Warfare & Tactics

After seeing some confusion on the most recent stealth bomber thread. I thought I would take a swing at bomb mechanics here, rather than hijack the thread. No tactics, no fits...just basic bombs.

For those of you with greater experience and understanding; I'll thank you in advance for your constructive criticism and corrections. This is for the newbies.

Lets chat about bombs.

There is a basic bomb for each damage type in EVE: thermal, kinetic, electromagnetic, and explosive. Base damage for each bomb types is 6400 hit points. This damage is increased by 5% per level of the pilots Covert Ops skill, if the pilot is using a bomb type that is matched to the specific ships favorite flavor.

For example, I fly the Manticore. As you would expect it favors Kinetic damage dealing. If I stick EM bombs in the launcher I can expect to deliver up to 6400 points of (potential) damage to a target when it goes off. However, if I feed my bomb launcher kinetic flavored bombs I get to factor in my Covert Ops skill level V which increases my potential damage to 8000 points. (Why do I say potential damage? In EVE the damage you deliver to your target is modified by things like targets resistances, the targets size (signature), the explosion radius and velocity, and for ordinance other than bombs the targets speed and the ability of turret fired weapons to track the target (tracking speed). For bombs we need only discuss the 1st two factors; but let’s do that later)

Bombs are fired line of sight. Without discussing camera misadventures and pilot error; whatever your ship nose is pointing at when you hit the launcher module -that's where the bomb is going.

Bombs will travel at 3000 m/s and will fly for 10 seconds. It will not make a turn. It will travel 30km and then explode.
When it explodes it will apply it's damage to everything within 15km of the detonation point (a 30km sphere of damage).

** Stargates do not magically suck up some of the damage; sparing ships in the vicinity the full force of the explosion. They do seem to mess with damage notifications, however.

Bombs have 240 Hit Points of armor and 50 points of structure. They also have a 99.5% armor resistance to the same kind of damage they deliver.

So now I've teamed up with two other bomber pilots. Both are in Manticores and both have Covert Ops level V. We are all using kinetic bombs, and we verbally confirmed this with each other before starting the operation. We have approached our target ships cloaked and have lined up to the target. Everyone has dialed in their warp away points. No torpedos today. The lead bomber has broken 31km from the target and announces, "bomb’s free"
I deactivate my cloak -and confirm the cloak deactivated (no green glowy ringy thingy around module). I activate the bomb launcher -and confirm a bomb actually launched. I then hit "warp to" for my preselected warp away point which is only 10 degrees or so off angle from my target and a safe warpable distance away. My fleet-mates did the same and three spherical bundles of mayhem are tumbling through space, in close proximity to one another, toward a single target.

** Bombers do not have to be on grid for the bombs to detonate. Bombers do not have to remain uncloaked for the bombs to detonate.


Warning: painfully tedious example to follow…

Now, about those three bombs: They fly for 10 loooooong seconds and detonate. Damage is calculated sequentially. Bomb #1 delivers 8000 potential damage points to the target, but I don't care about the target for the remainder of this chat, right now I want to know what happens to the other bombs.

The explosion from kinetic bomb #1 is 8000 points of kinetic damage. Bomb #2 takes this damage before it goes off. -But, wait...It has a 99.5% resistance to kinetic damage because it's a kinetic bomb. So bomb #2 only takes 40 points of damage. This reduces it's armor protection from 240 HP to 200 HP. Incurred damage does not enter into bomb structure, the warhead integrity is maintained so, an instance later bomb #2 explodes and 8000 more points of potential kinetic damage are delivered to the target.

Kinetic bomb #3 is the last to arrive on scene. It gets slapped with the blast from bomb #1 and takes only 40 points of damage thanks to the resistance. Blast # 2 hits and knocks its armor down 40 more points to 160 points of armor.

(240 armor - (40hp from bomb #1) - (40hp from bomb #2) = 160 armor).

Again, bomb structure has not been violated so bomb #3 gets to explode and deliver enough damage to finish off the target.

So how many bombs can be launched at once?

Thou shalt launch no more than seven bombs in a single salvo. Seven shall this number be, for to launch even one more is to waste it's seed upon the earth.

