The Little Blog of Games

I haven’t done much exploration the past week as I have been organizing my things and test driving the Hound with Lassie (well, that’s a pun I guess). Since I haven’t done much invention lately I decided to move closer to my exploration area. The station there doesn’t have labs, but otherwise it is much more conveniently located. Hauling is still a PITA though…

I really wanted to try out the Hound as a ratter and so I sneaked in to the nearby null sec for some fun and games. Some problems became apparent and I came up with some nice solutions which I then tried out.

‘Woof woof’ says the dog

Getting the stealth bomber to null is not much of a problem. If you keep your eyes open you’ll be able to spot the gate camps and sneak around them pretty safely. I really do love the covert ops cloak for the safety and freedom it provides. Unfortunately the stealth bombers are paper thin when it comes to combat.

In the systems where I started ratting the biggest rats are in a spawn with a BS (650k bounty) and two escorts (frigs). Some other spawns are four battlecruisers or a BC with two cruiser or destroyer escorts. So these are not the bigger rats I’m hunting, just something to try things out.

The most secure way for a SB to rat is to get into position (20-30 km away) and repeat a cycle of: torps hot -> decloak -> target -> torps off -> wait for the hit -> recloak -> wait 5 seconds and repeat. This allows you to beat the BS down one volley at a time while remaining out of combat. But it is pretty slow going and on the third or fourth volley the escorts usually pick you up and engage.

I found that I can usually finish off the BS (BCs for sure) with the escorts attacking me as it is maybe three or four volleys left to a kill. My medium shield extender gives me enough buffer to take some frig fire while aligning and firing the last torps before warping out. But that leaves the escorts at the belt and makes looting a pain in the ass as you’d have to sneak in cloaked to quickly grab anything valuable.

The slow pace of ratting this way really kills any isk/hour chances and while everything shouldn’t be about the money, I feel kind of stupid if I’m doing things that don’t make sense to me.  I mean lets face it, ratting is not that much fun by itself. It is an adequate pass time if you’re looking for some PVP targets, but I wouldn’t want to focus on it solely for the fun of it.

Of course the Hound faces the same problems as any (non-lazor) ship  ratting in hostile 0.0. You only have so much cargo bay and the torps will eventually run out. Loot is next to impossible to collect as BS modules are rather big and you’re soon juggling the junk to figure out what is more profitable to keep.

I was rather disappointed until I realized that I could waltz in Mynthea with some other ship to help with the ratting. Since the problem was the small rats and their unwanted affection towards the SB, I figured something that could tank the rats while the SB smacked the big rat was in order. If it could also carry extra ammo, salvage and collect the valuables all the better. Enter the supply cruiser.

‘Sit, stay’ says the dog wrangler

My logic for choosing a cruiser centers on the size: a cruiser is small enough to speed tank the BS yet big enough to fit some tank against the smaller rats. Cruisers can also be fitted for a moderate sized cargo bay and with a flight of Warrior II’s you can take out the small rats easily. Cruisers are also really cheap to buy and  fit so losing one to a gate camp wouldn’t be the end of the world.

Since I’m a Gallente gall and I have been flying a Vexor for half my life I immediately thought of it for the hull. It has a fairly sizeable cargo bay which I extended with a few cargo bay expander II’s. Its slot layout also makes for a possible passive shield tank (even with the cargo expanders taking two lows) and a passive tank seemed like a good idea as I don’t want to be juggling too many modules when dual boxing.

The idea is to fly the supply cruiser in to the belt and immediately set it to orbit the big rat to maximize transversal. Then all it has to do is wait for the SB to decloak and torpedo the big rat down, at which point it will throw out the drones to finish of the rest of the rats while the SB recloaks. Fairly simple plan, really.

For this purpose I kitted the two remaining lows with meta 4 shield power relays and the mids got two large meta 4 shield extenders aside a MWD. This gave me a 53 dps tank which I further boosted to 66 dps with a core defence field purger rig I had lying around. You could slap in additional rigs to further boost the tank, but I didn’t have any available and didn’t want to wait for a production job to finish.

