« Reply #12 on: March 19, 2007, 01:04:12 am »
the last two comments about ammo and tracking speed/webbage make a lot of sense and relate to one another.
In terms of range: from Quake at about 4 or 5km range to tremor stretching to just about 50km the range is pretty versatile. If you have decent gunnery skills you can hit just about anything within those distances.
There are then 3 major considerations:
1: getting within range
2: ensuring right range for right ammo
3: fast frigates (may they rot in hell)
Bear in mind this is predominantly a PVE or PVP (as part of a fleet) setup. I will ignore the fleet side of this, at the moment, suffice to say you should be able to hit something in a fleet, especially with good scouting and a good FC.
So, for PVE. If the mission is tough it's normally because you get attacked by a large nmber of ships. This means you need a large tank and this tank does the biz. You warp in, if you can you take out as many of the fast frigs first as they come from a distance towards you. Some will get past your arty and orbit close and fast and probably web and/or scramble in a level 4 mission.
With this setup, while you are under heavy attack you pop any and everything that you need to. You can take out the vast majority of cruisers and BS pretty quickly.
Two assault launchers and a handful of good drones will eventually pop the fast frigs and you can do this at the same time as you're popping the BS and cruisers in range.
Overall, these are not big issues, although the fast frigs can take time.
Once you have thinned the field you can warp back and swap out a T2 LSE for an afterburner if you want or need to. The only time I really need to do this is against fast BS with good shield tank, such as Hoborak Moon, may his corpse float in the cold vacuum forever.
But with 2 T2 gyros and an afterburner you can swap to Quake (after you get in range), still maintain range on most fast PVE BS when you get to range and pop them within a few minutes.
Making the gyro/afterburner alterations halves the strength of the tank. It is a pretty formidable tank to start with and so this is still a very good tank that you could do almost every level 3 mission and many level 4s, but you don't feel as protected and you have to watch the shields, as soon as they go below 25% think about aligning and when you hit 20% hover over the "warp to" control.
Once it drops below 20% it disappears almost immediately, but from 30% to 20% takes a long time in most situations.
An alternative, and a good solution to fast frigs, is to drop the inv field for a webber if you know that the shields are good enough for the situation you're going into. 15K shields and a tank of about 300 d/s on 0% resistance should be able to handle most PVE situations, giving you the webber to freeze those pesky fast frigs, enabling you to pop them with one or two shots.
The fitout I described here is the maxed out shield tank. However, it's not worth having a lot more tank than you need, so once you know what you need you drop out the excess and repace it with the afterburner, or the webber, or the gyros, etc.
This combination will give you enough speed, damage and felxibility to get through any combat based level 4 mission.
In terms of types of ammo. I always carry at least 4 kinds: quake, tremor, emp and either phased plasma or depleted uranium depending on the damage types and range I expect to be facing. 2 to 3k of each of these will see you through every level of even the longest level 4 mission, giving you the felxibility to swap what you need to pop what is there.
Hope this helps.
Z
MrCue
