My goal is to protect the fleet of passive tanked Skiffs (as well as myself) from being popped while jamming the attackers with ECM drones on both Skiffs and Orca in order to warp out. I’ve got two variants: active and passive tank. Key feature of the fits is the intention to fit in MWD for 10 seconds alignment + warp
Active tank variation
[Orca, Orca]
Damage Control II
Reactor Control Unit II
Adaptive Invulnerability Field II
Adaptive Invulnerability Field II
X-Large Ancillary Shield Booster
500MN Y-T8 Compact Microwarpdrive
EM Ward Field II
Large Ancillary Remote Shield Booster
Improved Cloaking Device II
Mining Foreman Burst II
Mining Foreman Burst II
Large Ancillary Current Router I
Large Ancillary Current Router I
Large Processor Overclocking Unit I
Vespa EC-600 x5
Cap Booster 800 x3
Cap Booster 200 x5
Mining Laser Optimization Charge x300
Mining Laser Field Enhancement Charge x300
The passive tank variation
[Orca, Orca]
Damage Control II
Reinforced Bulkheads II
Adaptive Invulnerability Field II
Adaptive Invulnerability Field II
500MN Y-T8 Compact Microwarpdrive
EM Ward Field II
Thermal Dissipation Field II
Large Ancillary Remote Shield Booster
Improved Cloaking Device II
Mining Foreman Burst II
Mining Foreman Burst II
Large Ancillary Current Router I
Large Transverse Bulkhead I
Large Transverse Bulkhead I
Vespa EC-600 x5
Cap Booster 200 x6
Mining Laser Optimization Charge x300
Mining Laser Field Enhancement Charge x300
Any ideas/suggestions? The passive tank variant has 1.5 times more EHP, but active tank one is regenerating about 550 EHP/s
I’m going to stop you right there. Unless you’ve managed to untank your Skiffs, and I must admit that I don’t know how bad one can untank a Skiff other than flying completely without a fit, will your Skiffs be relatively safe. Anyone who still tries to gank them and wants to do so successfully will not be stopped by whatever means you think would help. A Skiff can have 80k-90k eHP of a passive tank. That’s enough. Anyone who wants to punch through those eHP will have to bring a gank fleet and you can stop worrying about those. They will gank anything if they have their mind set to it.
Then go for the second fit, but you really only need one Large Transverse Bulkhead II and should fit 2x Large Drone Mining Augmentor II next to it. Your Orca will still have 300k-350k eHP, which is plenty, and the Drone Mining Augmentors will give your Orca some nice mining ability. I.e. will the cycle time of an Ice Harvesting Drone II drop down to 57s for one block of ice with these.
Then train for shield boosts. If you’re really still worried about ganks can you fit one mining burst module and two shield burst modules. Shield boost bonuses range somewhere from 8% to 19.7% and one can boost HP as well as resists and thus increase the shield eHP of all the ships in range by 16% to 39.4%.
[Orca, *Simulated Orca]
Damage Control II
Co-Processor II
Dread Guristas Kinetic Deflection Field
Dread Guristas Thermal Dissipation Field
Dread Guristas EM Ward Field
Dread Guristas EM Ward Field
Adaptive Invulnerability Field II
Mining Foreman Burst II
Shield Command Burst II
Shield Command Burst II
Large Remote Shield Booster II
Large Ancillary Remote Shield Booster
Medium S95a Scoped Remote Shield Booster
Large Drone Mining Augmentor I
Large Drone Mining Augmentor II
Large Drone Mining Augmentor II
Mining Drone II x4
Ice Harvesting Drone II x1
Hammerhead I x4
Shield Extension Charge x3476
Mining Laser Optimization Charge x8062
Navy Cap Booster 200 x16
Shield Harmonizing Charge x2894
can rep 270 hp/s , give 19.7% shield hp and 19.7% resists.
basic skiff fit
[Skiff, *Simulated Skiff]
Damage Control II
Mining Laser Upgrade II
Mining Laser Upgrade II
Adaptive Invulnerability Field II
Dread Guristas EM Ward Field
Dread Guristas Thermal Dissipation Field
Medium Shield Extender II
Adaptive Invulnerability Field II
Modulated Strip Miner II
Modulated Strip Miner II
Medium Core Defense Field Extender II
Medium Core Defense Field Extender II
min 78 res, 18k shield hp : with boosts, 21.5k hp and 82% lowest res, ie 120k ehp only in the shield, while being repped 1500 ehp/s.
of course if you OL your hardeners on the skiff, even better, as you reach 85% res on lowest resist, ie 140k+ ehp on shield, and repped 1700 ehp/s
Of course, you need to have your skiff pre locked, as well as the rep pre heated.
