As I mentioned in the first part of my T1 production guide, there are a few T1 ship types that require different build materials than all other T1 ships or modules. These are battleships, capital ships, supercapital ships, and Titans, which all are technically T1 ships.
Historically all these types were also built out of basic minerals. This has changed in 2021 when CCP increased the requirements to a wider range of build materials. Until that point, all these ship types were a lot cheaper to build than today. Also back in the past, basic minerals were so abundant by massive fleets of Rorquals roaming the null sec belts, that capital und supercapital production in null sec was on a massive scale. Combined with the fact, that capitals ships are very hard to kill by subcapital ships, the stockpile of supercapital ships and titans rose to higher and higher levels. Back then you could buy a cheaply fitted Titan for less than 70 billion ISK.
Since then, the build cost of these ships more than doubled bringing the cost to build a Titan up to around 160 billion isk as of today. But the massive amount of cheap pre-2021 ships still exist in the game and therefore the market price for all of these ship types still does not properly reflect the actual build costs. Titans are still sold for around 120 billion a piece, way under the build cost of the hull.
Because of this, especially capital ship production simply stopped after the new material costs hit the servers and hasn’t resumed a lot since.
After this short historical excurse, let’s look at the actual build requirements of a battleship, in this case a Dominix:
As you can see, there are three components required additionally to a relatively large amount of minerals to build it. These material requirements are exactly the same for all T1 battleships.
Let’s have a look at the build requirements of the three components:
All three components need a relatively small amount of planetary- und reaction materials. Looking at the total cost of these components to build a battleship, they make up less than 10% of the total production costs. Furthermore, producing these yourself wasn’t profitable at the time of writing, so I just bought all required materials in Jita to start my Dominix build. As you can see in the screenshot below, the required materials have a volume of 125k m3 which requires a freighter to haul the materials to your production hub. If you refine the minerals yourself, the compressed ores will fit into a regular hauler although it is risky to transport such a high value load in a industrial ship.
I simply used a BPC to build it, since the actual battleship BPOs are quite expensive with also very high costs to research them to maximum levels. Since battleship production is still not profitable at the time of writing, buying a BPO was not an option.
Building the Dominix takes only a couple of hours. Total build costs including facility cost were about 280 million in total, which is around the same as the price of a Dominix in Jita at the moment. The other battleship hulls were in a quite similar price range.
Maybe you can make a profit if you refine the minerals out of compressed ore yourself? Let’s have a look at the ore refining table to check if refining ore is profitable atm:
As you can see, none of the high-, low or null-sec basic ores are profitable to refine with a rather high refining rate of 83%.
Maybe battleship prices will rise again in the future, but as long as they don’t hit a 20% profit margin to the build costs, the hassle of building them is not an option.
Building capital and supercapital ships needs a lot more components than battleships and even larger amount of minerals, planetary and reaction materials to build them. At the time of writing, build costs for a carrier were around 4,3 billion ISK per hull. Price for a hull on public contrast reached from 2,7 to 4 billion for the hull. As you can see, building capital ships is still far from profitable at the moment. That is why I will postpone a detailed guide to build capitals to a later date.
