Sunday 22 August 2010

Chimera Guide


I just bought a space limo. Its huge!

This baby is fully decked out. It has an 870 m3 cargo bay, drone Capacity of
80000 m3, 10000 m3 corporate hangar capacity and finally a square kilometer sized ship maintenance array. That's right your like a personal fitting service for my corp mates.



I have been researching the chimera and decided to write a bit of a guide about what i have found out about it since i just purchased one. enjoy :D

Cargo

Although 1000000 m3 sounds big, its not. end of story. You can only fit ships in there if they are assembled which meens they are going to take up a whole lot of space.
Lets take a look at some other ship sizes quickly.

  • Merlin (frigate class) - volume 16500 m. Ok that's cool you can fit 60 frigates 
  • Caracal (cruiser class) - volume 92000 m3. your going to be able to fit 10 of these.
  • Drake (battle cruiser class - volume 252000 m. This is where it gets limited. you can only fit 3 battle cruisers.
  • Raven (battleship class) - volume 486000 m. and you can only fit 2 battleships. 
OK, you can fit 60 frigates / 10 cruisers / 3 battlecruisers or 2 battleships. So your not going to be making your eve living taking ships to 0.0 outposts because of the jump fuel cost but it doesn't mean you cant help out your corp mates out or take a few ships to cover the fuel costs.

So the ship array is pretty small but it fulfills its role for me, saving a whole lot of time. There is no need to find a wormhole to empire if we get in trouble because i can easily jump my hulk and equipment to safety and the same with getting it out there. As well as my hulk, each trip i make to 0.0 ill be filling the 10000m3 corporate hangar with modules that can be sold to corp / alliance members and perhaps buy cheap fuel for the corp pos.

Cost

The ship itself was actually a decent price. You have the ship which is around 600mill, drones around 200mill (the fighter drones cost from 10-15 mill in high sec depending on the race of drones you buy), capital modules (shield booster, energy transfer, shield / armor repairers) cost around 50mill each. If your buying drone control units they are about 40mill each, 3x large CCC rigs (always fit capacitor control circuit rigs, you want a fast recharge time because jumping uses around 70% of your capacitor) which are 10mill each. So your at around 900mill for a simple t2 fit.

Drones

Drones. Without them your nothing. Firstly you will want the fighters skill at 4 (5 if you have 52 days to spare) and your racial carrier skill (caldari carrier in my case) at 4/5. With fighters 4, caldari carrier 4 and advanced drone interfacing (enables you to use the drone control unit, one extra per level) 3 i can use the initial 5 drones that you can use with drones 5, 4 drones from the caldari carrier skill and and 3 extra drones by putting 3 drone control units in the highs.
Below you can see the basic information for each of the fighters. 
Name EM Th K Ex Damage Mod Tracking Speed Rate of Fire Optimal Range Accuracy Falloff Max Velocity Shield Armor
Templar 50 25 0 0 4.0x .075 6 sec 4.5 km 2.5 km 2.125 km/s 2250 HP 3750 HP
Firbolg 0 50 25 0 3.5x .1 5.25 sec 1.5 km 3.5 km 2.25 km/s 2500 HP 3000 HP
Dragonfly 0 25 50 0 4.25x .0625 6.38 sec 5.0 km 3.5 km 2.0 km/s 3000 HP 2750 HP
Einherji 0 0 25 50 2.5x .125 3.75 sec 1.0 km 5.0 km 2.5 km/s 2750 HP 3250 HP

Fitting

This brings us to fittings. like any ship the fitting changes depending what you are going to be doing with it. Everybody has a different opinion of how to fit them but ill link a few acceptable options.  Just remember its your toy so fit it however will be best in your situation.
  • how to fit for fleets, link.
  • If you were going to PVE in it i would use something like this perhaps put a sensor booster instead of the second cap recharger, link
  • I would advise against soloing as they are more of a fleet tool (unless its PVE solo, thats ok)
alternatively you could use something like this for PVE:

Highs: 3x drone control units, 2x smart bomb

Meds: capital shield booster, shield boost amplifier, 2x invulnerability field, photon scattering field, cap recharger and a sensor booster with the targeting range and scan resolution scripts.

Lows: 4x capacitor flux coil

Rigs: 3x capacitor control circuit

drones: 20x light scout drones, 20x medium scout drones and 12x fighters.

Getting around

Now theres the problem of getting around. The alliance has POS's along the way to jump to but what about at each end where manual cyno fields must be generated? I don't want to be dependent on my alliance or corp. what if the people able to create the cynosural fields were offline? So last night i created a new character on my alt's account. With this cyno alt you can create the cynosural field yourself.

To know what system to generate the cyno in so that it will be in range of the chimera's jump drive i would suggest  you use a this website. You can also use the iphone app "iclone" which has an in built jump planner very similar to the websites.

It would be a good idea to get the skill "jump drive calibration" to 4 or 5. this will increase your maximum jump distance from 6.5 light years to around 13. Another skill you will want is "jump fuel conservation" reducing the isotopes needed for jumping.

A couple of things to be aware of when using your cyno alt. firstly the chimera (or any capital ship) is very slow and clumsy and if you generate the cyno field too close to an object (for example a station) you could find the chimera has bounced off the station and is a long way from the docking point. This could be disastrous. One way to get around this is to undock and and travel straight forward. continue as far as you can with your distance from the station staying at 0m.  secondly your alt will be unable to move for the duration of the cynosural activation and as soon as you activate it everybody in local will see the cyno field on there overview as a warpable object. This is why a cheap frigate is recommended, so as to reduce cost if you have to replace it.

Generating the cynosural field

what you will need:
  • a friend or alt
  • a cheap ship with enough cargo space to hold the liquid ozone
  • enough liquid ozone for one cynosural generation (500 units, less if you train cynosural field theory)
  • one cynosural field generator module

If you are jumping to a station remember to be far enough away from it. If you are jumping to a POS be far enough away from the force field in case your ship doesn't have the password for it and it forcefully rejects your ship. 5km seems to work fine although one time my carrier ended up 4km away from my alt in + the 5km to the station. That was the scariest 9km ive traveled.

Before you generate the field make sure you and your alt (or friend) are in the same fleet. Now go ahead and generate it. Now right click your ship, go down to jump and select the system that the cyno has been made in

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check out just how huge the ships are in eve. this video here compares the lengths of the ships.

hope you found my guide useful. ill add more as i learn more about it.

for now, fly safe
serenity one

2 comments:

critique said...

I found this information helpful. I don't fly caldari but I just adapted it to fit the Thanatos.

Cohen said...

Glad i could help. yeah the carriers are pretty similar. the main differences i can think are the thanny has a 100k drone bay where as the chim has an 80k one.