For OP’s benefit, to understand why ship selection is such a big deal:
The Drake fit above is a fairly standard issue, bread-and-butter L3 fit. Extremely easy to use. Very hard to die flying that thing. Compare and contrast, however, our Caracal Navy Issue fit, which has comparable costs and skill requirements:
- Our fit is much faster using both using AB and MWD (684m/s and 1,965m/s vs 425m/s) - this matters a lot in missions because you don’t want to waste time flying from pocket to pocket or to an acceleration gate or to some object you need to loot, etc.
- Our fit also has far superior agility, so it is faster at aligning and accelerating to/decelerating from warp - so you don’t waste time jumping systems or using acceleration gates
- In regards to both points above: even if the Drake had a T1 50MN MWD, it’s MWD speed would be a grossly inferior 1,157m/s and would have horrible turning/acceleration/deceleration, so it just won’t have close to the same mobility. Technically a Drake could fit an MJD (which you don’t need in L3s), but this honestly wouldn’t make too much of a different even in a triple-propulsion setup due to the combined performance failing to live up to the CNI.
- It has a substantially higher rate of fire, which is important because it kills most rats in 1-3 shots and you want those shots to be as quick as possible. If you have one hundred bees to kill, you don’t want to spend 10 seconds killing each individual bee.
- Even after reloads, it inflicts substantially more damage in a single shot against the majority of L1-L3 targets than a Drake does in several shots. Minor exception: the Drake inflicts a bit more damage against BCs than the CNI; however, BCs show up in small numbers, if at all, in L3 missions (except for specific one mission that is almost entirely BCs), so in practice this minor disadvantage is easily offset by its overall superior killing power against the bulk of rats present in L3 missions. (As a matter of convenience, my organization has a blacklist of BC-heavy L3 missions in case our runners using our CNI fit want to skip them, but it’s their choice.)
- Even after the very lengthy reload time of RLMLs, both the DPS and cumulative damage over time of the CNI exceed that of the Drake (save for the minor exception above)
- While it is true the range of the CNI is shorter (but by no means “short”), the speed (esp. ability to close in on pockets using MWD) and rate of killing the bulk of targets (time you save overall, even if you account for time you had to spend flying to pockets due to lower range) more than make up for it. (Missiles travel slowly, so you’d want to be closer anyway just to reduce the time-to-contact.)
- Alphas perform better in the CNI than they do in a Drake
- Drake’s damage bonus only applies to Kinetic missiles; CNI’s damage bonus applies to all missiles, which is important because you can apply NPC-specific damage on a mission-by-mission basis and apply more actual damage using the proper “weakness” than you would using kinetic if it is the “wrong” damage type (this is particularly true if the enemy is primarily weak against EM)
Here a damage-over-time graph (not to be confused with a DPS graph) of our fit (Green) vs the Drake (Red) using missiles-only against Drones, Frigs, Destroyers, Cruisers, and Battlecruisers over the course of 3 minutes. Cruiser and Battlecruiser is the same for CNI, so it appears as “one line”. Drones are not shown, but if they were shown they’d contribute identically between both fits.
Narrower bands indicate higher rate of fire, which is a desirable property because it means you kill stuff faster in the same time frame. Notice that even after the lengthy reload, the CNI continues to outperform the Drake in general, with the Drake having a minor advantage over BCs after about 63 seconds of continuous firing. (BCs don’t take that long for either the CNI or the Drake to kill.) Since the CNI uses drones (so does the Drake), it isn’t “useless” during reload - the drones dispatch L3 rats quickly in their own right, so often times you’ll have the drones attack one target and your missiles another to maximize throughput.
A similar graph can be made for most L3-appropriate ships vs the Drake because the Drake is categorically one of the worst ships to use in terms of throughput in L3 missions. What it is designed to do it does exceptionally well, but it is not designed for throughput. It is, however, the recommended ship for the freshest of the fresh of newbies and those looking to passively mission - like everyone else, I would recommend the Drake for that demographic/use case as well.
Edit: In the above graph, the CNI is using range scripts; the more proficient runners in our organization who use that fit use precision scripts, which sacrifices a little bit of range (not much) to increase throughput considerably, so the green lines would be even higher.