Ships & Modules

You know that cruise missiles and HML's share all the support skills right? That he would only have to train those two skills....

After oddessy cruise raven will be the logical next step.

SNI is BS version of a drake

nighthawk is just... drake but more expensive and takes longer to train. There's very little advantages of the nighthawk over the drake to be brutally honest.

People trying to fly a raven like a drake will lose it very quickly: they are not similar at all.

Tengu is almost identical to the drake if you passive tank it which is what a lot of pve people do. It's just obviously a bit more expensive and longer to train.

if you want to keep use of your (medium weapon) skills:
- you can go navy drake (coming soon (tm)), but don't expect stellar PvE upgrade there;
- you can train for command ship(s), but atm they are just not worthy it - they are very skill intense for expensive, dubious increase in performance (however, they seem to be doing something about that, so it might be better at one point)

alternative is Tengu, keep in mind that T3 are ships with quirks of their own:
- Tengu will give you better DPS, better (active) tank and better damage application then drake
- Tengu (and T3s) are arguably best exploration ships (though drone ships can do it really good as well and don't suffer form problem 1), but T3 is only ship that can pack good probing bonuses and good combat power all in one
- Tengu is great for WHs (and singergizes with more tengus for that role even better)
- Tengu is sexy

however keep following in mind:
- 1) they are expensive, unless you are damn rich; also losing SP will annoy you to no end when it happens*; if you want to fit it properly for PvE, it will cost even more (looking at pirate faction battleship price tag here)
- 2) you will need subsystems on level at least 4 (weapons / defense to 5) to make it worthy buying one, otherwise you are just sitting in overpriced drake
- 3) tengu likes active tank; active tank on tengu generally means low buffer; low buffer means that '**** happens' is much faster then with drake (and when **** happens, see 1 :) ) - believe me, neuted Tengu + sleeper lasers = bad bad combination
- 4) with odyssey cruise missile buffs, raven might give you better performance in missions, navy raven will certainly do so; for equal price tag, machariel or nightmare will give you even better performance
- 5) for PvP, well... see 1) :); pair of battlecruisers can kill a tengu, many battleships can kill a tengu, if something goes wrong, one battlecruiser can kill a tengu. People love dead tengus and are ready to go to great lengths to see one die (talking about dropping capitals on you or preparing 10+ pilots ambushes) :)
- 6) for high end PvE, tengu has fallen out of mercy in incursion fleets, so don't expect that people will be all giddy when you show up with your tengu for incursions; personally I think that RR tengu fleet must work quite well for incursions, but it just seems to not be cool these days (vindicators grind better I guess)

*: when you buy tengu, it is best to accept the fact you will lose it at some point :), it will make you less annoyed when it happens

if you don't mind training up, raven is good PvE ship (crap in PvP though, but you have caracal and drake for that), ferox (? ) -> Naga (uses your BC skill) -> Rokh should work as caldary path for fleet pvp

Hmm yeah might have read that wrong. I know from experience the Nighthawk outdoes the Drake in general, though it's questionable if it's worth the training.(Unless you trained it before t3 cruisers came out like I did so eh) Thought it said that the tengu was better than the nighthawk with a passive fit and was trying to figure out what passive fit was doing that well.

Actually still curious about that passive tengu fit as last I played around with one I pretty much only saw active fits flying about.