Fly Safe #13

Know Thy ships. Know what the strengths and weakness of your ship and not just yours but also the enemies.   

Federation Comet...The Gallente Dagger

The Federation Comet is becoming one of my favorite ships. I'm not used to flying kiting ships, mostly flying close brawlers like the Incursus. This ship has changed my mind about kiting and it's making solo PVP more fun for me than it has been is a long time.

 Federation Comet

Unlike a brawler that wants to be up in the face of its target, a kiter wants stay range from it. Using speed to stay out warp scram and stasis web range. Kite ships also have a different weapon system than a brawler using weapons that have greater range. The Comet is a great fit for this kind of fit with its natural speed as well as  7.5% weapon tracking bonus and 20% weapon damage per level. That with the ability to deploy 3 small combat drones makes it a natural kite ship. 

Kiting in game

It was hard for me to make the change from brawling to kiting. It took awhile understanding that I have to be at a greater range than I normally am and the speed of my ship is a lot greater than I am used to. The fit that I use for my Comet is shown below. I use two 150mm Railgun II that give me a good 20km range with heavy ammo. I can switch ammo and boost this range to 37km. This is nice but I run the risk of losing a point on the target. The damage is so so about 125 with Faction Anti-matter and 109 with Faction Tungsten including drones. While that is not going to when any awards it will get the good done against another frigate or destroy.  I also run Tracking Disruptor in to help with my tank. This mod also me to throw their guns and now missiles out of target. I am getting better at using this mod, as it was not a normal mod that I used. When I first started fly this fit I would often forget about it. The rest is basic for a kite Nano-fiber Structure, MWD, Damage Control Unit and Tracking Computer.

RG-NN-II

The Roam

Tonight started like any other roam, I just began to patrol the local Caldari-Gallente boarder looking for squid targets. I know that I am only going to be able to do 2 v 1 fights at the most, so if there are more that two war targets in a system then I just pass through. I also know that I am only going to be able to fight Destroyer class ships and down as larger hulls of all races tend to carry drones which could be the death of me. So with what my targets are in mind I go to the disputed system of Kedama and begin to run defensive plexs there to help secure it for the Federation. I will get my first target in this system a squid, Andrie Jeglow. He would be in a Corax destroyer, and new Caldari Missile boat that could be a lot of trouble for me. We would engage each other at a small outpost and the fight would end with him having to warp off. The reason was that his light missiles were unable to track my fast ship and I stayed out of their range, all the while my drones were dealing heavy damage to him. This is also where the speed of my ship was too great and I was unable to keep a point on him preventing him from leaving. He managed to get out. Several minutes later I would engage another squid in an novice outpost, Eugney. He would be in an Atron class frigate. Most of the time I have seen these ships kite fitted, so I think that this will be a good fight. He is not though, he is using blasters so I know that his max range is about 12km, so I am able to switch to a different ammo and still be able to stay out of his web and point range. Again the speed of my ship is a surprise to me and I over shot him on a turn and he is able to escape my point and gets away. 

Gallente Atron

I am feeling a little discouraged by these last two fights and my faith that I can fly a kite Comet is waning. That is when Andrie Jeglow and two more squids, Dipression and Petrowic h come into system. I know that this will be a hard fight, 3v1, but I really want to try. Pertrowic h, Condor is the biggest threat to me, because it is very fast and may be able to catch my Comet so that is the first ship that must go. After that I feel that Dipression's Thrasher is the next due to its very high alpha damage, but I know that Thrashers usually have poor tracking so if I stay 30k off him and the Corax then I should be fine. The battle begins and I start off really well, hitting the Condor and trying to separate him from the two destroyers but they act very well as a unit and stay together. My drones with their good damage did manage to drive the Corax off the field. Because I was scared of getting caught I am unable to get a point. This cat and mouse fight goes on for about 3 minutes when to my surprise Toshi Zawa, sends me a fleet invite and moment later his Vengeance Assault Frigate hits the field. Now the with fight 3v2 we in a much better position. So I redeploy my drones and grab tackle on the Condor as Toshi grabs the Thrasher. We kill both of them but not before Andrie another Corax, Enabrain Tain come back and are able to web and scam me. I would lose RG-NN-II. 

        

Caldari Condor Frigate                       Minmatar Thrasher Destroyer

Four jumps away though I had another fitted Comet with the RG-NN-II fitting and with in 5 mins I was back in Kedema and then Rakapas where I found my old friend Eugney, This time he would not get away. As I learned from my first encounters and 3v1 how better to pilot this fit.

After killing Eugney nothing else really happened except a weird duel with a pirate. Comet vs Comet not much happened in this fight that last about 10 mins with neither of us losing our ships. The interest thing about fight was that we both fitted differently. He was in a brawler Comet and I in the kite. So he was using blasters that where unable to hit me. What the said thing was in the first 4 mins of the fight we each killed off the other drones so it became a game of his single Armor repair vs my Railgun DPS. The advantage was to him in the begin and I did manage to get him to burn his repper out, but again I missed piloted my ship and he was able to break my point and get away. 

