Warfare & Tactics

Yeah, you basically screwed yourself.

Here's the deal, Bombers are the enemies of Hell. I say that because the magic number of bombers in a gang is 7. After that, the number, the damage done by the first 7 destroys the remaining bombs. So, No more than 7 bombers per squad at a time.

To conduct an effective bombing run on a single target of any sub-cap size you have to set up your bookmarks about 600km apart. That way they are still on grid, and you can make multiple runs on the same vector. Interceptors with corp bookmarking access are your best bet to get those made quickly. Your squad should have:

1 Arazu with a domination warp disruptor (max recon skill is stupidly handy for that 100km point)
1 Rapier with a federation navy stasis webifier (max recon skill is stupidly handy for that 100km web)
1 Dramiel/ heinously fast frigate for making bookmarks for the bombers
7 Bombers, of which, one pilot must have leadership 5 so you can get all 10 of you in squad.

You go to your starting point cloaked, everyone aligns to the gate, when someone comes through and decloaks the arazu and rapier web/scram the fool, squad commander does a squad warp at 30 to the gate, you all decloak, drop bombs, squad commander warps them to the outbound bookmark and you all cloak up and prepare to do it again. Mean while the interceptor warps in from off grid and nails the pod.

Rinse, repeat.

The point is, you have to have numbers and organization with a bomber fleet. You also have to have a lemonade stand (anchorable container loaded with bombs) set up inside a bubble in a deep safe. Everyone thinks it's a decloaking bubble, but it's where the bombers go to load up on ba-bombs! =)

So, don't do that again, make nice nice with an arazu and rapier pilot. Any tool can put themselves into a dram these days and there are no shortage of tools out there, so do that. Then, PRACTICE =) and you will destroy peoples calm in BOMB-SEC.

You can also just anchor a medium warp bubble on a gate and forgo the arazu and pull it off with a cloaky hauler for a mobile lemonade stand. You can't warp out as quickly, so fit nano's in your lows, and agility rigs so you can turn on a dime and GTFO. This is the alternate method, which works great at deterring the low sec light weights from jumping in and out of flavor country. I find putting out a few jet cans in a sphere at 12 k around the gate helps decloak the other cloaky warpers and make it easier to bomb the bajeezuz outta recons. it's a good time =)

But yeah man, don't take on nothing solo with a bomb unless it's moving faster than.... 2km/s You will fail, and get boned.

@ 2Quad

You're not taking into account the pilot's Covop skill level. At Covop 5, racial bomb does 8000 damage

RvB's Ganked Night on Sunday got a nice bit of experience with bombers vs frigates, as it was Rifter hull night through CVA space.

Bombers that get killed before the bomb explodes do no damage from that bomb. On-the-ball frigate pilots can cross the radius of a bomb by mwding at you/away from the bomb before it explodes. Those on a gate can of course just jump if they don't have aggro. Now the session timer's 10seconds, they can also reapproach the other side and jump again unless the bombing waves are well synced both sides and (far more importantly) they feel the need to break the 60second jump cloak & invulnerability.

Some bombers still don't know to not mix bomb types. It's ok to use off-racial bombs so the set's matching, it's just never ok to use the wrong torps per bomber.

Also, putting a bubble ~10km off of a gate is actually a nasty trap as people will just lol and turn their mwd on to cross the seemingly safe small gap, then panic when things decloak. Again if they're fast enough frigates will still get to jump range, or run you down or simply warp out before the boom.

After we'd killed 10s of them, I got cocky and tried to run down the most capable pack we'd met yet, rather than just jump the gate I was close to. I don't they'd have killed my AF otherwise. I still believe bombers should stick to attacking BC and BS hulls where they're also likely to survive any delay in hitting warp, rather than vs say 120 sensor-boosted arty-fitted suicidal roamers.

We did also get to see a solo bomber try, fail and manage to mwd into his own bomb which did get the final blow on his own ship. Sadly we were too slow to assist him in getting his own podmail.

Awesome thread! Thanks everyone for the wisdom!