Rep Drone Tanking

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Overview

Relying on a large personal tank in typical pvp engagements is often a losing proposition.

Using speed, range, or electronic warfare scales better against larger forces.

Giving up on tanking completely though is a mistake. While a personal tank works well in small gangs and fails in large ones, remote repairing is actually the opposite.

Drone Love is almost the same concept as Spider Tanking except in the place of using Large remote repair modules the gang will use armor maintenence drones to do the repairing.

Advantages

Repair drones have a 45km+ range compared to the 9km of Large remote modules allowing the gang to use propulsion mods and short range weapons, plus the gang can jump through a gate into the enemy gang without its ships being too spread out they cant rep each other.

Also 5 Heavy armor maintenece bots rep for around the same as a tech two Large armor repairer yet they use no cap, this removes the dependance of the gang on cap boosters allowing it to last longer engagements and roam for longer or deeper into nullsec.

Resistance to ECM, once you have your drones on the friendly target they will continue to repair even if you become jammed, making ECM a less effective method of breaking your repping power.

Finally it frees up high slots which can be used for extra weapon systems or energy neutralisers to assit in breaking your opponents tank.

Disadvantages

Heavy drones are very slow and will take time to move to the intended target, the further away the longer it will take, this increases the chance of the target popping before he recieves enough reps to tank the incoming dps.

Drones can be destroyed, multiple bombs, smartbombs or light ships weapons could easily destroy the gangs repping ability.

Using logistics drones greatly reduces the gangs damage output, 5 Heavy combat drones put out alot of dps.

Drone Love Battleship Tanking

Basics

After testing this tactic it became apparent that it would be best used instead of Spider when engaging capital ships such as Carriers, capital ships commonly fit smartbombs which will destroy combat drones used against them therefore using Logistics drones is much more appealing, provided the gang does not get too close to the target.

Also its easier to break capital ship tanks with alot of energy neutralisers, the Drone Love gang has plenty of spare high slots and extra capacitor to support this.

Alternatively Logistics drones can be used in addition to other remote repair tactics like Spider Tanking, Dual Guardian Gang and Dual Basilisk Gang(Using shield mainenace bots) to create a much stronger tank.

Fittings

When fitting for Drone Love the key attributes you should focus on are Lock time, Resistance, Buffer and Sensor strength.

The starting point for any fitting should be the tank, meaning 2 1600mm armor plates, 2 Energized Adaptive Nano Mebrane II and a Damage Control II.

Additional tanking modules and rigs are very beneficial as well, keeping you alive longer, a good example is Trimark Armor Pumps which when combined with 1600mm plates give a huge boost to armor hp.

Next comes the Drones, ships with a 75m3 Drone bay should field 5 Medium armor bots and 5 Warrior II's, ships with 125m3 Drone bay should field 5 Large armor bots and finally Dominix should carry a flight of Large armor bots in addition to a mix of combat drones.

After this a sensor booster with a scan resolution script will bring down your lock time to a sufficient level, allowing you to quickly apply repair drones to gangmates.

Even tho Drone based logistics is better against ECM then its Spider counterpart its not immune therefore atleast 1 ECCM module is essential.

Unlike Spider tanking Drone based logistic gangs have enough range and capacitor to run Micro warp drives but they are not essential unless your ship is a blaster boat for example.

Fighting

Your number one priority in any remote repping gang is to lock and repair your gangmates as they broadcast for armor.

After your drones have been assigned then you can focus on applying dps to the primary and ewar to the enemy gang.

Its important to set your drones to passive and check your drones regularly to make sure they dont accidently start repping hostiles.

Another important part of remote tanking is managing your targets, knowing who to unlock and unlock, plus making sure you dont accidently fire on gangmates.

As a rule you should lock the primary and secondary, then have the past 2 people to broadcast locked leaving atleast 1 target slot free, once a new person broadcasts and you begin to lock them you will want to unlock one of your other gangmates so you always have one target spare.

If you start taking damage make sure you broadcast quickly and do not wait until you start taking armor damage, try to do it while you still have shields left providing your gang enough time to lock you.

One final note is you will need to monitor your done HP, its important to know if someone is firing on your drones, If someone is firing on them do not recall all your drones just the one taking damage, also try to identify the ship responsible and alert your gang via vent so he can be shut down with ewar or even primaried.

Setups