Just going to pop in here, but I seem to recall a full flight of seven bombs can pop anything up to a slightly over-tanked Rokh if you factor in the torpedoes from the bombers on follow up.
I’d need some fits to run hard numbers against but in the time before CONCORD ruins your day I’m pretty sure you could pop almost any freighter, and the cost efficiency would be ridiculous. Tornados are running around 75-80m per hull, Manticores are running around 29m per hull. I seem to recall a fully arty-fitted and maxed out Tornado gets about 15,000 damage off before it pops. A maxed out bomber does 8000 just with its bomb. That’s more than half the damage for about 1/3rd the price before factoring in the torpedoes, which can potentially bring that up to near parity.
Not to mention the potential for secondary casualties and therefore even more loot.
Also it’s endlessly hilarious to me how little the forums, or indeed the faces on them, have changed despite being gone for like 3 years.
Seven is the max number of bombs you can drop from a flight of bombers at once before they start popping each other from the splash damage.
You do know gankers can work with others, right? Or just have alts? Like, there was even a period a few years ago where Stealth Bombers were so cheap they were getting used in normal ganks with just the torp launcher because they were the most cost effective option available for popping Freighters.
Because doing it this way would be massively more cost efficient for ganking than anything in the current meta and would allow you to nuke every ship in a quite large area.
This is literally one of the balancing mechanics around ganking. It’s why CCP removed insurance for ships lost to CONCORD way back, after the Attack Battlecruisers were introduced. Thanks to their low cost relative to insurance it was about at the point of being profitable to gank a T2 tanked hauller full of Tritium.
I gave you the numbers up when I first posted. They’re rough but they already show that a bomber with just a bomb is more cost effective than a Tornado.
And people have been using Omegas to gank since before Omega was a thing. If you’ve been playing the game long enough a little ISK isn’t much of an impediment to something like this.
Anything ganking in High Sec will, barring unusual circumstances, survive exactly as long as CONCORD allows it to, which is almost exactly 15 seconds in a .5 security system.
Hauling ships don’t shoot back, and it’s very rare for there to be anyone in a position to interfere with a gank.
In fact Bombs completely mitigate one of the most common methods people use to troll gankers, locking them with an EWAR ship and jamming or sensor dampening them so they lose lock and can’t fire. Bombs don’t require locks and therefore don’t care about EWAR.
Also even if the only DPS applied by the bomber is its bomb it still comes out more cost effective than the Tornado.
And finally, if you actually run the numbers there are a number of situations where the Battlecruiser is actually less survivable against Player gunfire than the Stealth Bomber. The bomber is a small and relatively fast target, to the point that any ship with Large class guns is going to have difficulty tracking it as long as it’s moving at all, where as a moving Tornado is going to be taking full damage from Large class guns under almost all circumstances, and since these ships fit no tank under most circumstances they die fairly quickly.
I could support this as long as you need to set safety red to do it, and hitting anything unintended permission wise results in a prompt concord response.
Biggest problem I see though would be a large fleet that could afford it bombing the undock of busy stations. Perhaps disallow within 100kms of stations to balance that out, but the potential application of void bombs in high or low sec space is enormous.
If I were ever to get a custom skin added to the game, it would be to add nose art to a bomb. You’d almost certainly only ever get to see it in the hangar, but even so I would seriously consider forking over some ISK/cash to be able to see “That’s what she said” or “Somebody set us up the bomb” on a bomb slung under a Manticore.
