The Unpaid Bill that Launched a Thousand Starships
Just to point out something about this whole battle that may not be readily apparent...<p>The article quotes the figure that a titan (the largest type of ship in <i>EVE Online</i> ) costs the equivalent of $1500 to produce.  But that doesn't mean you can just walk into <i>EVE,</i> plunk down $1500 to buy ISK, and walk off with a titan.  Far from it.<p>A titan has to be assembled out of over 7,000 individual components, each of which must be bought or (more frequently) manufactured, and, if you build them, you have to have the raw materials and blueprints for them.  Assuming you have all that, it would take a single player two and a half months just to assemble all the components.<p><i>Then</i> you can start building the titan's hull, which takes 40 days.  But it has to be built inside a Capital Ship Assembly Array (itself a very expensive structure), which has to be anchored with a structure in player-controlled space.  And then that structure has to be <i>defended,</i> because if someone comes along and blows up your structure, you lose the titan hull that's under construction.<p>And even after you <i>have</i> a hull, that hull has to be fitted with appropriate modules, such as the Doomsday weapon, jump bridge, and any other modules that suit the pilot's fancy.  That can easily run to as much cost as for the hull alone, especially if you fit the kind of modules that can only be found in-world by defeating high-ranking NPCs (or buying them on the market from someone <i>else</i> that has).<p>Hell, just <i>learning to fly</i> one of those monsters can take months of training time, and skill books that themselves carry price tags in the billions of ISK.<p>Only the largest and most powerful organizations in the game, alliances, can actually build or fly titans, and they tend to jealously guard them.  That really underscores just how big a loss 75 of them is.  Such losses cause tectonic shifts in the balance of power.