Gnosis Test Flight

About five minutes after I read Ripard Teg's post on the new Gnosis battlecruiser on Singularity test server, I was up and downloading the latest client. This concept this ship represents appeals to me from way back, like April 2009 (emphasis added):

4. Tech II versions of the tier 2 battlecruisers (Drake, etc) and tier 3 battleships (Rokh, etc) as well as tech II carriers and dreadnoughts. I'd like to see some more non-combat-focused ships like a scientific explorer or a ship dedicated to managing the battlefield of multiple fleets or a ship specialized for salvaging.

Well, the Gnosis vessel appears to satisfy this role at first glance nicely: damage bonus? Check. Scanning bonus? Check. Sufficient tank to survive rats? Well we are going to find out.

Click for full size.

First off, I'm a big fan of the model, very sci-fi and menacing, looking like a combination between sleek and strong. The slot layout and bonuses are setup so as to allow for any type of weapon system and defense, a jack of all trades if you will (and expert of none but we'll talk a bit more about that later).

I decided to try a blaster fit with shield buffer thank and see how it compares to a Drake / Tengu.

Note: I did not spend hours on fitting.

First thing I found out is that you will have lots of fitting room on this ship unless you try to go for an Expanded Probe Launcher, then things get tough. With the Core Probe Launcher though I found I had no problems with power grid or CPU when going for Heavy Neutron Blaster IIs, two Large Shield Extender IIs, and two Adaptive Invulnerability Field IIs along with a meta MWD and webber.

So yeah, fitting is a dream. With five mids and five lows and even resistances to start, there are no holes to plug and it does not favour armour tanking over shield tanking or vice versa. I went for shield tanking only because I wanted the mag stabs and tracking enhancer to improve turret effectiveness. I found I could get a fair amount of raw shield hits points with average resists (17K with ~68%) which is comparable to a Drake; you could probably squeeze more tank about of that with some tuning.

I wasn't sure what to do with all the lows and could have easily fit a third magetic field stabilizer on there with the remaining CPU. The two nanofibers and MWD gave me a top speed of 1557 m/s which is very nice but I'm not sure if I had my low grade snake implants in at the time so your mileage may vary.

The drone bay is 75m3 with a bandwidth of 50mb, so I went with Hammerhead IIs for DPS (expecially nice considering drone bonus ofthe hull) and a backup flight of Warrior IIs for interception. The damage with the hammerheads and Void ammo comes out in the 770 DPS range according to Eve client which feels a little low for a battlecruiser setup for damage; its not embarrassingly low but it is also not worth writing home to mother about.  After looking at some other Battlecruiser stats I have come to the realization that the DPS of this ship actually is not half bad outside of the Attack versions (i.e. Tier 3s) especially considering the ease of fitting.

Overall this is a very flexible ship. It won't out DPS some ships and won't out tank others, but it finds a nice spot in the middle road and the scanning bonus makes it as good as the Tech 1 scanning frigs for finding PvE content.

I think I'd go with missiles and an active armour tank for a real serious PvE exploration boat. I might play with that one next as it would give more cap and range to play with while freeing up the mid slots for some code breakers / analyzers. Stay tuned.