Warfare & Tactics

In all honesty, firing torps was your big mistake. A fleet of that size rips bombers to shreds. You should have launched a bomb, warped off, recloaked, and baited them about to get them off the gate. It might have gone better for you had you had more than just you there for support and a full engagement. Just my thoughts on it.

Lesson learned: a lone bomber cant kill a fly (unless the fly makes a mistake of MWDing). Why cant people get it?
Bombers are only good in fleets of them.

I also second Bernie: dont even think about firing torps.
Align to celestial so that target is between you and the celestial, uncloak, drop bomb, warp. Oh and didn't I mention that solobombing is futile?

Just use it to gank Low/Null miners :)

not entirely true check out this guys blog
shall we not revenge

If you drop the bomb towards the dictor, you can try locking him and target painting him with two TPs and you are aligning to warp out. It'll boost his sig to take about 2x the damage he'd normally take from a bomb.

Bombers are fun ships to fly but they fly in packs.

And then again the chances to bomb target are far and few between.


I've found bombers are most effective with a few tackle inties and bombers fitted with sensor damps and target painters and chugging torpedoes at opponents unable to target them. Mostly I didn't even have a bomb launcher fit. This frees up a lot of resources to fit better other mods.

Bombers requires good piloting skill and careful target selection but they are fun.

First, I must point out that you chose a very poor target to engage. 1 bomber vs a fleet of BC and small T2 ships camping a gate is pretty much suicide. Keres is the EAF with bonuses to point range and damps. You were screwed as soon as you decloaked.

As said above, small ships take reduced damage from bombs and torps due to the ship's signature radius being smaller then the explosion radius of the bomb. (Not to be confused with the area of effect.) Fast ships take reduced damage from torps due to velocity being faster than the explosion velocity of the torp. An active MWD causes the target's signature radius to increase by 500%, thus quintupling the bomb's applied damage. A solo torp bomber can kill frigates due to this. It also greatly enhances your damage vs large targets.

Know your targets. While technically possible to kill other small ships, it is not a good idea to try. As soon as they switch off the MWD, or if they are AB fit, you're pretty much screwed. Solo, your primary targets are non-combat ships like industrials and miners, or PvE-fit BS and BC while they are actively engaged with rats. With good piloting you can also solo PvP T1 battleships, battlecruisers, and sometimes cruisers. Destroyers are generally a no-no.

MOST IMPORTANT: Drones will wtfpwn a bomber in no time. They are your worst enemy. As soon as they start coming towards you, gtfo unless you are absolutely certain of popping the controlling ship in the next 10 seconds.

imo, a solo bomber relies more on torps due to the above issues. Because torpedoes are so badly affected by size and speed of your target, a target painter is a good module to use solo. It will enhance your applied dps against your primary targets. A webifier is not a good module to use because your in a paper-thin frigate and don't want to be webbed yourself.

Some folks above say that bombers are not solo vehicles. That is not true. There are plenty of solo bomber pilots out there. It is entire feasible. You just need patience and a willingness to lose a few bombers while learning. Once you get the hang of solo combat in a stealth bomber, it can be very rewarding.

Bomb-fit bombers are no less effective. A single bomb can wipe the shields off of an armor tanked BS, kill dozens of drones, and insta-pop those MWDing frigs. But they are far more effective in waves of 6 or 7, which ofc requires a fleet.

Know your damage type. Each bomber has a specific racial damage bonus. Choose the bomber for the task. Purifiers are the bomber of choice for shield-tanks. Hounds for armor tanks.

EWAR can be very useful for bombers. A single target painter will increase damage noticeably for every bomber in your fleet. But more than 3 or 4 is a waste due to stacking penalties.

Remote Sensor Dampeners can also be effective, though more so when used in a fleet. Like TPs they also suffer stacking penalties. Always use scripts for sensor damps. A couple of these can reduce your target's locking range to almost nothing (range damping) allowing bombers to engage from outside the target's locking range, or cause them to take so long to lock your bombers that they never even get a lock before being destroyed (scan res damping).

Solo, I would recommend a target painter.

tl;dr: torps for solo, bombs for fleet. TP/damps for EWAR.

Disclaimer, I've been living solo in w-space where a probe launcher is required. So I've gotten used to going without the bomb launcher. Perhaps I've become biased in that regard.

Ditto. I've killed CovOps frigs with bombs before (and they didn't have MWD on).

And SB's can indeed be fun to fly solo, just have to know what you're doing. They are a lot of fun in WSpace, for example.

The MWD cloak trick used by many Covert Ops pilots, will make the sig on that thing large enough to be blown up easily by a bomber. Pretty much any frigate class ship that hits their MWD to get away from a bomb will find itself dead.

Covert Ops frigates also tend towards your bomber's tank - thinnest of any of the frigates. As such, they take the least amount of damage to kill.

get ten of your friends in stealth bombers set jump points like above mentioned and try again bet you have desired result hehe