The mighty Rattler

Normally I don't give the PVE part of w-space life much thought as of late. We did that when we lived with a static C6, and even if our way of making ISK was more focused on farming our static with quite large fleets doing single escalations than quad-escalating our home-syste like most larger w-space corps do now, I feel we know how to do that.

But it's different in our C4 and everyone needs ISK so lately I have played around with a solo-setup for doing C4 sites in our home system. And one that do not involve Tengus.

This is more a fun thing to do than anything else. As sad as it is, the Tengu is most likely the best plexer sub C5s, and R-NAT have a pretty good setup for doing C4s with three of them, so I wanted to come up with a alternative for doing it with just one, or possibly two ships.

That way, I could solo some sites when nobody else was around. We are a pretty small corp after all, and it's not always we have the pilots around for a Tengu-fleet.

My first try was to pair two BS and have them cap-bounce and RR each other. The idea was to generate enough cap with the bouncing that you would not have to bother about the neuts and be able to run a RR. There is a known Vargur-fit for this, but since I can only fly Vargur with one of my alts, I thought you could try it with any combo of battleships that would fit the basic requirements: high resists and enough utility high-slots to fit a cap transfer and a shield transfer. Or two...

For this to be a working duo, at least one of the ships needed a probe launcher. Plexing "blind" for new WHs is out of the question, and two battleships is easy to gank. I had no urge to lose PVE ships.

Marauders are interesting because of this, they have three high-slots left over, where the faction BS only have one or two. With a Marauder, you can have a bounce, a RR and still have room for a probe launcher. You always have the Dominix, but since I also wanted to be able to use this battleships as a replacement for the third Tengu in our normal plexing-fleets, it needed to be shield-based.

So, Vargur, Nightmare, Rattlesnake and Golem was selected as viable to build this upon. I think all those ships have potential to be great C4 plexers if you want an alternative to the ubiquitous Tengu.

Or, they would be, if it was not for the fact that you need to either throw more ISK at resists then I was willing to do, OR have two RR on each ship, leaving no room for a probe launcher.

The solution to that would be to involve a third pilot/alt, stick him into a booster and put the probe launcher on that, you would have almost twice the tank, and a scout to put on any WH you wanted to put ears on.

This would probably work, but are requiring three pilots and the initial goal was to solo or dual-box the sites. If you have three pilots you can just as well go with a Tengu-setup, and what fun is that? Thus, back to the drawing board.

The Rattler had gotten my attention. I had flown it before, but then doing C6s with logistics, and that was before the drone dmg mods...

The second try was to see if you could passive-tank a Rattlesnake enough to solo the sites with that, relying on sentries and a few cruise-missile launchers.

Well, you can, but you run into a few problems if you try;

1. Since you need to stuff practically all of your lows with shield power relays, those nifty drone-dmg mods can't be used. This makes the, potetially awesome, drone dmg a lot less impressive.
2. Doing a passive fit seriously impacts your cap recharge, and on top of that the sleepers neut. You need to come up with something totally passive, since you will be running more or less dry after contact with the first neuting sleeper BS. This is not a problem for your dmg obviously, since neither missiles nor drones need cap, but you might want to run active things like a TP or even a web to kill frigs quicker. I'm not talking about "a little low on cap" here, I'm talking totally frigging dry. Not-able-to-warp-between-sites-due-to-low-cap kind of dry. It's just no fun
3. As a single ship in a site, they sleepers will go for your drones, and that will be a real pita. You could try to get them to shoot your amazing tank instead of your poor sentries by fitting some ECM, but chances are you will not have cap to run it...

All in all, it's doable, but it's not the easy ISK I was looking for. It takes ages and not having cap to run the tiniest candy is meh.

Ok, so pure soloing is off the table. Then as a third try, what about keeping the Rattler but fitting it for resists instead of passive tank, using the lows for drone dmg mods, the highs for cap bounce and shield-transfers and dual-box a Basilisk?

When you don't need to use more then one low (dmg control) and maybe 3 mid-slots for tank, you get a lot more options when it comes to dmg and utility-mods. And as a bonus, the double cap-transfer from the Basilisk makes your cap problems and neuting just a bad memory.

In my highs I put two shield transporters (to keep the basi alive), a single cap transfer (for bouncing the basi), a pair of drone range mods and the all important probe launcher.

Mids was tank (3 slots), a Targetpainter, two drone tracking links (>100km optimal with Bouncers and ~50km with Gardes) and a ECM. The ECM was to pull agro from my drones, but with all the RR going on I'm not sure it's even needed. After 4 plexes done, the sleepers have not even targeted my drones even once.

In low I put 3 drone dmg mods and a dmg control.

In most C4s, the sleepers will spawn either 80km or 50km away depending on which wave it is. They come to orbit at 20ish or 65km. Frigs rush in and orbit closer then 10km.

I ended up using 3 sets of drones; warriors for frigs, bouncers for the spawns that's more then 70km off, and Gardes for high dps "close range" (20-60km) cruisers and BS. With good skills and two tracking links, the sentries absolutely slaughters cruisers, and using the warriors against frigs the limiting factor will be lock time, they more or less instapop.

The tactic was to warp both ships in, orbit the Rattler close with the Basilisk, putting both cap transfers and two or three of the RR on it constantly, then switch back to the rattler establishing cap bounce and running everything from there. The basi needed little or no taking care of, I put a rep on it permanently and that is normally enough unless it gets both argo and becomes webbed, then it might need a second RR.

In the basilisk I used a full set of Hobgobblins, assisting the Rattlesnake. I then could use the painter to direct those drones to smaller stuff i wanted dead, like frigs. That part worked out really well, the 100dps you get from the hobgobs really makes killing frigs much faster, almost to the point where you don't have to use the rattlers warriors.

Unfortunately the drone control range comes from the owning ship and not the assisted one, so I could not send the Basilisks drones further then the normal drone range for that pilot/ship.

I have only done 4 sites with this setup, but it works very nice. In our magnetar C4, I complete them in somewhere between 12 and 15 minutes, which is quick enough for it to not get boring and makes a decent ISK/hour ratio.

There are obviously some work to be done pre-plexing closing and/or critting WHs and scanning down the system, but after that just scanning for new sigs now and then makes it reasonably safe.