Ships & Modules

m8- You can't count drone damage as your DPS, at least I never do :) :) Hence the extra mag stabs <3

And the fit is clearly not complete, I was just trying to show how much it takes to get that gun DPS out at 20. Its a bit crazy if you ask me.

Theyre passable for pve cause rats are dumb but all 3 other weapon systems are just better in some way or other.

Maybe you should take into account that not everyone wants to use a Mach with officer fit and 13x Republic Fleet Gyrostabs for L3 missions. Lighten' up already...

Railguns don't really have a place.

Sentry Drones on dominix gives you gardes that have 85km optimal range, high .0885 tracking and 800 dps with just the drones.

Raven have buffed Cruise missiles that do more dps and have selectable damage type.

Nightmare/Paladin/Amarr Ships with Tachyon Beams with superior dps, alpha, and tracking.

High Falloff Vargur/Machariel with 90km falloff with barrage.

Heck there are torpedo boats with MJD's.

There is certainly some validity to this even if it is not practical all the time or even frequently. One fight in particular that I've been in comes to mind when an EVE Uni blob of about 40 decided to jump one of our ships in Amamake.

With only 6 people active fighting them head on is not really an option especially with the 3 blackbirds E-Uni brought with them. Instead we had 4 people get into mobile ship including 3 kiting frigates and a nigh-unjammable celestis to damp out the blackbirds so we could point things. The job of the frigates when jammed was to get about 150-170 km off the blob and provide a warp in to a pair of Tach fitted Oracles. The Oracles themselves were nearly immobile on grid but would land and destroy lighter (frigate/destroyer) E-Uni ships in one volley. With a top speed under 600 m/s they were not going to outrun tacklers but incoming frigates were extremely easy to hit due to their MWD signature and very low transversal when firing from 175km. It is far more common for me to miss aligning frigates on the gate with their MWD off on an otherwise identical shot. When pursuers got to a threatening range (~50 km) the Oracles would warp off grid to warp back into a fresh spot provided by someone else. After a few rounds of this and E-Uni's support largely destroyed or crippled they decided it best to leave allowing us to quick kill a BB who was slow getting out. Granted this was all with beam lasers but the underlying theory still holds.

A fight like this has not happened since and that was quite some time ago now. It's not that the advice is bad so much as a little bit unrealistic. The thought is sound but hard to achieve in practice as the story tells the Oracle pilots needed the help of the much faster frigate hulls to really take advantage of their massive range. In a solo type of situation I see it being a whole lot harder and the best solution would probably be to land very far away and make them chase you, burning most of their cap in the process while your AB ship doesn't suffer nearly as hard, though the prospect still feels dubious in many circumstances.

All this being said I am still a fan of some long range guns for small scale PvP (I don't do the fleet thing):

-Arty Hurricane has uses
-Rail Incrusus and Atron, the former always fits AB and active tank the latter kites with MWD
-Rail Merlin for fun
-Arty Jag
-Beam Executioner (did a beam Tormentor once, I don't recommend it though, very clunky)
-Light missiles (not guns but long range missile system) on Corax, Dragoon (3 launchers on solo fit because it doesn't pressure cap) and Condor.

EDIT: You'll notice I do use small rails in PvP, I don't really PvE and never fly large rails in PvP (again no fleets thing) though the opinion seems divided on them somewhat. The long range gun variants in small sizes give a marked advantage over small short range guns due to the generally small optimal/falloff on the short range guns meaning that even a small increase in either of these stats can have a dramatic impact assuming you can control the range of the engagement (see rail devil). In large gun sizes long range in general can have an extreme range advantage to the point where you can apply thousands of damage before a short range fit should even consider returning fire. The advantages apply to medium sized guns but not in sufficient amounts to generally warrant the dps or tracking losses.

900 DPS at 80km with pulse is a bit of bullshitting.

yeah that's not 80km and its with implants and heat

its 76+14. That is 80K. And so what if its with heat??? Do you not have thermo trained?

And for implants- im not sure about you but I normally have 3% at least. You can still get well over 900 with only 3% implants.

Cost? Oracles are not expensive. 2T medium locus are only 14 mil or so. I fly with a ton of guys who fly this fit for damage in our fleets. Its perfectly sane and viable. I don't understand the hate?

He said "close to", 90%+ of 900 is "close to" in my book.

900 DPS is very signifigant. When you are nanoing there are three ships you fear.

1. Recons
2. Light Tackle
3. Fast + heavy hard tackle. Scram vaga / Scram thorax ext ext

The oracle with the 900 DPS + burst can simply melt recons, and that incoming fast tackle. Thanks to such extreame range and using short range guns, the transversal mitigation on light tackle is also jaw dropping. Meaning that this DPS is giong to be applied on target. When i get home, I will throw up a few videos of the hatchery using these oracles along with our specialized nano fleets. It really is cool to see.

Drugs + implants should be used on every pvp ship. If you're not using them, you're just ignorant to how clutch they can be in a pinch.