Van Hemlock

From the ‘That’s No Moon…’ desk, this titbit:

Eve Online: Ascendant Frontier completes first Titan. (via Kill Ten Rats, Heatless Gamer, at al.)

And you thought opening the Gates of Ahn’Qiraj was time-consuming. From the news post, the construction of the Amaarian Titan-Class ‘Avatar’, detailed here, cost around 160 Billion ISK in materials and blueprints, and took the Ascendant Frontier Alliance, itself a grouping consisting of around 22 member Corporations, and just under 4,000 players, around eight months to complete.

(For reference, one Agent 4 mission will take me about 45min to complete, and earn me around fifteen million ISK, or so.)

Quite staggering really, and in many ways, having the actual ship finished and operational must seem almost besides the point – simply the very task of building the thing has provided a significant proporation of the players-base of EVE with a very real and tangiable goal and purpose for quite some time.

I love stats, so let’s have a go at this thing:

• Avatar Blueprint Original: Purchase cost: 75,000,000,000ISK
  This is the first step, purchased form the NPC market. It can however be used as many times as you like, provided you have the materials needed for each ‘run’.
• Capital Ship Construction Level V: Time to train for a new(ish) character: ~300 days, real-time.
  This skill is required by the person who is going to do the final ‘combine’ to manufacture it.
• Ship Recipe: (Without any skills, which may bring some of the costs down marginally.)
  

  Capital Propulsion Engine: 200, Capital Turret Hardpoint: 500, Capital Sensor Cluster: 200, Capital Armor Plates: 500, Capital Capacitor Battery: 500, Capital Power Generator: 500, Capital Shield Emitter: 100, Capital Jump Drive: 500, Capital Drone Bay: 200, Capital Computer System: 200, Capital Construction Parts: 400, Capital Jump Bridge Array: 500, Capital Clone Vat Bay: 500, Capital Doomsday Weapon Mount: 500, Capital Ship Maintenance Bay:500, Capital Corporate Hangar Bay: 500

  These are all sub-components which need to be individually manufactured. Fortunately, these are only of the Tech 1 variety, and don’t require any of the moon-mining and exotic and involved Player-Owned-Structure factory ‘Reactions’ to do, and can just be mined-for and built in the traditional manner. Even so, they are big objects - the above shopping list comes to, in total:

  • Tritanium: 3,353,295,700
  • Pyrite: 812,695,500
  • Mexallon: 277,560,800
  • Isogen: 48,980,100
  • Nocxium: 13,709,700
  • Zydrine: 2,456,700
  • Megacyte: 1,217,400

  Market rate for that little haul is about 37,595,892,475 ISK, plus you’ll need one of each blueprint original for the various parts above, costing 24,104,196,200 ISK in total.

  Note that the last two minerals can only be found in appreciable quantities in very PvP Enabled space, and dug up by ships that are often particularly gimped at combat.

  One top-end Miner II laser can typically haul in around 800 Tritanium per minute, or thereabouts, so that’s a lot of staring at asteroids. The construction would have also entailed all manner of herculean haulage to assemble the materials in the right place, dedicated blueprint research to make the construction times and efficiencies more manageable, and of course, since the ship isn’t even allowed into ‘safe’ space, the whole thing would needed to have been covered by an extensive and vigilant space navy, pretty much most of the way through.

Of course all of the above just gets you the hull. You still need to equip the thing, with special Capital Ship modules, equally costly and exotic things to produce, and you have the necessary support infrastructure in place – docking platforms, moon mining operations for fuel supply, etc.

You also need someone to fly the damned thing, no small task in itself. At a bare minimum, it would take the newish player about 475 days to be even able to get in its cockpit and move it about. Proficiency in all the various skills to operate it’s modules to a decent level of competency would take a new player around 3yrs, 112days, 14hrs, 55min and 27seconds, give or take, which is handy, as it will take the new player at least that long to work themselves into a position of trust such that they would be allowed anywhere near it’s cockpit!

Two of the more eagerly anticipated modules it can use are the Doomsday Weapon, a remotely operable smart-bomb capable of one-hitting most clusters of ships below Capital class, anywhere in the same solar system, at the cost of 20 million ISK of fuel per shot, available once an hour, in a manner not too dissimilar to Planetside’s Orbital Strike, and the Jump Portal Generator, a way for the Titan to become a jump gate for smaller ships, allowing an attendant fleet to cross hyperspace along with it, directly and bypassing normal jump-link routes and gate-camps for a nasty surprise, which sounds more dangerous than the Doomsday Device to be honest. It also gets massively scaled up versions of all the standard gear as well.

Of course it will also need defending. ASCN have effectively built EVE Online’s ‘Onyxia’, and any number of other alliances and corps are now all rubbing their hands with glee at the sudden new raid content, and all lining up to see if they can be the First to kill a titan, and since the purpose of all ships and stations in Eve is essentially ‘to be destroyed’, it’s just a matter of ‘when’ and not ‘if’ the newly minted ‘Avatar’ will go down in flames. One thing is for sure though, it’ll take a lot less time than eight months to die, I bet, and as with most vessels in EVE, it is quite situational, ideally suited to beating the snot out of starbases really. Bigger is not always better in EVE...

Still, congratulations where they are due, in what must have been a monumental exercise in management, logistics and sheer hard work for all 4000 players concerned, and indeed the whole effort seems more comparable to something you’d find in Real Life businesses, rather than online end-gaming raid culture.

Bravo!

(Incidentally, we at Van Hemlock do not condone ‘uying-bay ISK-ay rom-fay rofessional-pay armers-fay or-fay eal-ray oney-may’, but it is interesting to note that the above mentioned 160 billion ISK would cost approximately USD$10,666 in real beer-tokens to aquire that way. May temptation never darken your door, nor make you that crazy…)

EDIT: Pictures speak a thousand words, and videos, thousandly so. Or something.

YouTube: ASCN's Titan

The 'fly-past' camera ship is a Minmatar 'Stabber', a mid-range Cruiser class vessel commonly seen about Empire Space. I wish they hadn't built the thing in a system with such a dark skybox, although to be fair I doubt asthetics was top of the lsit when planning the construction site. It's hard to tell the scale, a problem I've always had with EVE Online, but at a guess I'd say that thing is about twice the size of the average fixed NPC Station found through out Empire space. Wonderful poster art here:

Eve-Files.com: Ship Comparison Chart

That speck there at the very top-right, and one down, is the Ibis, the Caldari starter frigate, itself an object that will only just fit under the lower arch of the Eifel Tower, and is aproximately the size of the Statue of Liberty (see extreme lower-left of the poster). Using the known height of the tower, 300m (1000ft), and Photoshop to measure pixels, I make the Avatar around 13.1 kilometres long, or about 8.1 miles from nose to tail.

I can't help by think I've seen it somewhere before.