Ships & Modules

Marauders are a completely different issue, and I was only using them as an example of a "broken" class of ships that very few people fly to give a real example of one.

Marauders aren't being flown because they have much higher requirements than T1/faction battleships without higher damage or significantly higher tank. They aren't being flown because for the investment of a marauder you can almost as easily get a faction battleship that does its job better. They aren't being flown because the Noctis has rendered their salvage bonus obsolete. They aren't being flown because they have the sensor strength of a T1 destroyer.

Hulks aren't being flown because... oh wait, they are being flown.

No, actually his arguments make sense, you are just whining

The damage taken on kill mails is really damage taken, not effective damage taken, so it is not the same as your ehp, it should be the same as Shield + Armor + Hull HP.

This. The damage on killmails is deceptive. A very tanky ship may look like it had 10,000 hit points, but what it doesn't show is that it had 90% resists across the board, meaning its attackers actually had to chew through 100,000 hit points, not 10,000.

Also, killmails are notoriously buggy and inaccurate with their numbers. Don't trust them.

CONCORD response time is a bit nebulous. The best guide I've found on it is this one, but even it has a lot of uncertainties.

I would be able to give feedback on your Hulk tank and speculate on the Catalyst's damage if I had the fit. A maximum damage, no-tank, full-gank Catalyst with perfect skills and overheated does 648 DPS. That means that, according to the guide I previously linked, in the top amount of time it would have had available (19-20 seconds in a 0.5 sec system) it would be able to do about 12000-13000 damage.

However, training all that requires several months, making it not a "disposable alt", and that Catalyst fit costs upward of 14-15 mil, which makes it not exactly disposable either. A more reasonable lower-skilled and cheaper fit would dish out about 400-450 DPS overheated, for a total of 8-9k damage -- enough to kill untanked Hulks, but far from enough to kill tanked Hulks.

All this is theorycrafting, as I don't have any ganking experience aside from killing a couple of Retrievers in low/nullsec. I can fly a near-max skilled Catalyst though, so I might give it a go.

Have some numbers: https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=1204016#post1204016

Have more numbers: https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=1205419#post1205419

Want numbers on ship usage? Have a (sort of dated, but likely still accurage) QEN: http://cdn1.eveonline.com/community/QEN/QEN_Q3-2010.pdf Check page 11 and tell me Hulks aren't being used.

It is not enough to say "eHP is fine". You have to compare it to the eHP of other ships before you see that it is not. 20k eHP on a Hulk is not fine. Compare it to a T2 transport, which is closest in its role to a mining ship, because it has got a large cargohold, is meant for deep space and not meant to deal damage. T2 transporters have different bonuses than a Hulk (the Skiff actually shares the +2 warp strength bonus with them), cost a fraction of a Hulk, but exceed it in eHP by 2-3 times. It then not may need more PG, it does need more PG and enough to fit at least an LSEII without any further help. And there is no further point in denying it with comments like "It does not need more plain EHP or resists."

Miners are being chased out of belts, because gankers know that miners fear them. It is still a mining ship and one with a large cargohold and as such will it need to have a high inertia. How are you going to explain the sudden high agility of a ship that can hold up to 18k m3 of ore and has got engines that do not allow it to fly faster than 90m/s? Battleships can fly and turn faster, because they not only have the size to be slow ships, but they have the engines to accelerate them fast. This is why battleships can not only fly faster but also align faster than mining ships. The alignment time of mining ships is therefore fine. You do not want mining ships that can spin in space nor do you want to support miners by allowing them to run like rabbits!

The rest of your nonsense "Marauders suck", "Hulks do not suck" is just more sign of your lack of experience. You then want to compare the numbers of mining ships flown with the numbers of combat ships flown. Do you even know how many combat ships there are and how many mining ships? The second most common object flown after the Hulk is the pod by the way. Why do you not go and fly, pvp and mine in your pod?

