EVE New Citizens Q&A

Often the Nemesis and Manticore are preferred, due to the additional more mid-slot.
Between the two, the Nemesis has the advantage of its thermal damage bonus, while the Manticore has more CPU.
But each of the four bomber has it's use.

Also, when using bombs, you have to fly the same bomber as your squad, otherwise the bombs kill each other.

As a newbie training for similar goals, I decided to work towards the Hound for a couple reasons:

1) I like the aesthetic of Minmatar ships
2) I wanted a fast covops for making bookmarks, and Minmatar do fast well (the cheetah seemed like a great scout ship option)

I was recommended the Manticore by a veteran as the easiest to fit for torpedo damage, since it has the most cpu for better launchers. But I'm a sucker for aesthetics.

The missile skills have served me well so far running missions in caldari ships. But honestly, the racial frigate 5 skill train is only 7-8 days or so, so once you're into one, you can easily just wait a week and get into another, since all the other requirement skills are the same, as are the support skills.

If you work on the missile skills first, you don't even have to make the decision on which to fly until all your core missile stuff is done, which takes a while anyways.

Fly the prettiest one.

The real reason to select a bomber is the torp damage bonus is massive and type specific, so you always want to fly the damage type that ratters in the area will not be tanking for.

Other than that the differences are pretty mild. Hounds and Purifiers get fewer mids for tank/ewar but more lows for damage mods. Nemesi and Manticores get more mids for tank/ewar, but fewer lows for damage. Its just a trade off.

So fly whatever you think is prettiest.

Not really preferred, but bonused since each racial bomber has a torp bonus (15% per cov-op level) and bomb bonus (5% per cov-op level) to a specific dmg type.
At level 5, the torp bonus reaches 75%, it'd be ridiculous to use anything else than the bonused torps. But for bombs, always match the fleet's bombs, though given the cargo available and the volume of bombs, you'll likely have a hauler along feeding the same bombs to the fleet.
Nit-picking, but just to make sure it's clear

Bombers are awesome. So go for the one you are already closest to getting. Try it, and see if you care enough to want the others.

I highly recommend joining bombers bar. They are noob friendly. So don't sweet it if you have never done medium size fleets before.

I love my Nemesis, but I have heard that the Manticore, properly fit and skilled can get more range out of the torpedoes.

Here's the thing, Whatever CovOps you trained into, use that racial bomber. If you get good enough with it where the hull is holding you back and you think you can squeeze more out of a different hull, then train into that hull.

I went frig V for the AF first. Then for the cov-ops. The bomber was really an after thought for me.

I went with Gallente for the enyo, then Caldari for their cov-ops (which I like but my drone skills are good enough to make the helios a bit more appealing).

I like both the nemesis and manticore for gang work because more TP's & TD's is always a good thing. For solo stuff I want the hound. With that said, I'm going Amarr next for their AF's so the hound will just have to wait and I'm sure the purifier will do just fine until then.

I'm trained for all four, but I prefer the Nemesis because it looks the most like an RL stealth bomber