OK, sorry for spilled seed.....Look, the point is this: if you have 8 pilots all at Covert Ops I or 8 pilots ALL using unbonused bomb types regardless of Covert Ops skills (e.g. manticores launching EM bombs) you can launch 8 bombs in a salvo. The 1st scenario is pretty freakin' rare and the second one is not routine. So with mixed bomber types, and mixed pilot skills your probably only gonna get away with 7 bombs; the rest will be destroyed prior to detonation. BTW bombs are not cheap, if you have to buy them at J-mart.

A very good beginners guide. Thank you.


T.

Thanks for the OP, very interesting, and I agree with Bam’s comment.

As a long-established carebear I recently opted to become a noob yet again and try some PvP play. A timely thread in this forum caught my attention and unleashed the carebear-in-a-hound … pottering around the universe trying to find players incompetent enough to die for me. Since then I’ve split my efforts between w-space stalking and occasional killing, and fleet work in nullsec with the Bombers Bar gang. My efforts have been either solo, two-ship with an alt (also in a bomber), or with a 10 – 20 ship bomber-recon fleet. This has all been fun, and very instructive, in different ways.

Since starting out, about five weeks ago, I’ve managed a few kills, and a death where I was so greedy to kill a drake that I didn’t warp away when I could easily have. He died first, but his last missile was already on it’s way to me and proved fatal. I’ve messed up heaps of attempts but found my small, agile, covops ship to be very forgiving of my SNAFUs. I’m experimenting with fits and approaches and seeing what works and does not work against what.

Given the most of my solo / semi-solo work is in w-space I am focussing on being able to kill drakes and tengu. That’s been quite a learning experience, and so far the vast majority I tackle have survived … either because they drone-jammed me out, loosed a pack of warrior IIs onto me, had nasty friends arrive to help, or I simply could not dent their shield tank. The carebear-in-a-hound is now actually in a manticore, valuing that extra midslots bigtime in my tengu / drake crusade.

So if, like me, you’re a carebear who wants to test the waters of PvP then I recommend that you give the bomber a second look.
- They’re pretty easy to skill for – if you have, or a close to, frig 5 with a faction or two, have some covops skills, and you have the missile and support skills to run high end missions or sleepers you’re not far from a useful bomber skill set.
- They’re cheap to setup and lose – even the faction fittings in the ship I lost didn’t amount to an awful lot of isk.
- Being fragile little beasties they force you to think carefully about what you tackle, and how – Good education.
- The covops element gives you time to plan and think about what you’re about to try, and gives a bit more latitude for messing up.
- There’s decent amounts of pretty good how-to info out there.
- There’s good in-game support and resources – e.g. the ‘Bombers Bar’ chat list. Even tho they fly outside my main timezone I do manage to get with them on weekends and learn about the gang side of bombing and recons.
- If you’re lucky they can kill big things.

Thank you for this

I'm currently learning all I can on how to rat and pvp with my future stealth bomber

Nice guide, thanks. I don't fly bombers, but I was curious about them and this answered some of my questions.

Thanks for the feedback. I'm always happy to see bombers and recon pilots on here. To echo sentiment that has been expressed here already; if you're even slightly curious about bombers (and Recons) I encourage you to take a little detour in your training plan. Try some soloing but consider hooking up with a proper cloaky group. I learned bunches from all the folks in the Bombers Bar chat channel, to mention only one such group.


OK, More bombs on target is better. So, how do I do it?

Your bomb salvos need to be separated by time or by distance.

As Soldarius points out above, you can bomb in short interval waves. 5 seconds is the hard limit for time between salvos. Bombers in the second and successive wave do tend to get a little more attention from the targets, as you can imagine.

You can also separate bomber waves by distance and have everyone can launch at the same time. This is more difficult to coordinate and you need to have a fairly organized/disciplined group. The “simplest” technique would be to have two bomber wings launch at the target from a distance of 40km on opposite sides of the target . The area of effect (explosions) will overlap the target without overlapping either groups bomb detonation center. More acute angles are possible, which allows more bomber wings, but this quickly turns into a painful geometry lesson, and decreases your margin of error to the point of becoming impractical.

@ Horiozn Dawn:To my knowledge, bombs are not affected by collision. They will travel their prescribed distance and explode. This question has come up in the bombers bar channel. All, I can tell you is that, to date, none of the bombers I have rolled with have seen a bomb physically obstructed or deflected. (Anecdotal evidence).

Thank you for this great guide. Quick question : Is it OK to launch a bomb when you are stationary? Will the bomb still fly towards the direction my ship is currently facing?