Drifters are chill dudes and dudettes. They probably don’t feel much tho anyway.
Why fight them.
Arrendis’s approach is closely related to something that’s been done before in Drifter hives with a lot of success. I do wonder if it’d be able to stand a death ball. My basic feeling is, definitely not, not least because Drifter death balls fly tight formation (they move like a flock of birds) and you’d risk triggering more than one doomsday at a time. It might not be ideal for a major war.
ARC’s hive doctrine has similar issues: it can be overwhelmed.
A major advantage to Coercers is that they scale up. The Drifters can kill one Coercer per volley, but they all shoot together at a common target, so that plus the DD targets is what you lose even if you’re up against a hundred at once. The Coercers, meanwhile, concentrate fire (tags are a must) to kill Drifters as fast as they can, as long as they can. Once their effectiveness starts to drop, you quit the field, reship, and come straight back.
Definitely a concern. You’d want the frigates absolutely as far as they can responsibly get and still maintain a reasonable transfersal in terms of radians. It’s my hope that webbing down one Tyrannos at time will help get a little bit of distance, because that Vorton’s definitely dangerous in those situations.
And if that fails… that the DDs don’t target the same ship, or at least some of them discharge at the frigates. There’s certainly the possibility that the Vortons end up triggering multiple DDs at the same time, and even this fit can’t survive two.
The Coercers have the advantage of being a known quantity: you know you’re going to lose 1 per volley, so you know how many people you’re sacrificing, and can try to be prepared for it. I’m hopeful that the Thunderers (I refuse to call plurals of this hull ‘Thunderchildren’, that’s just dumb, and I don’t know how anyone at EDENCOM didn’t spot that and think ‘ok, maybe we go a different route’ on the naming.) will at least give the chance for 0 loss of life. But you’d need a lot of them to provide solid reps, and you’d need them tightly packed.
Maybe supplement them with more high-speed, low-sig frigates for logi, like Scalpels.
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If it’s a system you live in, you’re better off counting the number of Drifters, multiplying by 5, and bringing out the carriers. If you can’t do that, dock up and wait for them to move on. If it’s a system you’re day-tripping in… just don’t engage. Get the hell out. You’re throwing away lives over something that could be completely avoided.
You probably could; it’s been done before.
Can the Thunderchild hold off the lux kontos fire from a whole deathball, though? And I’m a little puzzled about the frigates; even ARC’s confessors can come perilously close to death in just a few seconds of fire from just one or two Drifters before reps start landing, and that’s with minimal signature in a ship that armor buffers way better than a frigate can.
Artemis isn’t Kharybdis, or if they are the same then Kharybdis is crippled by Abyssal environmental conditions. Artemis is a really good shot. She also uses warp scramblers, stasis webs (albeit weak), and energy neutralizers, just to make it even more fun.
You’ve seen all of that, so, why frigates?
Because only frigates have a chance.
The Confessor, using an AB (because an MWD is suicide w/the sig bloom), does 1210m/s boosted. That’s using 3 T2 Aux thrusters and Propulsion Mode. It has a signature radius of 42.8m with high-grade Halos.
Using what I think is the ARC Hive fit, the Confessor, in propulsion mode, comes in at 771m/s, with that same 42.8m sig (using HG Halos. No Halos, sig is 54m).
The Hyena, by comparison, does 1575, with a signature radius of 23.8m, using mid-grade Halos. The Sentinel, 1315m/s and 35.2m sig radius.
Put bluntly, Aria… if it gets hit, it’s dead. So don’t get hit. Twice the speed, half the sig, plus tracking disruptors from the Sentinels. If Muninns can’t tag that Hyena with any regularity when it’s outside of 30km, I don’t think Drifters will, either.
And honestly, that’s why you bring half a dozen of each (not counting reships): don’t put all your eggs in one EWAR frigate.
As for whether or not the Thunderchild can handle the fire from a whole deathball…
If you’ve got enough incoming reps, it’ll handle any amount of incoming fire that doesn’t volley it off cleanly. It can’t survive 2 DDs. But unless the Drifters are engaging at over 100km… it’ll shoot first, and with enough of them, those vortons at 120-130km might just make ‘deathball’ mean something a little different. 
I’m not suggesting this for hive or abyssal ops. Anything where you can’t bring massed firepower, don’t try it. But if there’s another campaign like they waged after killing Jamyl Sarum… gimme 100-150 of these things and we’ll start slaughtering Tyrannos.