Your skiffs don’t have an issue. Just run a few Pyfa simulations and you will see. A simple gangwarp will get them out.
Forget about jamming, you will not have the time to effectively negate sufficient dps sources of a gank. Besides, you will be busy doing a bunch of manual actions while the clock keeps ticking for the gank to arrive. And do not forget the typical human behavioural delays or the response times on local detection while coordinating a bunch of things.
You are multiboxing, accept that if a gank happens, you have to choose what to save. A choice you need to make beforehand. Truth be told, an orca is easier to gank than a skiff, not so much because of math, but because of perception challenges. Skiffs have a status, so to speak. People do not engage them. Orca’s however are a different matter.
Out of a thousand ganks maybe one or two will focus on a skiff.
Now active or passive matters not. If you get caught, that’s it. You will have been scanned beforehand, you will have been set up for warpin, think about it.
Simple truth is that if someone wants your orca dead it will die. What might make a difference is not multiboxing, being part of a human team, having a scout on the other end of the gate - things like that.
Here’s one golden rule: do not fly what you cannot instantly replace. For the rest, look up OODA Loops, situational awareness. A gank succeeds because of a tiny bit of math, a lot of experience, rapid response timers and known target conditions (behaviour, fittings, etc).
Thanks everyone, I see that the consensus lies in ganks being prevented mostly by strategy instead of tanking, so I shoudln’t sacrifice too much yield and utility for that. Thanks for fitting comments, makes a lot of sense
gankers have neutral alts that warp to you, sometimes scan you, the moment they enter the system they already have a warpin point to catch you. Basically, you are dead if you don’t have enough tank.
You can’t “strategy” anything in that case. They are used to killing miners, the moment they make a move, they already know the outcome. So all you have is how many ships you can tank until concord comes in. Also, remember you can warp in an alpha alt in noobship and make it aggress you to summon concord on the grid (effectively removing one catalyst).
I’m going to disagree. There are a few a strategy here one can apply.
One is to have more eHP than “the other guy”. “The other guy” being any other target gankers may have in mind. It’s enough to have an untanked or weakly tanked Hulk in the same belt as oneself is and the attention will likely switch to it.
Then of course there is the number game, which one can also see as a strategy. A gank destroyer doing roughly 600 dps and CONCORD response time being up to 20 seconds for a 0.5-system, amounting to a total of about 12k damage per attacker, which a buffer tank needs to absorb. A Skiff with 72k eHP there requires 6 or more attackers to kill it, and with 84k eHP it’s 7 or more. Always assuming the gankers manage to land perfectly and open fire simultaneously, which they don’t always manage to do. I once had someone drop 9 Catalysts on my Skiff, what looked like an alt fleet, and he only managed to get my shields to 60%, simply because I was orbiting and his fleet couldn’t hold range and CONCORD wiped them out before they were anywhere near their perfect damage.
Worst case is a gank battlecruiser with polarized blasters, doing something around 1700 dps and capable of destroying a 34k eHP buffer tank. But those gank BCs aren’t cheap and mostly find use against high-value targets. Still, a properly tanked Skiff can withstand two of them.
A last strategy then can sometimes be, in case they really want to see you dead, is to give them what they want - a kill - and to move out of the area and do something else for a while until they have calmed down.
Sorry but this is not “strategy”, this is hopping you won’t get noticed. This is just gambling, saying your “strategy” has an impact or not is very difficult in that case.
BTW the skiff fit I linked has 120k ehp with boosters, with 2 mining laser aug. and can tank 1500 DPS cold with the help of the orca (ie 2.5 cata). That means it needs 10+2.5 = 13 cata to get it down, with perfect landing etc on a .5 system. Plus if you OL it then you can get even more EHP and buffer (need 15 cata ).
A strategy is just another word for saying to have a plan.
I find myself regularly in a belt and I see ganks happening. Gankers go straight for Hulks or Macks if there are any. They then sometimes scan ships before opening fire and choose Covetors and Retrievers if no other target can be found. The gankers themselves apply strategies, which means one can find a counter strategy.
