Eve Online - Ships

Ships

Ships in Eve Online are organized into classes, from tiny frigates only a few dozen meters long to gigantic capital ships ranging in the tens of kilometers (as large as whole cities). Ships fill different roles and vary in size, speed, hull strength and firepower. Each of the four races has their own unique ship design preferences and varied strengths and weaknesses, although all races have ships that are meant for the same basic roles and are balanced for play against each other. This means that there is no "best ship" in Eve Online. According to their preferred style of play, the player might want their characters to fly a ship with a huge cargo hold, one that is suited for mining, one that has a powerful array of weapons, or a ship that moves quickly through space (among other capabilities); but the fluid, ever-changing nature of Eve Online means that no ship will be perfect at all of these tasks, nor is there any guarantee that the "best ship for the job" today will continue to be the best ship tomorrow.

Furthermore, unlike many online games, Eve does not feature racial bonuses, that is, characters of different races do not gain intrinsic advantages for flying ships designed by their own race. While a character will begin with more advanced skills in his own race's ships, a character of another race can reach the same proficiency through training. Thus, players are encouraged to use starships that meet their preferred style of play, and the game does not place incentives for playing as one race over another.

Ships in Eve Online come in four size classes. Small starships include frigates (small, mobile gunboats) and destroyers (dedicated turret platforms and frigate-killers). Medium starships include cruisers (reliable multipurpose vehicles) and battlecruisers (heavier, more combat-oriented cruisers). Battleships (heavily armed and armoured dedicated combat-systems vehicles) make up the large size class. Extra-large (or capital-class) starships include carriers (extremely large mobile bases and fleet command points), dreadnoughts (very large dedicated siege vehicles for attacking immobile starbases), supercarriers (larger versions of carriers focused more on damage to capital class ships) and titans (supermassive all-purpose mobile battle stations, capable of equipping doomsday devices which do massive amounts of damage to other capital ships).

Each spaceship within the Eve Online universe has a different set of characteristics and can be fitted with different combinations of modules subject to their fitting requirements. Ships have a wide variety of characteristics, including power grid, CPU, capacitor size and recharge rate, energy shields, armor, maximum velocity and inertial modifier, agility, locking range and maximum number of lockable targets. A ship's systems also receive bonuses depending on the level of various skills of the ship's pilot. These bonuses usually correspond to the role the ship has been designed for, and thus vary widely.

One important characteristic of a ship is the slots it has available for modules. Slots and modules come in three variants: high-, mid-, and low-power. Examples of high slot modules include weapons such as turrets and missile launchers, cloaking devices, tractor beams, and other tools for mining and salvaging. Mid slot items include modules to improve shields or propulsion, repair hull damage, engage in electronic warfare, and "tackle" other ships to slow or stop movement. Low slot items include armor enhancements and repair, increased cargo space, and improved speed, agility, computers, or power supply. Different-sized ships have different numbers of module slots.

A ship may also have one or more slots for rigs, modules that require no power grid or CPU, but instead require a ship resource called calibration. Installing a rig is a semi-permanent action, as a rig cannot be removed from the ship without being destroyed. Rigs come in three sizes: small, medium, and large, which roughly correspond to the size of the ship, and are used to affect other aspects of the ship such as maximum speed or cargo capacity, or to augment the capabilities of other modules installed in the ship. Most rigs also incur a penalty to certain aspect of the ship; for example armor rigs reduce the maximum velocity of the ship.

All ships in the game are also classed according to Tech level, from Tech I to Tech III. Tech I (or T1) ships are general purpose, easily manufactured models that perform simple, straightforward functions in an obvious way. Tech II (T2) ships are based on T1 designs that have been modified to perform specific roles using specialized technology. T2 ships are harder to manufacture and are only produced by certain corporations, and are priced well above the T1 variants. They also require significantly greater skills to fly than their T1 variants.

The Apocrypha patch introduced into Eve Online a new type of ship: the Tech III (T3) strategic cruiser. These highly advanced starships gain their unique qualities by being manufactured from material recovered from beyond wormholes, another new feature introduced by Apocrypha. Strategic cruisers are quite rare and expensive, and require unique skillsets on the part of manufacturers that allow the reverse engineering and integration of highly advanced technologies recovered from dead or dormant ancient civilizations. They differ from other ships in that the actual hull is modular. Players customize a hull to the specifications they want, and then add the modules separately as they would to any other ship. Only the strategic cruiser hulls can be modified in this way; other ships' hulls are set. Strategic cruiser hulls are not equipped with a default layout of low, medium, and high slots but possess five subsystem slots that can be populated with subsystem modules that affect ship characteristics more dramatically than normal modules or rigs, such as altering the number of standard module slots that are available.