Caldari Basic Ship and Skill Overview

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The Caldari Basic Ship and Skill Guide is intended to give fitting and skill recommendations for Tech 1 Caldari ships for Player vs. Environment (PvE) and Player vs. Player (PvP) encounters.

This is a work in progress, and the guide's Discussion Thread is on the Eve University forum. Please direct comments, suggestions, and corrections to that thread.

Rookie Ship

The rookie ship is the first ship you start with. If you are Caldari, it will be an Ibis. A new rookie ship is given whenever you dock at a station where you do not have any ships.

Ibis

The Caldari rookie ship, often called the lolbis.

Frigate

Condor

This is the Caldari T1 scout ship, useful for quick transport of small cargo and some level 1 missions.

Bantam

The Bantam is the Caldari mining frigate. It considered the best racial mining frigate due to it's relatively large cargo bay.

Griffin

The Griffin is an ECM frigate, often seen in Uni fleets offering EWAR support.

Heron

This is the T1 Caldari probing frigate.

Kestrel

The Kestrel is the most commonly flown frigate in EVE, even beating the rifter. This is due to it's strong PVE capabilities with four standard launchers.

Merlin

The Merlin is the most capable Caldari frigate for PVP, but still falls behind the rifter in effectiveness.

Destroyer

Cormorant

Destroyers are ships slightly larger than frigates. They use the same sized modules as frigates, have more high slots. They are often used in pve for level 1 missions. They are rarely used in pvp, as their DPS is not impressive without high skills, although they sometimes fill the role of anti-interceptor.

Flying destroyers is not recommended for PvP Uni fleets. There are some exceptions, like Thrashers for a specialized Hit & Run fleet.

Cruiser

Osprey

The Osprey is primarily used as a mining vessel by Caldari pilots. It's 20% bonus to mining laser yield can mean with high cruiser skills, it can outmine the Procurer mining barge. Caldari miners will tend to continue to use the Osprey, until they are ready to fly a Retriever.

Osprey can also be fitted out as a logistics vessel in fleets. It's skill bonus is focussed on reduced shield repairing capacitor costs, and it has a large extended range for shield repairing.

Blackbird

The Blackbird is an excellent ewar cruiser -- in fact, given its ability to stop the enemy fighting, it might be the most dangerous Caldari T1 PvP cruiser. The main focus of any Blackbird fit should be the midslots, followed by the lowslots. You can find a detailed discussion of Blackbird fitting here.

A 'rainbow' fit of jammers to specifically jam each of the four races is better than a fit with multispectral jammers in almost all situations. It's good to carry spare jammers so you can refit accordingly if you get intel about the enemy's fleet composition.

Battlecruiser

Drake

The Drake is the most commonly flown ship in all of EVE, effective in both PvE and PvP combat.

• classic missile ship, bonus to kinetic missile damage
• quick shield recharge rate and shield resistance bonuses allow great PvE passive regen tanks; standard Caldari Level 3 mission ship
• with good skills, is capable of running some Level 4 missions -- albeit slowly
• alternatively, can fit a large buffer tank for PvP combat
• . . . or, because it's usually ridiculously well-tanked, and therefore not primary target, it can be only lightly tanked , focusing on damage-dealing and ewar

Ammunition, Range, and Kiting

Missiles

In PvE you are likely to be using missiles, since missiles have some advantages over turrets in PvE, especially for new pilots. One of missiles' advantages is that each kind of missile comes in four versions, each of which does one of the game's four damage types.

This means you can always target the weaknesses of NPC enemies by selecting the missiles which will damage them most. You should select the missile that will hit their weakest resistance (so, for example, explosive missiles against the Angel Cartel) unless you're in a ship (like the Drake) which has per-level bonuses to kinetic damage. If you're in a ship with kinetic missile damage bonuses and you have the relevant ship skill (Battlecruiser, for the Drake) trained high enough then kinetic may do more damage.

Missile range is roughly (not exactly) flight time multiplied by speed. Missiles have no optimal or falloff, they are either in or out of range. The long range missiles popular in PvE often let you outrange the enemy, and a propulsion module (an afterburner, for missions, because a microwarpdrive won't work in deadspace) will hopefully let you kite the enemy and keep them at range.

