The first part of this guide covers how to produce the blueprints needed to make hounds. This guide continues explaining that process so that you can manufacture one of the most effective stealth bombers in EVE Online. This portion describes how to take the blueprint copies produced in the first part of this guide and turn them into finished hound hulls.

Minmatar are often considered to be the EVE race most suitable for PvP, and their hound ship is no exception. The explosive damage that it inflicts is generally the most desirable type for large-scale bombing runs, and its high speed while cloaked allows it to reposition itself more effectively than the other stealth bombers. Not into PvP? That's fine: the hound is great for running missions, especially in dangerous places like low-sec or null-sec, and it can inflict any kind of damage if it needs to.

The Skills

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style="font-style: italic;">The hound is arguably the best stealth bomber, making them easy to sell.

One does not simply make a hound; there are significant skill requirements. Fortunately, there is also a good degree of overlap with the skills used to invent them. The skills will also mostly come in handy with other industrial projects.

Here is what is needed to make hounds:

• Minmatar Starship Engineering I
• Rocket Science I
• Frigate Construction IV
• Science V
• Mechanic V
• Industry V

As with any production project, it is also a no-brainer to train at least Production Efficiency IV, and V is really a good idea. Those waste numbers add up, and take a real chunk out of your profits.

Many Ingredients: An Overview

Tech two ships require a large number of ingredients. Many of them will be difficult or expensive to produce on your own. Your goal as a producer can vary: you may want to produce as much of the ingredients in-house as possible, you may want to only do the steps that save you the most ISK, or you may want to do whatever is easiest.

The ingredients used to make tech two ships involve asteroid minerals, intermediate planetary materials, components made of moon mineral reactions, and a tech one breacher ship. Your skill as a tech two industrialist will largely consist of how good you are at sourcing these ingredients. If you just buy them off the market in Jita, you will have minimal profits. If you use buy orders, make contacts in your corporation with moon miners, and otherwise cut financial corners, your profits will swell. Note the numbers given below all assume that you have trained Production Efficiency V, as that is what most serious industrialists will have.

The "tech two component" ingredients that come from moon minerals are:

• x15 Deflection Shield Emitter
• x60 Electrolytic Capacitor Unit
• x300 Fernite Carbide Composite Armor Plate
• x60 Ladar Sensor Cluster
• x180 Nanomechanical Microprocessor
• x6 Nuclear Reactor Unit
• x30 Plasma Thruster

The ingredients for these usually need to be purchased in Jita, though you would be surprised how many people make them. There has especially been an explosion of wormhole dwellers reacting their moon minerals, to the point where the market has seriously been affected.

It is recommended that you make some of these parts from ingredients, but for some it may be more time-effective to simply buy the finished components. Note that there is usually some small space saved in shipping the parts, if you are exporting these goods to a hard to reach area.

The basic minerals used are:

• x8 Isogen
• x8 Megacyte
• x38 Morphite
• x1772 Pyerite
• x1383 Tritanium
• x6 Zydrine

You need one planetary material:

• x30 Construction Blocks

Finally, you need:

• x1 Breacher
• x2 R.A.M.- Starship Tech

On Making Your Ingredients

In a competitive market in EVE Online, making something for yourself tends to be 10-15% cheaper than buying it off the market. If you do not intend to make every ingredient yourself, you should spend some time trying to identify what parts you are spending the most ISK on. Those are the parts you should be making, while those that make up a negligible portion of the final cost can safely be bought off the market. As is generally the case with business in EVE Online, it is best to concentrate on the most profitable industrial steps, and let some other chump do the less profitable parts.

Some of the ingredients listed above have special considerations. Consider:

• Construction Blocks: You do not need very many, so it should not be a problem to set up a lava planet to produce these. This is especially true if you live outside of high-security space, and would prefer to make as much as possible on-site.
• Breacher: You probably already own this blueprint because of how handy it is in the invention process. You may as well make your hulls with it.
• R.A.M.- Starship Tech: These are made from basic minerals and are incredibly overpriced when purchased on the market. You may as well make them yourself.

Hound Cost By Ingredient

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style="font-style: italic;">You can save a lot of ISK by producing the most expensive ingredients instead of buying them.

Nanomechanical microprocessors are obviously the biggest expense when producing producing hounds. The expenses can be broken down as follows:

• Nanomechanical Microprocessor: 46%
• Electrolytic Capacitor Unit: 22%
• Fernite Carbide Composite Armor Plate: 11%
• Ladar Sensor Cluster: 9%
• Remaining Materials: 12%

This really puts in perspective that spending a lot of effort to get a better price on any of the little ingredients is a waste of time compared to the larger ingredients. If you want to cut material costs, you should probably target the ingredients in the order above.

Making Nanomechanical Microprocessors

Producing your own "nanomechs" is going to require buying the blueprint (hopefully from a contract with material efficiency already researched), training Molecular Science to III, and buying or otherwise obtaining the three moon materials used to make it.

If you buy the fernite carbide, nanotransistors, and phenolic composites used to make nanomechs right off the Jita market, you will be saving 3550 ISK per item used, or about 640,000 ISK per hound produced. That's not a bad savings. If you get your moon materials from buy orders and manage a discount, that's money in your pocket.

Your Cost Versus Market Cost

The total cost of the material ingredients is 13,409,320 ISK. Add onto this the invention cost (worked out in the first part of this guide) of 3,496,000 per blueprint copy, and you get a total cost of 16,905,320 ISK.

Expressed in shorthand, that's only 16.91mil ISK. As of this writing, hounds cost about 22.5mil ISK in Jita. This means you could theoretically sell your hounds for a profit of about 5.59mil ISK apiece, less negligible factory slot costs and market taxes. Not too shabby.

Expanding

I recommend that you focus on a single race's ships, since the ingredients and skills used do not vary much between ships of that race. You also would not need to invest in new blueprints and so forth. That said, once you have trained your invention skills up to IV, you are inventing about as well as most people on the market. That means that once you have mastered the production process, you can make any tech two Minmatar ships that you like.

Don't go nuts, though: you need to do the math and see how profitable it is. This is especially true of tech two ships that are larger than frigate-sized. The material costs involved are such that it is often necessary to use decryptors (see our invention article) in order to make a profit. Indeed, it is actually impossible to make a profit making some ships. So again, do the math. Otherwise, good luck.