Ships & Modules

nightmare has a few extra high slots

you could fully embrace drones on a rattler and put some salvage gear in the highs


Any ship that isn't all dependent on it's high slots holding a full rack of whatever will fit your needs. Dommi comes to mind - drones for dps and high slots to pull in and salvage stuff. Heck, even a geddon could be used for drone dps and salvage in the highs.

The real question is why would you want to...? It's next to impossible to match the tractor, salvage and cargo capacity of Marauders (particularly the Paladin). Sure, you can come close - but you'll end up gimping your fit in the process. And it's been demonstrated that bookmarking and coming back with a Noctis actually takes longer.

salvaging as you go causes a real drop in efficiency, either as a loss in mission times, or lack or overall income boost due to leaving modules on grid.

The advent of mobile tractor units really did make the nautics obsolete. Bringmobile tractor units, drop one in each pocket and bookmark the unit. Go run 3-4 missions and come back in a salvage fit destroyer to grab loot and very quickly salvage everything there. For an extra 10-15 minutes of work you will have salvaged and looted every wreck on the field, as opposed to loosing 6-7 minutes every pocket trying to salvage as you go, or earning only paltry amounts of isk on what you grab while blitzing.

Its a real thing. Promise. ^.^

Even if you are in a Marauder.

Marauder salvaging is slow. If your salvagers and tractors can keep up with the rate you are destroying your ships, you are fail fit. The convience of the tractor in level IV's speeds mission blitzing times and that's about it.

If you are balsy enough to bring it into Null Sec Anomalies, it makes a little bit of sense so you can grab the faction / deadspace officer wreck it spawns at the end. even then you are working against the clock to GTFO and come back in something disposable for looting.

A mobile tractor unit is still faster than marauder salvaging. Unless of course, you bring a mobile depot to refit your entire ship for 7 salvagers and a refit for 7 tractors.... but why would you do that and risk staying on grid? I could be off blapping the next pocket while my MTU is stockpiling everything for a 2 minute clean up per pocket. I don't wanna wait to tractor everything in range.

Fair point. I was going off the original posters salvage remark. MTU and 3x tractors could definitely clean sweep a site in short order. No arguments here. even then I would still be in favor of extended MTU drops during long missioning sessions and then coming back in a warp to zero hauler to scoop loot for everything at the end of the day. MTU's don't vanish after 45 minutes. ^.^

Difference in play style then.

I'd say it depends on how your Marauder is fit. If you stick to a shot range fit and sit basically on top of spawns or don't move too much while shooting npcs in a 50km bubble, 5 salvaging drones and a combination of tractor beam(s) and salvager(s) in tandem with the MTU is good enough to provide a considerable boost in income.

Just an example:
A mission nets you 20 million in bounties. As you kill all the things, you just drop the MTU and let your salvager drones salvage on full auto without paying too much attention to what they do. In each pocket you scoop the MTU as soon as you've done killing without fully looting the field. At the end of the mission you should get around 2-4 million in loot and salvage on average - at least this is what i usually saw. That's up to 25% additional income on top of bounties for very litte effort and without any further time investment.

Muraders are designed for damage application at range. And for best results against level IV's, you want long range weapon systems that can apply full 800-1000 DPS damage to at least 45-60km (That's non-bling to bling fit). If you are short range weapons fit, you are loosing a LOT of time in movement between rats and changing between "agro" pockets.

When I was blitzing for income, most of the ships died around the 50-60km mark, with only a small handful getting under 30km. I would be able to blap two NPC's in the time it would take me to tractor in one can. This means chasing wreck range to scoop loot was far more time consuming than salvaging after I ran 4-6 missions. Dropping a single MTU on my way through the next accel gate or warp off saved me time and let me focus on my DPS micromanagement. Mission times stay at blitz / full clear speeds and overall time spent salvaging drops considerably.

MTU's killed the nautics. She needs a new role.

***

Edit, on a side note. Since coming back I've been seeing a lot of blaster fit kronos's thrown around for level IV mission use. I need to start a threat so I can understand this debate....

Which is why I was making the argument for just dropping MTU's as you mission and come back, full loot, zero down time other than warping to bookmarks.

^.^

Prices have crashed so much it just isn't worth coming back or even sticking around for loot/salvage, whatever the MTU and salvage drones can pull in is a bonus. in basically all cases the time spent in warp between the old MTUs would be better spent running another mission. And like someone said a marauder should kill faster than it can loot/salvage but that is okay because at most you want to cherry pick wrecks and with a marauder you can usually get the good ones.