Ships & Modules

I have some questions around the right transport ship for various situations. I start out by apologizing if this has been discussed before. I went back 5 pages of posts and didn’t find anything. So some background. I’m aware of the ‘limits’ on various transports for making it unprofitable for ganking. The rules I follow are:

- No more than 900M in a freighter (and even then I triple bulkhead)
- No more than 300M in a DST (shield tanked)
- I use instawarps (to beyond detection range) and 0 km docking on all stations
- For my DST’s and BR’s I use the cloaking / MWD
- My transporting is high sec based

The question I have is ‘what are other people doing?’ I realize the above is safe but flying freighters is slow and I would like to transition to more DST / BR goods movement. Does anyone know how often DST’s and BR’s are killed in the wild when they do the right things for cloaking? I’m not talking about being sloppy and getting ganked in Jita because you didn’t instawarp or 0km dock. But if you do the ‘right’ things – is it 1 in 10, 1 in 50, 1 in 100? Just curious, I don’t gank and so have no background for understanding the risks.

Darion

Some advice I was given when I first started was if your tech 2 fit mission ship with no bling or a cheap, tanked transport carrying low value cargo safely within your tank/cargo value ratio, then DONT use insta undocks. Reason being you want them to scan you and see your not worth the time, rather then being slippery and having someone set a trap for you on your bookmark to try to catch you.

That and don't ever ever auto pilot. Seriously. If you need the bathroom or the door goes, pick a random station in the system your in and hit dock. Resume travel when your back at the keyboard.

Keeping your cargo within your tank, not auto piloting and not flying under war decs and I think the ratio would be more like 1 in 10,000 trips for a gank attempt.

land on grid
pause for deep breath
look at ship and check which way its facing. follow its path down to nearest celestial.
align to celestial
hit mwd
hit cloak
when mwd has done its full cycle then hit warp.

Most dangerous part of flying a BR is landing at the dock in Jita. There seems to be a pause while decloaking even if you have an insta-dock (or maybe I'm doing it wrong). I now fit a substantial passive tank and have survived a couple of gank attempts. Seem to get my "docking request accepted" then ding! kill right notification - otherwise I wouldn't know anything had happened.

I will preferentially use my DST rather than a freighter if the cargo will fit (personal hauling - RFF requires the use of a freighter) and I use the same rule as my freighter - keep it under 1 billion. Without a cloak the DST will warp in 1 pulse of the afterburner (7.5 sec) and I can fit a large ASB. With MWD/cloak it's 10 second cycle and I can only fit a medium ASB. Honestly don't know which is safer but tend to use the afterburner because it's less work - easier to multitask. On the other hand people will gank an empty freighter if it's the only game in town and you'll find ransom bumpers practically everywhere these days.

900m in a freighter can be risky or not just depending on how many bored gankers are on your route and depending on whether or not you use a webbing alt. EHP doesn't do much except determine how long they'll have to bump you whilst they gather enough catalyst pilots.

300m is kinda low for a DST, you can get over freighter level EHP on some of them, cloak/mwd trick can get you past most hassle and an MJD can prevent anyone from bumping you whilst waiting for friends to gather.

I still fly the same BR I flew when I first bought one as my very first T2 ship. It should be almost uncatchable in high/lowsec when used correctly.
-Cloak every jump
-Use an anonymous alt for high-value purchases/courier jobs
-Use insta-undock and insta-dock BMs (also activate the autopilot whilst in warp when using an instadock instead of needing to spam-click 'dock' and play with the server ticks)

Ofc the other options you haven't mentioned are:
-insta-aligning shuttles/frigs - with less than 2 second align time these are *mostly* safe for high value, low volume goods, the obvious big-risk is smartbombing ships that set themselves up on the exit gate for a system and can then ruin your day. Yachts and ceptors are an extension of these for nullsec use because of their bubble immunity. If you make perch bookmarks on regular gates and know what kind of ships might have a smartbomb suprise fitted then you're pretty much uncatchable.

-Cloaky, nullified T3s - tankier, bubble immune, smaller volume blockade runners or tankier, cloaky, larger volume interceptors. Awesome things. Throw a few agility implants at them and they're again almost uncatchable and you don't really need to use BMs to avoid smartbombs - if you don't need the nullification then you can get even more tank/cargo/agility from them for highsec use.

-Orcas and bowheads - somewhere between DSTs and Freighters, less cargo space but more ehp than a freighter, more cargo but less tricksiness than a DST.

General rule for me is small and pricey you use an agility fitted/ hyperspacial BR

For chunky mid price range I use a super tank DST.

For big bulk like raw minerals and ships use a freighter.

For t2/faction/pirate ships a super tank bow head.

Actually, there's no need to spam 'dock'.

A little-known game mechanic is that you have 10s of invulnerability every time you exit warp.

You exit warp when the speed gauge under your capacitor starts showing numbers again.

From that moment, if you don't issue any commands, you cannot be locked for 10s. I don't know if you can be bumped (I'll test it when I have a chance), though I'm pretty sure you can be smartbombed (not tested, but you can be smartbombed IN WARP while landing so...).

So the 'smooth and classy' way to instadock is to wait for numbers to show on your speed gauge, wait a second or two because you're cool, then click dock just once and you're golden.