Ships like ammo

As I was reading a newbie's view of loosing a ship over on Saylah's blog, I reflected on the change in attitude I underwent prior to and through my own Faction Warfare (FW) experience. In order to understand what I mean I'm going to link My Minmatar Militia KB history. This KB history prety faithfully records my ship losses and kills during my 3 month stay in FW.

Thinking back on some parts of my conversation about Faction Warfare with Saylah back when I was giving her some pointers online. I think I shocked her a bit when I mentioned "Yea for faction warfare you may want to prepare your favorite frigate in batches of 10". The thing is I wasn't being at all fecitious. Adjusting to life in EVE does require a change in outlook regarding your posessions. Ships are consumables.

Now some salient points:

1. I went into FW as a low sec PvP newbie, but my small ship skills were actualy in very good shape and I had gone on corp and alliance PvP operations back in the day.
2. I went into FW with a warchest and my industrialist skills and my backing BPO collection. This means I was VERY self supporting. In fact with a bit of exploration at the end and some luck I actualy came out ahead in isk.
3. I intentionaly kept to T1 ships and modules 90% of the time because I KNEW I'd be burning thru ships. Only venturing out in T2 ships and with T2 modules towards the end of my stay once I got better at PvP.
4. I lost 51 ships in a 3 month stint. slightly over a ship every two days.
5. I did not do very much carebearing for my entire stay. Just a bit of exploration and ninja mining towards the end of my stay. With a titch of high sec mining to build more hulls on the cheap.
   
6. I was PvP'ing just about every day of that stay. It certainly felt that way.
   
7. At the end of the 3 months I donated over 60 hulls and their full load outs to the corporation that I had been a member of for a good part of my stay as a going away present (talked to them a month later and they still had some of the rifters left over).

Now I don't expect a newbie to be doing point 7. I am by now an experienced industrialist and that was just my way of saying "thanks for the experience" to my host corp down in low sec. But point 4 is not un-realistic if your're serious about PvP.

Now before this scares away the newbies, I'll also point out that as I said above with minimal - very minimal carebearing I was able to get positive cash flow by the end of my stay. The big reason for this was my restraint in sticking to T1. I'll point to the part where it says I "lost" about 147mil in ships and modules. To a certain extent this is true but with serious mitigation. First of all with only 3 or 4 exceptions all those 51 ships were fully platinum insured. I did some calculations and with my standard fit, my Rifter losses only represented a net 150k isk per loss (for me - your milage may vary). Each pod kill counted as a 10mil isk loss but my SP was such that it was only about 2mil for the new medical clone after each podding. Even with the two that had +1's in their heads they were very cheap since I bought the +1's from the LP store. Even the Rupture losses were only about net loss of 500k-ish per ship.

So even with a moderate war chest you can keep going for quite a while if you show restraint in your tech choices. Look if you're a newbie you're going to loose ships in PvP. Stick to the T1 till you are VERY comfortable and have a decent cashflow. But if you're active you can expect to burn thru ships. Get used to the idea.