Besides, that 66 dps tank should hold of the smaller escorts for long enough to kill the BS. And if the incoming dps seems too high you can always thin the crowd with the drones as long as someone keeps the BS pointed. The buggers have a tendency to warp out if their escorts get killed.

The only thing I was slightly worried about was the ability of the BS to hit my cruiser, because that dps would be too much for the tank. My experience with a Thorax is that pretty much the only damage coming from the BS would be missiles and that would be mitigated by sig radius (so no MWD on while orbiting!), but this of course was a different boat so I couldn’t be sure.

The highs got a set of a tractor beam and two salvagers in addition to the mandatory cloak. With nothing better to fit in the last high I slapped on a medium Nos.

This got me the following fit:

[Vexor, Null sec supply]
Local Power Plant Manager: Reaction Shield Power Relay I
Local Power Plant Manager: Reaction Shield Power Relay I
Expanded Cargohold II
Expanded Cargohold II

Large Azeotropic Ward Salubrity I
Large Azeotropic Ward Salubrity I
10MN MicroWarpdrive I

Prototype Cloaking Device I
Medium Nosferatu I
Small Tractor Beam I
Salvager I
Salvager I

Medium Core Defence Field Purger I

Warrior II x5
Hornet EC-300 x5

The drone bay has lots of room for utility drones (shield maintenance drones?), but I tried to keep the costs down as a ship loss in null sec is just a matter of time. The cost for this ship was around 15 million which is quite cheap all things considered. All I now needed to do was load up a stack of torpedoes in the cargo bay and make my way to 0.0.

Test drive 1, crash test passed

Flying the ten or so jumps into null sec was pretty uneventful and I was quite happy to get there so fast. Lassie was waiting for me and after swapping a set of bookmarks and some loot we were ready for action. With everything in order and the system all quiet Lassie warped to the first belt seeking for prey.

Luck was with us as the first belt had an Angel War General (BS) and an Arch Angel Rogue (scram frig), which is pretty much the biggest rat spawn in this sec system. Lassie moved the Hound in position and I engaged warp engines to 10 km from her.

Coming out of warp I immediately flipped the MWD on to close the gap to the battleship before they would start firing me. It was only about 20 km, but the Vexor seemed slower than ever as it crawled towards the targets. Something was definitely wrong here and I checked the speed which read 280 km/s. WTF?

It pretty soon dawned on me that I had fitted a 1MN MWD to the cruiser hull, giving me afterburner speeds with a huge sig radius. Great!

But I got over the gap before I got targeted and then it was simply a matter of soaking up the damage. Meanwhile Lassie decloaked as soon as I had gotten the rats to engage and started firing her torps at the BS. My tank was holding well and it didn’t take much more than 10 volleys for the  War General to explode in a cloud of dust and debris.

At that point I launched my flight of Warrior II’s and started salvaging and looting the wreck. The small Angel frig soon joined it’s commander in the afterlife and things were quiet again. Looting and salvaging didn’t take long and we were both soon cloaked and ready for another round. It was getting late however and I decided to call it a day.

Overall I’d say that my experiment with the supply cruiser was pretty successful. It did everything it was supposed to do and the teamwork with the stealth bomber was simple and effective. The ships complement each others weaknesses beautifully and smoothed all the ratting wrinkles I had experienced with the solo SB earlier.

I would probably fit the supply cruiser with some more shield rigs to increase the tank further. And a correct sized MWD would be nice too (doh!). But other than that I don’t see many problems. I think I’ll give the duo another spin today and see how well they perform in a longer ratting session.

Until then, fly safe and keep your eyes open for any stealth bombers lurking around. =)

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Tags: eve, ratting, ships

This entry was posted on Friday, March 5th, 2010 at 9:16 am and is filed under games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.