DSTs are tanky, but more importanly, unlike the t1 chubbies, DSTs can usually avoid getting damaged at all by suicide gatecampers in highsec by doing the cloaky microwarp align stunt. The dangerous part of the journey instead is the initial undock, because some NPC stations push you out at spawn positions that don’t allow you to redock again, while you’re too close to the station to cloak up nevertheless
Insta-warp bookmarks help with undock camps.
Most important though is that ganking an empty DST and thereby trading 10-ish destroyers for no loot is something that nullseccers might do to improve their zkill (which measures destroyed isk vs lost isk), but commercial Pirates won’t do that. So rather then attempting to avoid a dessie camp, be wary of “afk frigates” at stargates, because those are actually not afk, but armed with surpressed targeters and cargo scanners. If you get cargo scanned, and the gank group knows you’re full of expensive lootables, chances they give you a try are a lot higher then when they don’t know what will fall out of the DST. A DST also warps slow, which would enable the dessies to chase it into warp if they fail to lock it before it warps, wait for the DST at the gate it warped to, and take the gate once the DST jumped through, so they can retry clapping the DST in the next system. Don’t get cargo scanned.
Blockade Runners aren’t suicide ganked. Gankers consider it too much effort to do, and as they can’t scan what’s inside, so they’d be suiciding a battlecruiser or two potentially w/o getting anything in return.
It’s lowsec that’s dangerous, because some of the low campers are considerably more capable then the suicider campers, and will bump the DST while it’s cloaky aligning, which causes it to decloak and messes up the align. With the MWD engaged, the DST’s signature is penalized with a 500% modifier, so all the cruisers and battlecruisers at the camp will be are able to instalock the DST… and the signature penalty also magnifies the amount of damage that will be incoming
The T1 haulers are among the tankiest things in the game, actually. The ehp not being high doesn’t mean they can’t tank. (ok, the caldari ones actually really can’t). Fill all the many low slots of amarr or galente t1 haulers with Shield Power Relays and add some Shield Extenders and Field Purger rigs, put a scram in a mid and Shield Recharger in the remaining mids, and voila, 700~1000 ehp/s regenerating trollboat. You can swap the scram and for yet another Shield Recharger for even more ehp/s at the expense of being less troll-capable
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