you could bring it down to 100 of each that’s only a mid sized 40 man gang. w/o stacking penalties frigates are taking full damage from any battleship.
also E-war is most common in small - mid sized not most significant. it’s just easier to organize it well enough to make it effective. In large fleets the few groups that can manage E-war properly in large fights will take out fleets well over 4x their size. few years back i was in a cain fleet that whipped the floor with a much larger naga gang simply because our arazu pilots were able to keep them pinned and damped to nothing. we didn’t lose a single ship and only a hand full of them managed to break tackle.
or just turn them into one drone at each level and keep the staking penalty… this lets them be balanced as if they were a single module meaning they are not underpowered do to a single flight staking penalizing itself and at the same time don’t scale to a ridiculously over powered mess
Drones are inherently evil. They’re immune to EW and have zero operational cost. Even lasers have some small ammunition component that needs to be replaced.
Yes, getting rid of the stacking penalties between fielded drones, or getting them to act like one effect could help the situation, but I don’t think it helps them enough to see much use. Their effects would still be weak enough that you would want or need a full flight of them out to generate the best effect, and bay size limitations leads one to not want to give it over towards such a purpose. And having three sizes for each of these drone types seem uselessly redundant on a obsolete product.
They need to be strong enough to be useful, compact enough so that they arn’t a hindrance to carry, and flexible enough that they can be used strategically.
they are immune to some e-war but i would love CCP to fix this starting with fighters. would be a good way to give them a bit of a buff at the same time.
for example
webs, scram, ecm, and target painters all effect drones. the only e-war that doesn’t is sensor damps and WD
well no a frigate doesn’t need a strong web effect often times a simple 10% web would be enough to turn the tide of a frig fight. cruisers could use a bit of a stronger one. still using it to catch kiting ships but also able to use it for application. Then battle ships it could be argued that as much as a 40 or even 50% web is justifiable if the drones them selves had appropriately low speed. having the 3 sizes is not redundant. a BB may not want to use up all of its drone space so just has one 25m3 drone. only about a 10% web we’ll say. this is enough for him to slow a cruiser down at first fall off of his grapple to start the death chain as he gets closer and closer. or maybe he goes for the 50m3. he knows the 125m3 wont be fast enough to chase down a frigate but a 50 may be able to get on top of one in long grapple range letting him apply better. he uses that 125 to deal with scram frigs and cruisers. in some cases this would be better than med drones + grapple in others it wouldn’t so there is always that choice and they are in no need redundant.
your band with idea doesn’t allow for as much flexibility in balancing. using the above example there is no way you could justify such a strong web if you had a fast drone and there would be no use for a weak web on a slow drone. you could say speed changes with bandwith but now you are left with making sure you have the right number of drones out for your exact need and that’s far more trouble than its worth putting the drones right back where they are now
Obviously the drone speed would not be altered by the bandwidth allocated to it, but if being slower than frigates is the only issue, then I don’t really see it as an issue. Ewar drones, besides webs, neuts, and maybe ecm, don’t really need to catch their targets in order to apply an effect, as they generally have decent ranges. As long as they can apply their effects to pressure the opponent or apply them while they are within your own firing ranges, then they have accomplished their goals. And if they come close and try to orbit you, then the drones will naturally be able to catch them.
As for the multiple sizes having more flexibility, I think it is actually the opposite. If one were to load ewar drones a person would normally only load a single flight of a single kind to offset precised vulnerabilities of your ship. Drones are a weapon type and so a ship will be loaded mostly with damage drones. If you want to play support by having multiple sizes and kinds, all the power to you, but playing a dedicated ewar ship would be better.