Kill Mails Linked Below

Petrowic h - Condor

Dipression - Thrasher

Andrei Jeglow - Corax

Eungey - Atron

Fitting Management

Many people like to use their ship's name in EVE to express themselves, as some code of knowing who is on your side, or as a function of insulting one's mother.  These are all okay and as time goes on the names of ships change.  When I started flying in New Eden all my ships were named after Saints, "Saint Francis", "Saint Mary", "Saint George".  One of my friend named all his ships after Metallica songs and another used the word "Grey" to link all his ships together.

When I moved from being a carebear in High-Sec to a Low-Sec pirate I changes my ships names to Bleach Zanpakutos Shikai and Bankai forms. This was to show my more aggressive nature in game. What this lead to though was my fitting browser becoming clutter and often me saving two or three fitting with the same name cause I was not organized in what I was doing.  So what started as a rare from of OCD in my life, has turned into a full out war on my ships and how they are labeled in my fitting browser.

This is an example how many of my fittings were named in EVE, just the ship class. If you look at the top right hand corner you see the fitting's name "Brutix". What this lead to when I was asked to find fittings for corp mates or alliance members was me searching through 15 "Brutix" fits where five of them were the same fit.

 

At first I tired to counter this by simple naming the fit the same as the ship. As you can see here "Herpy Derpy" is the same fit as Burtix above. And this worked to a point, but I liked calling different ships of the same class, the same name so what happen is instead of five fittings called "Brutix" sharing the same the fit, I had five fittings called "Herpy Derpy" with different fits. 

It finally lead to this the name above  "AR-HEB-II". Using a form of crazy Jorkarese shorthand, I began to label and name the fits in my fitting browser by what they have fitted over their Ship Class and what I named them when they get into space. I did this because I wanted to be able to quickly find ship fitting for roams  in Faction Warfare and be able switch out of fitting fast as well. Once in the ship is in the hanger assemble I give it its fitting name, after undock I may change its name, but once I'm docked back up I switch the name back to the fitting name. That way if I have three Brutixs in my ship hanger I know without having to jump into them what they are fitted with at a glance.

I tired this before with just my Strategic Cruisers but it was confusing to me and not well planned and thought out. If you look at the bottom left you can see that I have Proteus fittings 7 of them labels to what they are used for.  But even here I have two fits that are copies of each other "Cov Opp Prot" and the "Cov Op Remote Rep". The names while telling me what they are used for are not telling me what they have fitted. Also this system of naming ships while it did kinda work for my T3s was not great in terms of how I should name other ship fittings. 

If you look at the bottom again you now see the all the Tech 3 Cruisers even the Legion and Loki share the same style of fitting names as the Proteus using my crazy shorthand. If you look you can see that the Loki and one of the Legions share the same name. This is because while they are two different ships they bother are fitted using the same key modals.

The very basics of my short is that I don't try to label all the modals on it. I only label those modals that I feel make that fitting what it is. I also only list at a max four modals and unit number that reflects how many of a mod listed is on the ship. So this can mean that two ships can share the same basic fitting just a different number of listed mod. 

This is still a work in progress as I have about 63 different ship fittings. Currently only 25 of the fitting names have been brought into line with the shorthand. Leaving 38 to go. The next step is in fact organized the Corporate's Fitting to follow the same fitting short. While it is a goal to get all ship fittings inline, this is something that I do while waiting on fleets, defensive plexing and just sitting in station. I hope that you find this post helpful in terms of setting up your own shorthand for naming the fittings in your fitting browser 

The Battle of Teimo...Stone Burner in Action

I posted in November about an EWAR heavy fleet that I would like to try using calling it Stone-Burner, on Monday EVE 00:30 I got my chance to fly in what I could call a Micro Stone-Burner.  There was not enough EWAR on the field to make it a true Stone-Burner fleet with only 6 EWAR ships, but with 7 Talos' and 7 more heavy hitting BCs and 4 logistic ships it made the fleet one tough nut to crack.  There real winner of this fight though was our FC from Monkeys with Guns., a smooth talking Aussie Larnkness.  Having flown with him a couple times before and after I know that I'll always trust my ships in his hands as in the heat of battle he gives good clear orders and is able to keep everyone on track with what is going on. He also doesn't panic as so FC and when many in the fleet thought we should flee, he got us turned around and flying our ships right turning the advantage back to us. 

