Ships & Modules

This is potentially a really dumb idea, but I'd be interested to know exactly how dumb, and how/if it can be made not-dumb.

I've been pondering potential counters to the now ubiquitous "boot" carriers. Something that isn't "drop dreads on them", "drop supers on them" or "drop even more boot carriers on them". The only way to beat the boot's reps would be to either deal enough damage to counter the capital reps (not likely), or disrupt the reps in some way. I.e, ECM or energy neutralizers.

I'm looking to put together some kind of fire ship; a suicide EWAR boat, effictively. I'm not expecting anything going up against slowcats to last very long. For this reason, I'm ideally looking at cheap frigate or destroyer-sized hulls. The idea would be to warp in on top of the slowcats and deploy EWAR in support of a conventional fleet (probably snipers sat at 120km+); they don't need to be able to do any kind of DPS, or have much tank. My leading candidates so far are:

ECM Burst Punisher (aka: "Little B*****d", inspired by the battleclinic fit of the same name, could be any frig really):

Pros: Cheap, fast enough to hopefully evade sentry drone fire at close range
Cons: Not likely to have much impact unless used in very large numbers, will have to come into smartbomb range to be at ECM burst's optimal

Neut Thrasher (aka, I pulled this out of be arse after 5 minutes in EFT):

4x small neuts, 4x Small nos (cap stable without MWD)

Pros: Cheapish, draining cap also prevents jumping out and smartbombing
Cons: Needs to be in smartbomb range to use neuts

Suicide Blackbird:

Pros: Good odds of jamming something, can orbit outside of smartbomb range
Cons: Large target compared with frigs or destroyers and more expensive than both, luck-dependent; could do nothing at all

Sensor dampening *something*

Pros: No idea
Cons: No idea

Seems like sensor damps could be used to good effect here, but to be honest I've never touched them. Maybe someone else can comment

So those are terrible but you see what I'm trying to do; how do you cause the maximum amount of disruption to a slowcat blob with a minimum amount of pilots and isk? I'd be interested to see what people come up with.

Can't you only fit one ECM burst per ship now though? So surely there wouldn't be much advantage to a Scorpion over a random frigate, except maybe for cap. It would also be a target large enough for the sentries to blap if they do manage to get a lock.

I'm beginning to think the key here must be sensor damps. In my distant past I recall being in a level 4 mission where I was sensor damped so badly I couldn't lock anything, I'm wondering how many ships it would take to do the same thing to an Archon. Will try to do some experimentation and report back, but if anyone else knows how to crunch the numbers or has done this before, please let me know!

Bombing runs are effective also. While they dont scratch the carriers or their ability to spidertank, killing so many T2 sentry drones is costing the enemy a LOT of ISK. Plus: eventually they will run out of those (That will take a lot of bombing runs, though)

The biggest problem I see with that...killing drones does not generate killmails, regardless of how many hundret million ISK are destroyed. That alone will keep most PvPer from doing it repeatedly.

This is mostly hypothetical anyway, but assume the carriers are outnumbered.