If someone wants to pop you bad enough nothing will stop it, there is no ‘gank proof’ set up, your best bet is to use tank fits and strategy, and that strategy is to understand those folk, they are going to use every trick in the gank book so plan on this;
Have local up so you can see reds when they come in.
Check for destroyers in local if combat probes go up in the DS.
They will divert Concord just before gank which will give them a few seconds longer to shoot at you (and don’t think they care about diverting Concord even tho it’s an exploit), they still do it.
EWAR probably won’t save you, protect your most valuable asset by setting drones to protect it, if you have 2 skiffs and an orca then that is 15 drones to protect the valuable thing.
Mine in the higher systems only, all and all I’d go with procurers so that the orca is well protected and the cheaper T-1 can be the low hanging fruit.
Apologies, but I disagree. I understand your perspective but I do think it qualifies as a “strategy”. Just as much as “put our best man on the job”, “place the high EHP ships in the first wave”, “equip active thermal resist shield mods”, or anything else would qualify as a strategy because it’s how you approach and potentially solve a problem. In this case, “don’t get noticed” is completely valid, especially if paired with “I’ll mainly mine when other, squishier ships are in-system to draw their notice”.
I’d say it qualifies as a gamble and not a strategy if you don’t put anything towards it. If you throw up your hands and say, 'Well, whatever happens, happens!", then that’s a gamble. But maintaining a high EHP threshold and maybe even specifically mining when you see most local gankers are logged off…that would qualify as strategy.
Probably because the devs, and even CCP Falcon himself personally announced it was not an exploit, it was the mechanic functioning exactly as intended. He even went on to state that miners could do the same thing to pull Concord on grid with themselves.
Before you spout off like that about exploits, try to think about “working as intended” as a concept and not just a catch-phrase. Why do you think Concord has a time delay between a criminal act, and when they arrive? Why do you think this timer is actually longer if they’re on-grid elsewhere? The answer is that they were programmed that way. Extra code needed to be put in for that to happen. Otherwise every criminal act would have the same delay, but it doesn’t. They spent extra time giving the mechanic nuance so that people could learn about the game, finesse it when possible, and that it gives both the game and the mechanic more depth.
Maybe it’s possible that I missed the update but according to what I seen on eve web page is this “We would like to clarify that all methods of delaying Concord’s response time are considered an exploit.” So maybe I got it wrong but that’s what I’m reading on their site.
Second, strategy comes in many forms, suffice to say I am only putting up some suggestions but I myself will not put up things I actually do because that is an invitation for gankers just so they can know free info, loose lips sink ships.
Is this highsec? How big are the gank fleets you are protecting against? If you can’t keep a basic tank Orca alive before CONCORD wipes their @$$ with a CODE. fleet then you are definitely doing it wrong… Unless they are bringing 10 or more Catalysts.
I think you are over-worrying. They would have to be extremely over-zealous and dedicated to try and gank an Orca with Skiffs.
This is standard to be done well in advance of any ganking operations. It does give us extra time on the gank and as pointed out, this is not considered “delaying CONCORD” as it can be performed hours in advance… by anyone… and is not necessarily related to the next triggering action.
As for the OP… @Zoe_Meffert How to be not likely ganked…
Fit a solid Tank ( you seem to have this in mind already )
Watch local and react to threats BEFORE they land.
Don’t smack talk about being “ungankable”
Don’t look like a bot fleet
Have an exit strategy for your fleet
Make friends with the locals ( Include the gankers )
Understand, your ship explosion has a price tag, it should be high.
Don’t AFK in space.
I agree with @Whitehound, the second orca, with some modifications, would be the recommended one.
Something else to keep in mind that surprised the heck out of me in my new Porpoise was when using the command modules you have an aggression timer. That will delay you from docking or jumping if you have that as part of your thought process. I too had been away for about 6 years when I came back earlier this month, October 2018, and have had quite the learning experience. Even sent an evemail to the person who popped me on the second day saying thanks for the reminder. Being watchful, aligned, and prepared (extremely nervous doesn’t hurt somewhat either) goes a long ways in keeping the minerals flowing. Thanks to all who have commented above this and knowledge is power. Go JOE! (Sorry couldn’t help myself).
Not sure I see any issue with an orca and skiffs. They have the tank. Any good ganker is usually going to bounce it’s target far out of the orcas fleet buffs. Best deffence is to not be a target. Skiffs are good for this.
I lost a couple hulk’s in the manner I described, switched to skiff, and not one attempt yet.