Uh … Arrendis? You might want to review the holos of the Drifter incursions around the time of Jamyl’s death. It’s not just one Drifter holding more or less still you have to dodge; it’s a whole fleet swanning happily around the field and firing in concert from various angles.
Frigates kinda got written off because they die more or less instantly? I mean, maybe your setup won’t, but…?
I remember. And I remember the frigates that were being used at the time. They were mostly things like Punishers—ships intended to be small and fast, but do damage. They sacrificed speed for tank and offensive output.
Remember: 2000 hostile pilots in multiple fleets in multiple positions, firing in relative concert from various angles? That’s what I do. That’s ‘normal’ combat for me. And that’s what I designed these ships (which we use successfully without Halos), to have a chance in.
Well … if we get a chance to try it, I’ll look forward to finding out how it goes. “Normal” for you usually involves ships that don’t track quite so well, though.
Muninns and light fighters track exceptionally well, and that’s what I’d been designing doctrines to have to deal with for the last few years. That’s also why the Sentinel’s packing tracking disruptors. They’re game-changers.
Like I said, I’ll look forward to seeing how it goes. Just, even under, like, a small fleet’s worth of tracking disruption during ARC’s hive dives, they still don’t miss consistently.
Edit:
Arrendis, if you want I’ll volunteer to help you test. I still have those mid-grades Ali gave me in a head somewhere around here. (“Here” being New Eden.) It’s not like I’m really using them for other stuff.
Kinda stuck in a system that’s probably about to do an extra-long Abyss dive at the moment, though.
Well, it’d be hard to test w/out a Drifter, you know? And this is all pretty hypothetical for the moment, anyway, and besides, you’re doing important stuff.
But for comparison purposes:
A Muninn’s 720mm artillery w/Tremor tracks at 3.41r/s. A single Typhoon using 3 TDs drops that to 1.7r/s. 20 of them bring it down to 0.543r/s. 20 Typhoons. I can’t run the numbers on a larger variety, but that’s basically bottomed out there at around 10 Typhoons.
1 Sentinel instead? 0.449r/s. 1 Sentinel is more effective than an entire small gang of unbonused ships.
EDIT: 2 of them gets the Muninn down to 0.345. Any more than that, 0.343 and then it just stops going down.
In both cases, interference from multiple ships’ systems and multiple modules gets us the diminishing returns we see on defensive systems like shield resistences, too. But the purpose-built weapon-disrupting ships push that window much lower, and do it much faster. Hell, a single Crucifier drops it to 0.775r/s.
I don’t have the hard #s on the Tyrannos battleships, and I don’t know if they’re EWAR-resistent… but if you’ve been trying to use TDs from anything less than a Crucifier… you’re hammering with a screwdriver handle. 
Additional comparison: A Punisher, using Small Beam IIs and DB Multifreq, tracks at 112r/s. 1 Sentinel drops that to 14.8, and 3+ to 11.3 radians/second. Basically, 2 Sentinels means 90% tracking loss. As long as the Sentinels can avoid getting killed by the regular fire, they should make avoiding the overshield discharge child’s play. (If they overheat when the discharge starts, btw, 3 overheated Sentinels drops a Punisher’s small beams to 5.48r/s. 95% tracking loss.)
It’d be interesting to find out. On a hive op or similar situation I assume you want the Thunderchild always going first to draw fire. For general combat it seems like you’d need to time things a little carefully, since the Thunderchild’s warp is going to be a lot slower.
What happens if the Drifter is ECM jammed when the doomsday is supposed to be activated?
I’m pretty sure you can’t jam them
Drifter vessels have been calculated to have an approximate sensor strength of ~500 of EVERY TYPE, which is to say they have some of the most advanced sensor tech seen anywhere, ever - their ships and weapons in general seem to be an extremely smooth amalgamation of various precursor race specializations, alongside some empire tech as well. Really, it’s all fascinating - I equally look forward to and dread the hypothetical day that their technology falls into the hands of capsuleers.
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I don’t think a Thunderchild would be much use on a hive op, since other things are within 10km of the drifter. For general combat, you’d want to send in cloaky scouts first, get them 100km or so off the drifters, then send the Thunderers in at 100km from them. Either the Drifters will start to close, at which point the small support can be directed where to warp in from and at what range to the scout, or the battleships can close to 140 off the Drifters and provoke them.
Oh yes, I’m well aware. My corpmates and myself do keep an eye out for Drifters in system when we do roll into a high class system, but we’ve only encountered one loose in a system at most so far (that I can recall). Small blessings from Bob, but I think the days of people unleashing as many Drifters as possible into a wormhole are behind us.
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