So, some of you may have noticed a fleet doctrine I’ve been pushing down everyone’s throat. I’ve got the guys in my FC Course over at E-UNI doing and and I’m taking it out myself with Waffles fairly regularly for the past week. I won’t go over fight’s I’ve already covered, but I thought I’d go over the fits and discuss some of the cool things about how they work and what you can do with them.

Right. DickCats, as christened by Wafflebro Darko Fett. The fleet revolves around the magnificent ship that is the dual prop Thorax, expanding upon it’s strengths and mitigating its weaknesses. Overall, the fleet is a very versatile brawling setup which can take on sub-cap fleets of all sizes with great effectiveness, ans is flown best (in my experience) by small-medium sized gangs of 10-30 people. Having said that I am yet to fly this with 60 dudes so I can’t say for sure whether or not it would work.

NB: Those UNIbros who see this fleet may notice that there are a few subtle changes from the setup I gave you guys. There’s no real reason other than I like to fiddle.

The Thorax

[DickCat Thorax]

[Lows]

Damage Control II

Magnetic Field Stabilizer II

Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane II

Armor Explosive Hardener II

1600mm Reinforced Rolled Tungsten Plates I

[Meds]

10MN Afterburner II

Experimental 10MN Microwarpdrive I

Warp Scrambler II

Stasis Webifier II

[Highs]

Heavy Electron Blaster II

Hеavy Electrоn Blastеr II

Heavy Electron Blaster II

Heavy Electron Blaster II

Heavy Electron Blaster II

[Rigs]

Medium Ancillary Current Router I

Medium Anti-Kinetic Pump I

Medium Anti-Thermic Pump I

[Drones]

Hammerhead II x5

Where to begin on this sexy little ship? I guess the most poignant part of it is the dual prop. No, you can’t run both at the same time to counter the fact that you’ve got a great honking armour plate slowing you down, but it’s even better than that. Blaster range is short. REALLY short. The MWD allows to to get right up into the face of whatever you want to kill, then the scram/web keep you there to melt its face. The AB allows for some lovely sig tanking when you’re under fire, as well as keeping the transversal up. Unlike the Maller, the Thorax is naturally a very fast ship, so you can get some amazing speed in this thing even under a web.

As you can see, you can get a wonderful tank in both EHP and resists while still fitting a Mag stab for that crazy blaster DPS. As this is a Gallente ship, it has a significant drone bay to add to its power-base, here I went for a flight of hammers, though a fight of medium ECMs or two sets of each in light form are also viable.

The hull bonus and naturally good tracking of blasters means the application of DPS is excellent when you are in range, and also that you can use void much more commonly than when flying, say, a Vexor or a Moa for example.

The Support

The Exequror and the Celestis are my two preferred support ships, though Augorors are not inherently wrong. Additionally, I’ll gibe an honourable mention to having an Arbitrator with a similar fit to the Celestis even though I have yet to use it, but it does fit into the fleet very nicely and is a great bonus especially if you know if you’re facing any non-missile fleet. The extensive drone bay and multitude of options for the high slots for the Arbitrator give you a lot of cool options to tailor the fleet capability to your needs and/or preference.

[Celestis]

[Lows]

Damage Control II

1600mm Reinforced Rolled Tungsten Plates I

Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane II

Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane II

Explosive Plating II

[Meds]

10MN Afterburner II

Phased Muon Sensor Disruptor I, Targeting Range Dampening Script

Phased Muon Sensor Disruptor I, Targeting Range Dampening Script

Phased Muon Sensor Disruptor I, Targeting Range Dampening Script

Phased Muon Sensor Disruptor I, Targeting Range Dampening Script

[Highs]

Imperial Navy Small EMP Smartbomb

Republic Fleet Small Proton Smartbomb

Republic Fleet Small Proton Smartbomb

[Rigs]

Medium Inverted Signal Field Projector I

Medium Inverted Signal Field Projector I

[Drones]

Vespa EC-600 x5

The thing I love about armour Celestis over their cowardly shield brethren is that they have twice the damps, so before anything else they are already doing their job at least twice as well. You’ll note that I’m using faction smartbombs here, and if you’re a bit tight on ISK it’s entirely fine to use T1, as they are something like a fifth of the price. The advantage is the 50% range boost, which makes the killing of drones (which is the whole point of thee smartbombs) a lot easier. Run the EMP followed by the two Explosives to have the best chance of going through resist holes to get them in one cycle.

You’ll notice that I have ECM drones on both this and the Exequror below it, purely for the extra utility but grabbing more hammerheads and applying them to a drone bunny for more deeps is also an excellent use of the drone bay.

Despite how goddamn awesome they are, damps are only just becoming as popular as they should be, but even then they’re mostly seen in solo frigs (see skunkworks Loki-boosted tri-damp CNH in Dal) and in kiting fleets (see Exodus’ triple-boosted kiting cruiser fleet. It’s a bitch.). You can spread range ramps evenly across enemy logi to remove their ability to lock what they want if they’re at sufficient range, focus them to break cap chains and effective remove any snipers/ECM/whatever that want to affect the engagement you’re having at any kind of range. Not only that, if the opposing logi have too many friendlys to pre-lock, spreading sensor damps gives you an incredible amount of time to burn through your target before reps will land, especially against armour fleets as the reps land at the very end of the modules cycle.

[Exequror]

[Lows]

Reactor Control Unit II

Damage Control II

Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane II

Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane II

800mm Reinforced Rolled Tungsten Plates I

Armor Explosive Hardener II

[Meds]

10MN Afterburner II

Medium Electrochemical Capacitor Booster I, Navy Cap Booster 800

Conjunctive Magnetometric ECCM Scanning Array I

Conjunctive Magnetometric ECCM Scanning Array I

[Highs]

Medium Remote Armor Repair System II

Medium Remote Armor Repair System II

Medium Remote Armor Repair System II

Medium Trimark Armor Pump I

Medium Anti-Kinetic Pump I

Medium Anti-Thermic Pump I

[Drones]

Vespa EC-600 x5

Not too much to say about this, it’s a pretty standard AB Exeq. I would predict that in the future as damps get even more popular (and they should) one of the ECCM modules will be switched for a Sensor Booster.

So there you have my DickCat Doctrine. This is the first post of this style in t’ blog (read in a northern accent), so please do let me know what you think of it, be that “sounds cool, but not really interested”, “oh dear god stop it this is awful”, “oh my god this is better than sex, do nothing but this for the rest of time” or anything in-between.