Could not fit light missile launcher on Merlin

New Citizens Q&A
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I tried to fit a light missile launcher on Merlin and I failed.
System reminds as follows:

You cannot fit the Light Missile Launcher I because your ship doesn’t have any launcher slots left for fitting, possibly because you have already filled your ship with launchers or that the ship simply can not be fitted with launchers.

Launcher slots represent how many weapons of a certain type can be fitted on a ship. The current design is over a hundred years old, and is modular enough to allow for a great leeway in the fitting of various weaponry.

So I just don’t know whether I lack some skill training or any other thing ?

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So ships have “hardpoints”, represented in your fitting window by small hollow circles underneath your high slots. Each ship has a set number of hardpoints, for either turrets or launchers. Many ships have a number of each type of hardpoint, but the Merlin only has turret hardpoints. There are non-weapon items that use high slots, too, so the number of high slots is not always an indication of the number of weapons you can fit on any particular ship.

You can find this information in the Fittings tab of the Show Info window on the Merlin. You’ll see under the Traits tab that the Merlin has bonuses that increase the performance of Small Hybrid Turrets. Given that, even if you could fit missile launchers on a Merlin, it wouldn’t be all that effective.

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The Merlin has three launcher hardpoints, and three high slots. So you should be able to fit three light missile launchers. If you can’t fit any, it’s either because you already have three high slot modules fitted, or it’s a bug. In the latter case, you might trying undocking and re-docking, or logging out and back in. If that fails, put in a support ticket.

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Wrong… Merling has three turret hardpoints… If you want to fit missile launchers on a Caldari Frigate you need to look for the Kestrel.

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Confirmed Merlin is a gunboat (My preferred T1 frigate actually, can fit a good active shield tank with decent blaster DPS). If you want to use missiles, you should fly a Kestrel or Condor (For Caldari).

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Your ship has a bunch of stats, and the following are “limitations” that control what you can fit:

High Slots - missiles and guns of various kinds require high slots
Turrets vs Missiles slots - into High Slots that the ship has, you can only put so many guns or missile launchers
Drone Bay - drones

Power Grid - everything requires megawatts (MW) of power from the generator, you cannot install guns, missiles, or other modules that are too big and consume more MW than your ship has. The Power Grid of the ship ensures that you install frigate-sized stuff into frigates, cruiser-sized stuff into cruisers, and so on.

CPU - everything also requires some processing power (teraflops - trillion floating-point operations/calculations per second - TF). Industrial or electronic jamming modules require a lot more CPU teraflops than guns, armor, and shields, so the CPU usually limits you from installing industrial or electronic stuff (mining lasers, probes, cloaking devices, electronic jammers) on “combat” ships that aren’t really intended to have that stuff.

So, as above, the Merlin has 3 high slots, but is designed for 3 turrets 0 missiles, it’s a gun ship. You can put any of the guns in it (Minmatar autocannons or artillery, Caldari/Gallente railguns or blasters, Amarr lasers), but the ship has bonuses for “hybrids” = rail guns or blasters, so you’ll do more damage if you use the Caldari guns.

Kestrel has 4 high slots, and also 0 turrets 4 missiles so it’s a missile ship. The ship bonuses and the limited Power Grid will force you to use either rockets (short range) or light missiles (longer range) on the Kestrel. In order to fit the entire complement of 4 Light Missile Launchers you may need to increase the Kestrel’s Power Grid by installing a Micro Auxiliary Power Core in one of the low slots.

Also, there are very few skills that increase Power Grid and CPU for ships, so it’s recommended that you train these few skills to 4 or even 5. Look in the Engineering group of skills in your character sheet, and train the Power Grid and CPU / Processor skills there; they’ll serve you well, with all your ships in the future.

7

Also this might probably help you - always read what ship traits particular ship provides, and fit your ship accordingly. To see ship traits, right click -> show info on the ship, then go to a tab “Traits”. Here you would see that Merlin has bonuses towards small hybrid turrets, and therefore you should fit it with small hybrid turrets (either short range - blasters, or long range - railguns), not missiles, neither projectile guns, neither laser guns.

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I got it now, the details of this game impresses me again, thanks a lot for the responding from all of you!!

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As always, Eve University is an excellent resource for ship characteristics:
https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Merlin

as mentioned above Kestrel is the Caldari missile frigate and is a good choice for level 1 missions because of it’s range and cargo capacity.
https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Kestrel

More advanced frigates based on the Merlin platform like https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Hawk and https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Worm are missile boats (missile + drone for the worm)

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On the topic, you are correct; I made a mistake. However…

Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untraveled, the naive, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as “empty,” “meaningless,” or “dishonest,” and scorn to use them. No matter how “pure” their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best.
– From The Notebooks of Lazarus Long

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