Ships & Modules

Except that Nosferatu don't subtract cap from a target and transfer it to the user.
The Nosferatu checks the target's cap, subtracts as you might expect... If it does subtract that cap is "destroyed" but the Nos raises a flag and then creates cap equal to its maximum drain amount in the capacitor of the ship it's mounted to.
This means that if a Nos which drains 90 is successfully activated on a target which has 50 GJ of cap left it will reduce the target's cap to 0 (I like to think it will also "brown out" the lights but...) and add 90 GJ to the ship it's mounted on (despite the fact that there was only 50 available).

This makes Blood ships very powerful because as long as you stagger your nos sufficiently to allow the target to regen at least 1 GJ between activations you dump a large amount of "free" energy to your own cap.

Not sure of the change you mentioned.


Last I used these in PVE (long long ago) they work for just a few cycles then stop working. they will still run but you draw no cap from rat.


reason being, I think, ccp doesn't want you NOS'ing rats for cap boosts. Put another way they don't want you going for potential perma run setups based on rat cap drain. As rats have infinite cap.

Jacob, it doesn't matter if a ship has capacitor left or not for Blood Raider ships. Prior to the nosferatu nerf in 2009 they used to give everyone infinite capacitor regardless if the target has any or not.
Yes, this mean that since the pirate ship rebalance Blood Raider ships will produce capacitor with nosferatus fitted out of thin air all the while leaving the target dry.
It is possible to nos a ship out completely and still soak capacitor from them, it just takes longer for capitals but since a lot of people are not from before the nos nerf they continue to use neuts and cap injectors that they don't need.

Blood Raider ships are actually more powerful than Curses that way but if you don't tell them everything in a guide or fit the ships for them and fly them for them they cannot do anything.

please show some proof of this, in my tests a blood ship soaks up the cap remaining on the target and nothing else. If they simply created magical free cap I'm sure they would be far more popular, especially since faction/deadspace nos are rather cheap as they are pretty useless.

and neuts kill a targets cap way faster than nos. on a bhaalgorn a heavy neut does 1050 cap every 24 seconds (43.75cap/s), where a nos does 210 cap every 10 seconds (21cap/s). In a gang with cap transfers it makes more sense imo to have mostly neuts on a bhaalgorn.

I cannot find the thread in the old forums but back in the day everyone had one nos fitted because it created capacitor out of thin air.

After reviewing the actual effect of this change on PVE we have decided to leave it alone and let it function in the new way, which mirrors the way it works in PVP, rather than try to split the function of NOS into a PVE and PVP version. Along with the consistency this provides, we also prefer that under the new mechanic you can't infinitely NOS any NPC nearby and instead have to work a bit harder to take full advantage of energy vampires.

I've seen speculation that NPCs have 1GJ cap and that's why % based drain always worked before, but now does not. This is not the case and most NPCs have base cap that is slightly below average base cap for their class. As an example, incursion BS rats have around 3800GJ base cap, meaning that a player BS would be able to NOS them successfully at between 50% and 75% of its cap total. Just like player vs player situations, NOSing NPCs in a ship class higher than yours should be very easy.

I'm pretty sure the reason was that nos basically functioned as a BR-fitted nos does nowadays, in that it always leeched cap off the target, not a "creating cap out of thin air"-mechanic.

My memory's not 100% on this so it may be wrong, but I also seem to recall that "in the old days" the difference between nos and neut in cap taken / cap neuted was substantially smaller, which (would have) made using nos over neut a no-brainer.

Try to run the test again with a corpmate of yours. Take an ashimmu and nos him and put two reps on. Ask him or her to tell you when he or she is empty and leave your mods on. I promise they will not run out of cap.

2. It was always explained to me, that a NOS would not work on a ship that had less cap than you did. It wasn't supposed to be able to neut that ship out to zero. The best it could do was equalize your cap to his.

3. When Navy Ravens had 7 launchers, I used a NOS in the last slot. The only utility hi-slot fitting that can help you survive. Way better than Drone augmenters for a PvE ship. Rayseres and Selenes NOS reach out to 36 KM if I recall.