EVE New Citizens Q&A

A full battleship rack of T2 smartbombs (8) will do about 2400 alpha damage per volley. There are variations (faction/officer SBs) that increase range/damage.

Looking at the kill report ingame my Caldari Shuttle was destroyed in Jita by a Maller with one smartbomb taking me out. I can't explain why it happened, but it definitely did occur.

If it is the rare occurrence in high sec that it seems to be than I wont worry about it.

Thank you for the information regarding how much damage they deal and where I'm likely to encounter it.

A typical Maller smartbombing fit has 3x large meta Smartbombs, for about 900 damage. More than enough to destroy your shuttle.
It is the 'juicy' pod inside that is the real target.

Fly a frigate with at least a Damage Control Unit fitted. Inertial Stabilizers are generally better than Nanofibers for travel fits, too. They will help with your align-to-warp time and won't reduce your structure hp. The small sig radius increase shouldn't affect a frigate too much.

Something like this would be okay for highsec travel. About 1.2M isk (520k without the rigs).
Has room for a prototype cloaking device if you can use it.

[Condor, cheap travelfit]

Type-D Restrained Inertial Stabilizers
Damage Control I

5MN Cold-Gas Enduring Microwarpdrive
Medium Shield Extender I
Upgraded EM Ward Amplifier I
Upgraded Thermal Dissipation Amplifier I


Small Low Friction Nozzle Joints I
Small Low Friction Nozzle Joints I

back when autopilot left you on the gate I would use a smartbomb battleship to kill afkers. Back then you could get insurance payouts on concord kills, also ship prices were low enough I made money on the insurance. You can get a few pulses off before concord shows up and then cap inject and possibly get another pulse or two. I think my best kill was a Dramiel. Oh yea and one time when CCP was doing a jita cam I used a smartbomb BS to I got a bunch of ships and 15 pods, I forgot about that till I went to look for that dram kill. Concord is fast, but you can take a lot of ships with you.

Today it should be very rare to get killed by a smartbomb in highsec, Most ships will either have enough HP, or move quick enough to not be in the same place as a bomber. Also most people wont even try to smartbomb as randomly attacking a target isn't worth the effort. I'm not going to throw away (at least not often) a 200m+ isk battleship for lulz of maybe getting a few small ships. Looks like a smartbomb maller comes in at 12.5mil so I could see that going after shuttles/pods on autopilot more often.

That said if you are carrying a large value of cargo with a ship that has low EHP someone will probably try and gank you. Shuttles carrying skill books, implants, PLEX, or skill injectors/extractors would be the main targets I would look for. A shuttle is a very easy target, looks like a newb ship is a touch stronger, and might actually survive a 3 bomb blast.

As Wanda Fayne said, use a frigate with a MSE, a few resist mods and a DC help, I'd suggest warp speed rigs instead of agility, but small difference.

Welcome to Jita :)

Smartbombs cannot be fired if in range of a station or gate or acceleration gate or some other structures. So a Smartbomb cannot 'cover' a small gate. Instead the attacker sets up at 5 or 6 kilometers away from the gate in line with an obvious warp destination, in this case Jita 4/4. When he sees a target (usually on D-scan) he activates. Smartbombs do AOE damage with no need to target and they do damage to targets that are in warp as well as slowboating, thus will catch a pod or shuttle that has gone to warp.

The killmail would not say how many smart bombs were fired or hit you, just that the final killing blow was by a Smart Bomb. It is likely that such a ganker would have filled his highs with Smart bombs and staggered their firing. One Smartbomb would probably have been enough to kill the shuttle and he would have hoped to have caught the pod with the next one. You survived because of the direction you were going, from the gate to Jita 4/4, namely in the acceleration phase. Coming the other way though, while decelerating, it is very common to catch the pod with the next bomb. The attacker would typically be spamming his directional scanner (360 degree arc) and would have activated his bombs (staggered) the moment he saw a pod or shuttle on D-scan, without having the time to ascertain whether it was incoming or outgoing.

The reason why no kill mail is posted is because the OP is in an NPC corp and most ganker corps do not register their APIs with Z-Kill, because they don't want their Concord losses to be automatically pulled. Thus killmails only appear on Z-kill if one party manually posts it and presumably your shuttle wasn't worth the effort for the ganker, but he will perhaps batch process them in a few days.