agents, and allow you to train whatever invention skills you please. Mechanic V is great for the extra structure hit points, and will allow you to use tech two armor repair modules, and is a requirement for learning to use assault ships. Electronics V is necessary for learning the advanced electronic warfare skills, as well as cynosural field generators (an important skill for moving capital ships around low-sec and null-sec) and parts of various tech three ships. Hacking allows you to run Radar exploration sites, as well as various COSMOS missions. The point is that these are not dead skill points, and that many players in EVE Online will want them, anyway.

The Miracle Of Invention

For invention newbies, the process is very simple. The idea is that the data interface lets you attempt invention jobs for various Caldari modules. You use a tech one blueprint copy with as many runs as possible on it, and two datacores. You right click on the blueprint copy, select invention, and choose which kind of missile you want to invent. You may also opt to include a version of the item that you are inventing, in order to bolster your chance of success. If the attempt succeeds, you end up with a ten-run blueprint copy. If the attempt fails, the ingredients are consumed and you can try again. The market prices for all invented items take this failure chance into account.

The invention attempts are simple enough. You need to have an "Esoteric Data Interface" which is re-usable. For each attempt, you will need max-run copies of the "Scourge Heavy Missile Blueprint" which probably involves buying the blueprint original and copying it at a low-sec station. You will also need a single "Datacore - Electronic Engineering" and a single "Datacore - Rocket Science", each of which will be expended in the invention attempt.

To bolster the chance of success, you should also include a faction scourge missile of some sort. I recommend including a "Caldari Navy Scourge Heavy Missile" with the invention attempt, as a cheap way to increase your chance of success (it adds a +4.44% chance of success, assuming you have your invention skills trained to IV). Make sure that the extra missile ingredient is in your hangar with your other stuff and add the missile in the invention window by clicking on the 'base item' popup and selecting your extra ammo, which should be listed. To be absolutely clear: the extra ammo must be some variation of the scourge missile.

Common Mistakes

• Make sure that your scourge blueprint copy has 1500 runs on it, or you will get less than 10 runs on your final result.
• Don't worry about decryptors (optional ingredients that affect invention success chance) unless you are making ships.
• Don't try and use a tech two missile as an ingredient, they are "too advanced" to be used.
• Datacores have a very brisk buy order market. Even if you are normally too hands off to nurse buy orders in Jita or Amarr, datacore buy orders will probably not take more than a day or two to fill, and can involve considerable savings.
• Be sure that all of your ingredients are located in the same hangar, and not scattered between your ships cargo or corporation hangars.
• Don't bother inventing if you have not trained the appropriate skills to at least level III. It doesn't take that long, compared to the pre-requisite skills, and to do otherwise is throwing your ISK away.

Yes, Yes Indeed

Check back tomorrow for the second half this guide, in which we discuss the actual building process, perform a cost breakdown analysis, and discuss ways to cut overhead and make more ISK out of the entire process.