Originally posted by Super Perforator 18-07-2015 at 19:44 (2201 Views)
Reproduced here for future reference (with permission from the author) are PVROCK's notes about Thrasher ganking.
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Trying to make miners better people can be quite tiring, I quite understand. I suppose I'm pretty well qualified to talk about thrashers now, I'll do my best to help. This will be a little out of order but I'll try not to forget any questions. Some of this will only be applicable to the secondary fit I use, a mostly tech II autocannon fit for industrials, destroyers and tanky frigates. I'm probably slightly crazy for doing that, but I had the thrashers and figured it just meant stocking more modules and scanning more ships.
First I want to address the choice of system: isanamo has... a lot of gates. You should check whether people really autopilot shuttles on consistent routes through there. Ideally you want people to be going to the same gate 80% of the time when they come from another specific gate. Perhaps the nearby Litiura would be better? UemisaisenNonni traffic is dominant there, I did some ganking there before, although that was vexors rather than thrashers.
Something you should ideally train that's not obvious: Siege Warfare. That 10% shield HP really makes a difference, when ganking on gates with multiple volleys you really always need more HP.
I'd quickly like to address pulling with shuttles: that's not what I normally do, I do normally just undock rookie ships from a pull station, but you happened to look at days when there were multiple squads spawned and I had to dump shuttles at offgrid bookmarks to get CONCORD off the gates. I could've made rookie ships for this but there were a lot of shuttles in stock in the system.
I stay in Sivala between ganks, white knights be damned. I'll chase people sometimes if necessary or move the gank up a gate, but mostly I stay in Sivala for the ganking.
Bookmarks: I have a fair few. Naturally like any -10 I have instas of both types, but for the gates I have offgrids to bounce at if I need to wait for a target, these are in the line of traffic so that I can use narrow and wide dscan to distinguish outgoing from incoming traffic.
For the gank itself I have bookmarks at two specific distances, which I really should increase to three but I'm lazy: 0 and 15km. The 0 is for artillery use and lets me warp to the gate from anywhere in the system and land at approximately the right point to have a decent amount of time in optimal with low transversal. The 15 is for targets I need to be on top of to gank with autocannons. The third distance I want is 10, for targets that I need to start ahead of to stay within autocannon range of during the gank. The 0 could actually benefit from being even closer to the gate than 0 maybe, but the other side of the gate is too far and you don't want to potentially bounce off the gate when you warp to it. Um this probably goes without saying but all the bookmarks are lined up with the other gate by making the brackets overlap with the tracking camera.
Range: I've found that shooting as the target passes 10km on my overview, slightly under 2km out of optimal is close to ideal for my lag and not too close to correct transversal. It might be different for you. Speaking of that, transversal: I manually pilot to correct transversal, which is mostly caused by warp variance when warping to the 0 bookmark. Bookmarks in space are so useful for this! I used to rely on pointing the camera at the gate and looking at the line to the selected ship to determine what direction I had to burn to fix transversal, but with bookmarks in space I can simply see where the bookmark is relative to my landing, that is so much easier.
Scouts: I like the Vigil for scouting thrasher ganks. It doesn't excel in any single area but has decent cargo, good scan res, decent agility, decent speed. I always warp the scout to the gate while I'm warping the thrasher to the gate, at 0 if I am only expecting blue loot and at 15 or 10 if I'm expecting yellow loot. If it's really important that I loot I might even take a second to make the scout approach the target. When scouting I use sort by radial velocity a lot.
I always ship scan any target which could potentially fit tank, even rookie ships although that's definitely paranoia on my part. I cargo scan shuttles if there's a lot of traffic or they wouldn't normally be targets, e.g. 575 m/s shuttles with no sec status at all would never normally be targets. I also cargo scan everything that I would need to break out the AC thrasher for or would probably or definitely not get the pod for if I use an artillery thrasher. I never cargo scan anything that I have already decided I'm going to kill. When there's plenty of traffic to choose from this normally means leopards or anyone with visible implants. When traffic's slim this can just mean the first shuttle I've seen in five minutes.
Quick note about implants: you probably already know this but base shuttle speed is 500 m/s, base pod speed is 150 m/s. There are a lot of notable speeds with implants, but basically 172, 180 an 187 are clean pods, 575, 600 and 625 are clean shuttles. 779 is full HG snakes, 653 is full genos to name the two most expensive other speeds. Also if you ever kill a ship and it seems unusually tanky, check the damage taken for slaves.
I do have an iteron mk 5 (ABSOLUTELY DO NOT RECOMMEND, THE HITBOX IS TERRIBLE, use a bestower instead) in station for when I hit an industrial, which is a bit of a pain and one of the reasons I don't like hitting them unless they're amazing. Regarding scooping yellow loot when everyone wants to kill you... well I probably don't have to tell you this, but the main technique is press warp then loot when nearly aligned. Sometimes I'll use fleet access to jetcans to keep the indy safe easily if I'm looting an industrial wreck, but looting with the indy itself isn't particularly hard unless you're getting bumped.
Hmm, what else haven't I covered. I'm probably forgetting a lot, but let's quickly talk system security: 0.5 and 0.6 should work just fine for three volley artillery thrashers even if unpulled. In fact even if CONCORD is on grid you can get a shuttle and pod in 0.6 just fine, though I suspect not in 0.7. The autocannon thrasher benefits from pulling in 0.6. In 0.8 you can still get a shuttle and pod if the system is unpulled, but I think two volleys followed by a pod may be too much. In 0.9+ you need to pull to get a shuttle and pod.
Oh and when using autocannons on autopiloting frigates, there's such a thing as being too close, manual piloting is a must.
Oh, IMPLANTS! Yours, not the target's!
SP-60x
SM-70x
Slot 8 is pretty irrelevant, a medium turret would honestly be best to use a cruiser with the same clone
SS-90x
WU-1003 as normal
Oh I forgot some of the most important information.
There are hmm five different ways to do this at -10.
A) Warp between gates until you get a target in range, kill it. Doable completely solo with just a thrasher, you will miss a lot of targets and get pointed by neutrals a lot but it's casual and works.
B) Warp between offgrids until there is incoming traffic (using a combination of wide and narrow dscans pointing at the gate as mentioned). Still doable with no scout, you spend less time in warp but can't distinguish manually piloted from autopiloting traffic until you land on grid. Less getting pointed by neutrals.
C) Stay in space warping between offgrids while the scout's next door monitoring incoming traffic. A short warp to the gate makes timing quite easy.
D) Stay in station, undock and warp to an insta then potentially offgrids then a bookmark on the gate. You need to know the timing based on how close the target is to the previous gate for your specific system and gates.
E) compatible with all of the above) Have an orca or bowhead full of thrashers at the gate. Warp to it and board one to gank regardless of your current criminal timer.
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