Shiny, Shiny, Shiny: Eve Online Capital Ship Brawl

It’s story time, boys and girls. Everyone gather ‘round Uncle Lio’s comfy chair and I’ll tell you a tale that’s simply grand.

Seriously though, this is a pretty great story.  It all starts with a mistake. For those that aren’t familiar with Eve Online, there’s a type of ship called a Titan. Now these ships are expensive. If you were convert their cost from ISK (in-game currency) to US dollars, it would be worth around $3000. The ships also take approximately a month of real time to manufacture. As you’d expect, these ships are almost always kept inside the protective force fields of player owned star-bases. Titans also have the unique ability to punch holes in space and transport other ships across great distances. This is called bridging. They also have the ability to move themselves (and only themselves) across these distances.  This is called jumping. Keep that in mind as I continue.

There was one such Titan that was preparing to bridge his fleet into somewhat hostile territory, a fairly common occurrence in Eve. Here’s comes the mistake. Instead of bridging, the pilot of this Titan jumped himself and only himself into hostile territory, outside his protective force field and far from any allies to help him return back home. He was essentially a sitting duck, a very expensive sitting duck.

Naturally this caught other people’s attention. A lot of people. Soon enough, every major player organization had moved ships into the star system and were slugging it out.  This is where a unique aspect of Eve comes into play. As time went on and the battle escalated, the number of player in system peaked at around 2500. That’s 2500 of the most expensive star ships in one place beating the smithereens out of each other. It was a battle the likes of which haven’t been seen in years.

When the dust settled, over 200 ships were destroyed. To put it another way, if you were to build each lost ship one after another it would take nearly 2 years. That’s about $14500 worth of pretend spaceships that were destroyed forever.