Hybrid Turrets

If you've chosen to fight with hybrid turrets you should carry 3 types of ammo during missions, and switch when required. Use close range (antimatter or plutonium) ammo by default. If you are taking too much damage at close range, switch to medium range (lead or thorium) or long (iron or tungsten) range ammo and fire from further away.

Guns can suffer from tracking issues, so try using the 'keep at range' option instead of the 'orbit' option. With the amount of enemies in missions, orbiting is less likely to mitigate the total incoming damage from rats. Even close to optimal, when orbiting and using close range ammo, guns can sometimes have difficulty tracking enemies. Enemies should be kept close to optimal, this should keep angular velocity low to avoid suffering from tracking issues, and as long as enemies are within optimal there will be no reduction in damage.

To find out your optimal with ammo, load ammo in your guns, then right click and show info. The optimal displayed in the attributes will be adjusted for ammo and skills.

Tech and Meta Levels

These fittings were made mostly using Tech 1 Meta 0 modules, or Tech 2 for larger ships. This is partly to avoid confusion with higher meta names. Also, this insures that ship fittings are relatively cheap to get into without spending too much for new players with cash flow difficulties. And during war, pvp fittings using Tech 1 Meta 0 modules are provided by the university.

Higher Meta items up to meta 4 will often be easier to fit. Tech 2 is Meta 5, and harder to fit. Meta 3 and 4 are expensive, often more expensive than Tech 2. Meta 1 and 2 will often be less expensive than Meta 0, due to supply and demand on the market.

Drones

Caldari ships never have large dronebays for their size, and never rely on drones as a primary weapon system. However, Caldari pilots should still train some drone skills for PvE and PvP combat since they provide useful supplementary DPS and are an essential defence for large ships; in L4 missions the most dangerous enemies can be frigates since, unlike all the other rats, they can warp scramble you, stopping you from escaping if your tank breaks. And light drones are the Raven's only effective defence against frigates. Consider Tech 2 light and medium drones a good medium-term goal.

Small drones kill frigates and destroyers, mediums drones hunt cruisers and battlecruisers, and heavy drones do well against battleships and reasonably well against battlecruisers.

As with missiles, you can pick the drone type that hits your enemy's weakest resist. (With the exception of Amarr drones, which do such low damage that it's not worth it.) Gallente drones have the highest damage multiplier, and thermal damage is the best or second best damage to deal against most rat types. For Level 1 to 3 missions, it's fine to exclusively use Gallente drones, although switching drones may make you more efficient. In Level 4 missions, consider varying between Gallente, Caldari and Minmatar drones to match rat weaknesses.

Watch for drone aggro. When arriving in a mission room, don't launch your drones until you've gotten the attention of a group of rats by shooting them. If a new wave of enemies arrives and attacks the drones or a new group of enemies aggro the drones, they should be recalled to the drone bay, and released only when you have full aggro. Under normal circumstances, you should never lose drones when using proper aggro management with rats.

Hot keys are recommended for drone management. They need to be initially launched manually from the drone window, though hot keys can be set for attack and return to drone bay.

In PvP Gallente and Minmatar drones are used almost exclusively. Gallente drones for their damage potential, Minmatar drones for their speed and explosive damage which armor tankers will not always patch.

Tank & Gank

Different rat (NPC pirates) factions have different damage type resistances, and deal different damage types.

Drones and hardeners should be switched around based on rat types.

Damage type resistance and dealt by rats can be found in the NPC Damage Types article.

Mission-specific damage profiles can be found on Eve Survival.

All EHP in this guide is given with EFT calculations, not in-game EHP.

Salvaging After the Mission

Salvaging boats are usually used to clean up rooms after missions are complete. To do so, make sure you bookmark one wreck for each room in the mission, since the acceleration gates will disappear after the mission has be turned in at the agent. Once the mission is turned in, the MWD can be used to propel the salvaging boat within tractor range faster.

For level 4 missions, many players switch from the destroyer to a battlecruiser. Unfortunately, the Gallente battlecruisers have 6 or 7 high slots, instead of 8 like for some other races. The hurricane is well liked as a salvaging boat for its speed (for a BC sized ship) and 8 high slots.