    

Larkness Monkey with Guns Member

In my eyes Larkness had us winning this battle 20 minutes before it even began because he is such a good FC.  Even though many of the fleet members didn't understand how our fleet work he did was able to get us in a position to be the most effective for the fight.  He used strategy and tactics to win the day.  While looking at the battle report it shows that we out number the Squids 2-1, we are in shield battle cruisers and frigates and they are in heavily armored battle ships and Navy Faction Cruisers. We have 4 logistic ships one tech 2 and three tech 1 they have 4 guardian class Armor Logistics and 1 Oneiros all tech 2.  To match our EWAR they also have 4 EWAR ships, three cruisers hulls and one Bhaalgorn Battleship,  a nasty pirate faction ship that can suck the cap out of our fleet leaving us dead in the water. Also like us they have a Loki Tech3 Strategic Cruiser  providing them with Fleet Boost that increase their scram and web range. On the outside looking in we should win cause we have the numbers, but looking at ship types and what both fleets have it can be close fight and go either way if there are any slip ups. 

             

Minmatar Loki Tech 3 Cruisers               Blood Raider Bhaalgorn Battleship  

Our first goal is simple we want them to come to us. Here we can use our speed to our advantage. What happens is a war of attrition where we wait on our side, they on theirs.  This is where Larkness wins us the battle. Our coms are filled with cries of "Kill them all" and "We should go get them." but Larkness keeps us under control and on our side in position waiting. All the while he is telling our tackle frigs who they need to tackle and hold down. And with the Infrastructure Hub taking damage we know that the Caldari do not want to lose the system so they are going to come for us.  After 20 minutes they do come us, and we are ready. Our second goal is to burn off gate and pull them with us keeping our DPS and Logi out of range of their warp scrams while our fast frigs hold them. We know that if they get us webbed and scrammed we are dead. 

The plan comes together fast as they began to jump into us and decloak using three fast frigates to try and tackle us, we quickly counter by locking them up and sending our own frigates at them. As their battleships uncloaked Larkness was calling primaries, seconds and traceries, while we didn't pop any ship super fast and we needed to switch targets because of their reps. In the first minute of the fight we traded losses,  us Vexor, them a Myrmidon, we would also trade frigate losses. That would be our last loss. Larkness' skill of beginning a great FC would come into play as he regrouped us and we began pull range and use our speed to out track their guns. Second we began to work signaling out their ships pulling them out of range of their logistics, this and our fast switching of targets we were able to keep their logistics off guard, as well as being able to lay damage on to them killing one Guardian and the Oneiros.  This is where we missed up in the battle, our tackle which in the beginning was great began to breakdown and we lost points and ranges and they began to get ships warped out to saves.  If we could have kept that tackle then we could have killed off the whole field. 

One of the guys got the fight on video so I have it linked here. 

We came out of the battle only losing two ships and killing 11. It was a good fight all around and a great example of how a good and controlled FC can turn the tide. 

Battle Summary from Dog net  

To the Rescue...

In the universe of New Eden it is as I predicted the "fires of war" have came to the far reaches of the void, leaving little space for those that want peace. To help stem the tide of war the major races of New Eden recreated four new logistics ships to help support the increasing number of combat ships. For the Gallente Federation it meant a retooling of an old mining ship the Navitas.

Gallente Federation Navitas Logistics Support Frigate

Like many unsung heroes of war the Navitas will not be winning any fashion or best looks awards, but she is a rugged ship that can change the tide of battle in small gang. small ship class PVP very quickly. When first talked about I wasn't a believer that these ships would helpful and not only clutter the battlefields. I was proven wrong in a battle in a Faction Warfare site that limited ship size to Cruisers and smaller when a team of Navitas were able to provided more armor repairs than the DPS that my ship was taking.  They  kept me alive long enough to not only score a kill but to continue the next round of fighting.  I was very interested in the ship after that fight, for a long time know I have been able to fly Logistic Ships and these frigs caught my eye to what the possibles of them could be. So I went a head and fitted on out. 

FITTING

This is a basic fitting for the Navitas that we can see working and being efficient on the battle field.

High Slots- Small 'Solace' Remote Bulwark x3

Med Slots- Cap Recharger II

                   Small Capacitor Battery II

                  1MN Micro Warp Drive II

Low Slots- Damage Control II

                  Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane II

                  Adaptive Nano Plating II

Rigs Slots- Small Anti-Explosive Pump  I

                 Small Capacitor Control Circuit I

                 Small Trimark Armor Pump I

I will have to play with the fittings to see what works best. Here we use a signal Warrior II combat drone to get onto killmails.  Without the MWD on it moves at a base 367km/s and with it a just over 2k. It carries a 3K EHP which will not win and awards but is enough for your other logi boat to lock it up and get some reps on it. The three Reps put out 216 hp a cycle from 28k away with the MWD active for one min, without the MWD active they are stable So it is advised to pulse the MWD to escape when needed. With the Retool of the cap batteries in Escalation now they now leach off of incoming Neutralizers and Energy Vampires helping to ensure that she stays cap stable in a fight if you have to get away. As I said I will do some fitting adjustments as I fly it more, but I feel that these ships are going to be right at home on the battlefield.

   

Fly Safe #12

Make sure that your ship's weapon systems safe is turned off in low sec.  It does a pirate no good if he can't shoot.