Gankers and freighters, a request for discussion. Not a BJ RANT

[Scipio_Artelius]

@Tian_Tian_Tian

This weekend I was offline because I knew Burn Jita was coming. Looking through the destruction that’s been going on, I’ve decided to sell my freighter off and downgrade to a DST instead. What changed my mind was a percieved imbalance in risk taken between freighter pilots and gank fleets (individual weighted roll of the dice versus distributed and calculatable sacrifice). Viewing this relationship, the power dynamics felt imbalanced. Is this perception flawed?

OP, I think the perception you have is a common one, but the actual rate of freighter loss overall in highsec is low.

Since the end of Burn Jita, I started saving off killmails from zkillboard’s redis feed. The dataset is a touch under 50,000 killmails (not all killmails since burn jita, just periods I’ve saved off), but enough to still see the trend:

That’s freighter ganks (not includng war losses or killright scamming) and for a dataset of almost 18500 highsec killmails, less than 100 of those are freighter ganks (including freighters, bowhead, orca and jump freighters).

Over 2500 gank ships on the killmails, to kill less than 100 freighters in that dataset, with an average of 27 gankers per freighter (and range from 12 - 39).

Only half of 1 percent of ships lost in highsec are freighters being ganked and a lot of what you were doing with your freighter (eg. using Dotlan, killboards, webbing, scouting) makes it unlikely you’d be ganked.

So, I think you’d probably be ok to not sell your freighter, but DSTs are even safer.

• Worth noting that zkillboard records approximately 50,000 killmails per day (total for all regions of space), so in the last week, the total data available is about 7 times what I’ve recorded, but the dataset is good enough to be representative overall.