Warfare & Tactics

I know covert cynos are not visible from anywhere in system like regular cynos.


But regarding visibility on-grid, my google-fu turned up two different answers:

1) Covert cynos appear as a beacon to anyone on-grid

2) Covert cynos appear as a beacon only to fleet members on-grid; non-fleet members do not get a beacon to pop up on their overview, though they will see the covert-cyno graphical effect if they 'look at' the ship that is cycling the covert cyno


Which one of these is correct?

I'm curious as to why you desire the distinction. What are you trying to do?

Would always fit the scram. Given the grid load time when you jump in, there is a decent chance your prey could align and warp out before you could get your lock anyhow.

If someone tackles your bait and you light a covops cyno (or regular cyno) I'm not sure beacon/no beacon will influence the next few moments too much one way or the other. Always have a point on your bait ship - bait is sitting next to a cloaked bubbler is the only exception I can think of.

If you're bringing a bunch of black ops through and not just using it as a bridge - they take forever to lock, so point is deffo the way to go on your bait ship.

I like proteus on a gate in null. Super long point range and can de-agress and jump if that is what is called for.

The cov ops cyno is quick. So practice helps. Talking on comms helps too. We've missed a few bridging BS making the fight because they waited too long for others to bridge and missed the cyno. That being said, the ozone cost of the cov ops cyno is cheap, so letting it go around twice before turning it off shouldn't hurt you too much.

T3 are fuel pigs. Plated T3 gobble up your fuel rapidly. If you're blopsing t3 all over the place, bring a cloaky blockade runner.

As far as lock times - you have the session change timer, the normal lock time for your given ship, and the coordination time due to piloting. If you have more than 3 guys bridging - one of them will be slow (not sure of the reason, but I'm leaning towards porn/alcohol/potato chips - no particular order)

It's hard to give a specific figure since a lot of it comes down to connection, loading speeds, and the mood of the server that's handling your bridge. It's going to take several seconds at the minimum just for someone to jump through and load grid no matter how fast they click the buttons. Then there's the mental work of sorting through your overview and finding an expensive target that's close enough to tackle and of course the actual lock time of your ship. If the hostile pilots react quickly and aren't in 1600mm plated Drakes they have pretty good odds of getting out if you don't have an initial tackle on them, especially since the guy camping gates in a Loki is the one most likely to be doing it aligned to a safe POS with one finger on F1 and the other on "GET OUT". If you have dedicated fast-locking tackle ships (a bit difficult to do with blops gangs, since Bombers are paper-thin and Recons have terrible scan res), you could consider trying to send them through a second ahead of the rest of the gang so they don't get traffic controlled on jump.

A few other miscellaneous pointers:

Blackops gangs are really, really bad at taking on straight fights. Recons suck at fighting in general, bombers hit real hard but will die en mass to anything that can shoot back, T3s/the Stratios are grotesquely expensive for how much damage they do in a covert configuration, and a proper Blops has the EHP of a battlecruiser on a billion-ISK hull. When you're blopsing, you're generally hunting for isolated, expensive targets and doing everything in your power to make sure they never have a fighting chance. It's a lot of fun, but never forget that your whole fleet can probably get dunked by a T1 cruiser gang.


If you just want to drop your gang of assholes on a slightly smaller gang of assholes, I'd look into pitching in for a corp Titan.

Thanks again!

@Voyager: my assholes would probably also take on a slightly bigger gang of assholes, but yes I get the point that you can't be too reckless with T3s, even if you don't bling-fit them

@Serendipity: brings to mind another question I had. You seem to imply that it's possible to cyno-jump to a neighboring system connected by a WH, did I understand this right? Regular and/or covops?

No you can't cyno from a wh. You sit inside the wh system in wh jump range. This hides you from intel channels. When it's go time, you jump into the staging null system then make your jump. You either jump straight away or get your bridgees into range and then light it.

Just use the wh system to hide out and be even more underhanded. A word of caution with this. Black ops BS are pretty fat in the a55. They consume the wh mass budget faster than the other BS.