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Witness in awe this terrying display of firepower from the Amarr Titan; Avatar. A tool of cleansing, spreading the word of the emperor for the glory of the almighty Amarr race.

A Noob Niche - Corvettes

There are many vessels operating in the space lanes of New Eden. From frigates to dreadnaughts, battleships to cruisers, all have there roles defined for them which are by no means definitive. However there is a class of ship which has been omitted.

Corvettes are traditionally small agile ships designed to tackle support and harass smaller vessels, or for light escort duties. At present, destroyers are the nemesis of any frigate and some specialist hulls such as stealth bombers can kill a frigate almost instantly, but they do have problems hitting fast movers such as drones or interceptors.

A destroyers’ defences are not very robust; generally they succumb to hostile drone firepower in less than a minute unless the pilot is quick to target them and act accordingly; even so it’s difficult to defend a destroyer from drones. I submit then that corvettes should be a class below frigates and be designed for anti-drone defence. There are currently no specific defences against drones save for smart-bombs which present their own dangers, being area-of-affect weapons.


A corvette would typically own enough rapid firepower to kill drones quickly and have a high enough tracking speed to tag rapid small targets. I appreciate that there’s a plethora of ship classes in New Eden and that another class would complicate operations further, but I think that there may be a niche for such a vessel.

In addition to this I understand that many pilots would not find such a ship empowering, but if the ship was cheap enough on both recourses and skills then it may be attractive to newer players to play an important role in fleet engagements. With such a small signature they would be very hard to track and target with larger weapons which would suit their nature perfectly, allowing less skilled players to remain on the field longer and experience the marvel of fleet combat.

Just a thought…

Camera Drones

Camera drones are unseen. Obviously they are there as we can see there effects every-time we undock, they tirelessly do our biding and orbit our vessels at a standard range and allow us to see the field without compromising our position, even when cloaked.

The use of camera drones is one of passive instruction. None of us give much thought on camera drone operation as they are vital tools to allow us to view the space we occupy. Their speed and agility is unmatched and they are totally invulnerable.

The views they give can be absolutely beautiful as New Eden is full of wonder, but sometimes their operation is something I wish could be enhanced. B13 recently made a comment that the view point should be locked into position if one so wishes. As an interceptor pilot one might wish to lock the field of vision behind the ship so the interceptor could be flown more like an aeroplane through the battlefield.

Tactically I can see little reason for such a feature except that the orientation of the vessel could be constantly observed and could act as a substitute for the lack of a cockpit. There are already instructions in place which allow the drones to focus their views on any object (observe as interest) while orbiting any other vessel within range. There has never been a graphic for these mechanical eyes and there are many reasons why they are not visible. Perhaps the official reason for this is that they are too small to track. Obviously it would be undesirable to have them visible whilst invisible, defeating the purpose of cloaking.

It would be a nice feature to be able to lock the drones into any number of fixed positions particularly on smaller, faster ships to aid navigation. Perhaps next year B13 may have his wish, I doubt it though as there are more pressing issues at hand. Ambulation anyone?