Warfare & Tactics

Pipebombing is essentially the art of using dictors and bubbles to maneuvere or anticipate a hostile fleet to a single, known, point in space and then using a titan to bridge smartbombing battleships, of an appropriate damage type, onto that point. There's an article here with some more details.

The 'mobile artillery' version uses Black Ops pipebombers and thus the ships can jump themselves, without the titan being required. This has some limitations but they are able to project more easily across long distances.

All kinds of ships have been pipebombed, from frigates to plated battleships, though the latter requires large strikes with 40 or so pipebombers, as we did last winter. Usually the size of the common hunting fleet is tied to the dominant meta of the area (and the kinds of fleets that are easily found there).



We're the ones doing the pipebombing in the video. Sometimes there are pipebombings simply for sport, to keep things sharp and to test different methods of reducing problems with module activation, etc. On occasion, there is a conscious effort to suppress an area, cause considerable destruction or fulfill a strategic purpose, where I'd aim to rout several large fleets every few days (hopefully several in a day).

The most common pipebombers these days are the Rokh and the Abaddon. The Typhoon suffered a little for this purpose in the battleship re-balancing.

One time bump to fix forum.

Pretty sure we never lost 100 of them.. I am a proud survivor of that fleet :) But you should also know that that little fleet killed a 100 BC gang only minutes before....
Love you work RnK..

Not necessarily. If you know where the enemy fleet is headed and they don't scout their warpins on gates you can just throw a drag bubble at their target gate in the line of the one they are coming from and you know exactly where they will land.

There are lots of pipebombings, though I think the OP is referring to a video from Fountain, where Harpies made up only a small number of the targets/kills (<5%) but did happen to end up in a video.

In the case of Harpies specifically, the last three times I've gone hunting in the past weeks, each time the big fleet I found was a Harpy fleet. One of them survived after the cyno died before we could jump. However, the other two were destroyed (here and here).

Of course, Harpies are a rather soft target for pipebombing, so we probably wouldn't, for example, hunt a fourth Harpy fleet in a matter of days unless there was some specific reason for it. When it's for sport, variety is the spice of life - HACs, BCs or maybe the tasty logi wing of a very heavy tanked group would be targeted in preference.



If you're curious, here''s a general gallery (albeit small) of pipebombing shots along with some specific ones from operations like 'Tindermoat'. I'll expand those a bit later.

As for videos, thanks for the kind words & glad you found it interesting. Hopefully some more on the way soon.

WOW! thank you for the details. But I do have a few questions regarding the implementation of this (I fully understand if OpSec would keep you from giving details - and for that I would understand.) I would like to learn this tactic though.

I would think the Rohk would be amazing as other have said....From what I see the range of a Large Smartbomb of any of the damage types is 5000m. How do you not destroy the smartbombing ships by friendly fire? I would think that you could put resists on aimed specifically against the damage type that you are going to employ, but you wouldn't know what type of smartbomb launcher to fit until you knew the makeup of the enemy fleet. And swapping out last second would seem to be cumbersome at best and fatal at worst.

Do you carry all damage types in your holds and refit on the spot?