Comparing the EHP of ships works for PvP ships, or for transport ships, but Hulks and the other miners are in their own category. Your comparison doesn't make sense. Here is why:

Deep space transport:

• What it does: transport large amounts of valuable stuff
• What it has to defend against: people wanting to take said stuff
• When it dies, the drop is: roughly half of its stuff
• So therefore, the worth of the ships ganking it needs to be: at most half of its stuff

Nobody ganks DSTs for fun. They do so for profit.

If an Occator is carrying 300 mil worth of stuff, that means that suicide gankers can throw up to 150 mil worth of ships at it and expect a profit. The Occator needs its very large tank to resist the large amount of ships that will be thrown at it. Same goes for other DSTs, the Orca and freighters.

50k EHP is 4-5 Tornados, which are a total of 300-400 mil cost, which means that an Occator's tank makes it "safe" when it's carrying up to 700-800 mil ISK worth of stuff or so.

Hulk:

• What it does: mine and do minor transport of small amounts of ore
• What it has to defend against: people wanting easy fun and kills
• When it dies, the drop is: not significant
• So therefore, the worth of the ships ganking it needs to be: worth the ISK loss for the fun it gives

A Hulk doesn't need to have the Occator's HP to be safe; it merely needs to be tanky enough to be "unfun" or too expensive or hard to gank. 20-25k EHP, its current tank, requires:

• 4+ destroyers: who wants to spend 4 destroyers on one Hulk, when you can ignore it and spend 4 destroyers on 3 or 4 other, untanked Hulks?
• 2+ BCs: who wants to spend 100 mil ISK on ganking one Hulk?

The untanked 6-7k EHP Hulk is fun to gank, alone or with a friend/alt. Tank it a bit and it gets to be a chore and an ISK drain to gank it, so gankers will leave it alone. Or fail hilariously. Or get mad and get more ships, but the Hulk pilot should be aware of the danger and taking precautions by that point.


It's not really like rabbits, it's more like the deer stepping out of the damn road when it sees a truck's headlights approaching instead of standing there dumbfounded. This is, again, possible to do with Hulks as they are now, but I was venturing it as an alternative to tanking your Hulk, if you can't, or don't want to, or see an oncoming gank that your tank could not possibly survive.

That's better than sitting there in your pod next to your Hulk wreck and saying "I didn't have a chance ", yes?

Ed: Also, in-game physics arguments make very little sense. If you're going to say that battleships are so fast because they have big engines, I can equally say that Mastodons or Vagabonds tank so much better because they have milspec power cores, shield generators, and nanobots. RP/physics arguments get nobody anywhere and are just dumb.


I strongly doubt that there are more Hulks flown than there are pods. But as can be seen from the QEN, there are more Hulks being flown than the Drake, a very popular ship in both PvP and PvE. My sole point linking the QEN was that the Hulk is clearly popular, which indicates it not being broken (who would fly a broken ship?)

For those showing hulk kills with only 4-6k damage taken, even though they have hardeners etc. on, I would like to remind you that killmails show DAMAGE taken, not EHP SHOT THROUGH. Ex. I have a ship with 5k hp (not EHP, just straight HP). It has 0% resists across the board. I then have a second ship with 5k HP, and 80% resists across the board. The first has 5k EHP. The second has 25k ehp. But any killmail will show 5k damage taken, even though the second took 5x the firepower to take down.

-Arazel

If all the mouthbreathers on the hulkageddon loss board that didn't fit a tank, did fit a full 25k+ ehp tank, then hulkageddon would be sitting at 600 kills, not 1550. 4 thrashers = 4 gankers on 15 minute minute cooldown for 1 hulk. 4 untanked hulks = 4 pilots on GCC for 4 hulk kills.

ie its collectively irresponsible to not fit a tank to your hulk, just as its collectively irresponsible to not have sufficient capacitor skills to not need a capacitor mod, and its collectively irresponsible to not have the major shield skills at least up to IV.