Bomber gangs are a fun, low-barrier gang that utilize your Black Ops’ bridging ability. I would dare say the majority of your alliance/corp mates have the ability to fit and fly at least one of the stealth bombers.
I think of bomber drops sort of like bubble camps, either A) you’re doing it because you’re bored and don’t want to make 50 round-trip jumps to shoot stuff or B) You know of a specific target rich area that will reward you for your patience (maybe an evac in progress and you just wait for the haulers to hit the low-sec gate) Bomber drops are very similar, but usually produce better results. With dedication and some patience, you can usually haul yourself a really shiny or expensive kill with little overall effort.
Let’s look my favorite casual bomber gang comp from the ground up – The JB SURPRISE PARTY! (And possibly CYNO GEN PARTY!)
Gang Composition
Very straightforward here. The more bombers, the better you’ll do. Let’s look at a good set up:
1-2 Scouts – (Out of Alliance scouts will make this entire endeavor more fruitful)
20 Bombers
1 Black Ops
1 Transport Ship (Optional)
1 Return Cyno (or just bridge the fleet back using one of your Cyno Gens if you have them)
Obviously, you might not be able to get 20 guys to join up for a bomber gang. You either love these things or you hate them. (You very well may end up sitting and chatting it up on Comms for two hours before you score a good kill.) The more the merrier, but I probably wouldn’t take less than 12 bombers.
Fits
There are 2 rules for the JB Surprise Party fleet that can never, under any circumstance, be broken!
Rule #1: Afterburners only – NO MWDs
Rules #2: No Bomb Launchers – don’t even bring them, offline launchers are a waste of a slot.
Now that we have that in your head. You don’t need to worry about fits, per se. Just make sure fits are SAM fit: Siege Missile Launchers, Afterburner, Medium Shield Extender. To be honest, after those, the rest is just icing. You’d really like a nice mix of Target Painter, DPS mods, Long Points, Damps, etc. (You know that extra high slot you have from not fitting a bomb launcher? Fit a covert cyno if you are skilled up / otherwise fit an offline small remote armor rep for post battle fixes)
Scouts should be in a bomber. Recons/Cov Ops are useless here, since they have a targeting delay after decloaking. You’ll watch your prey warp away before you can get a point. 99.9% of the time the bomber will die because the POS will finally lock it and dispatch your stationary little ship.
You can fit your Black Ops for gas can work seeing as you won’t be engaging anything with it. Load up on cargo expanders and you can probably live without the transport ship.
Where to go
Pretty obvious here. Having an enemy jump-bridge map makes life super easy, but it’s not totally necessary. Check out Dotlan and specifically look for your enemies border systems. Typically, you’ll find JBs near nullsec-empire connections or near the edges of their region. Definitely look at your enemy’s home systems, too!
Knowing where JBs connect gives you the added bonus of being able to have scouts on both sides of the bridge. Knowing what is jumping through and what’s on the other side gives you time to ready your gang.
Open your ingame map and change the Filter to “Active Cyno Fields”. Disregard the blue dots, these represent ship cyno’s that, unless you have intel, will probably be a waste of your time. (More on this in another post) The other Dots are active cyno generators. Go to those systems. More often than not, where you find a Cyno Gen, you find a JB. And hopefully twice as many targets.
What to do
Place the scout about 10km above or below the JB. (Make sure not to be within 7,200 meters of any JB or Cyno Gen as you may be decloaked by your target on jump in.)
20 bombers will easily do 6,000 raw DPS. So depending on your gang size, you might not want to bust your cover to kill and iteron mk. 5 passing through. Wait for tasty treats like Carriers/Rorqs/Jump Freighters/Freighters/Stupidly pimped faction Battleships
When you gang loads grid:
1) Immediately pull secondary points and begin anchoring with your AB on. — Your afterburner is utterly essential to your survival if the POS has small (and even medium) guns. I typically have members set orbits @ 10k before we enter.
2) Shoot
3) Loot
4) Cloak
4A – Targeted by the POS? warp off. Pointed by the POS? Keep orbiting with your AB on until it switches (overheat if you’re taking damage) Then warp off.
5) Somebody set a safe spot, and bring in the Black Ops to bridge home
Things to remember
1) When a ship jumps through a JB or Cyno beacon, it’s completely invulnerable to you until its session timer runs out. Make sure the scout has the “Velocity” column on his overview, the moment you see him move, decloak and point.
2) When the cyno is lit on the bomber, the POS will take about 20-30 seconds to lock and begin firing.
3) Don’t orbit your target, have an anchor pre-determined for everyone to orbit. If your orbiting the target when he dies, your ship will stop and you’ll get one-volleyed by the POS. (Typically, the anchor will orbit the JB/Cyno Gen, or handle keeping an orbit up when the target dies)
So there you have it. I wrote quite a bit, but these fleets are great when you just want to relax and get some hilarious kills. You may lose a bomber or two on the POS, but you’ll get a nice kill out of it.
EVE Black Ops 