The Circular Tank
The circular tank was an idea that first came to me when I wrote an article entitled "The Squadron Effect" for this website. Since then, I have designed and tested several forms of intersupported remote tanks, the circular tank being the easiest.
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Left are the two most basic examples of a circular tank, the two-ship and three-ship versions. The white dots represent ships and the green lines represent remote repairers. Yes, it still counts as a circle even if it's a triangle ;)
The idea behind a completely or partially remote tank is that you effectively move the repairing from the low slots, or mid slots if you're shield boosting, into your high slots. This leaves low/mid slots free for more resistance gear which will improve the effectiveness of the remote repairing. If you were able to run a self-repairer in a high slot, a lot of people would be doing it because the low slot is more useful for other things and a lot of ships have a high slot that is hard to fit (a utility slot, when turret/launcher hardpoints run out).
With a circular tank, as long as you maintain a target lock on your friend, you do exactly that. By having two or more ships remote repairing one teammate each and reciving repairing from one teammate each, every member of the group is running one repairer in his high slots and recieving one repairer on himself. The net effect is as if each person were repairing himself.
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There is, of course, a downside. You have to maintain a lock with the ship you are assigned to repair and so ECM (AKA "Target Jamming") will completely ruin your day. This is why it is often prudent, when running multiple remote repairers on a target in a circle tank, to instead run one normal repairer and one remote repairer per ship. In this way, half your repairing relies on your buddy maintaining a lock on you and the other half does not. Additionally, ECCM would make a good addition to ship setups of those trying this out.
So why not just repair yourself instead of going to all this bother? The damage you can tank vastly increases when running a remote repairer. Not only do remote repairers repair more per unit time than normal repairers, their short duration means that being killed by burst damage or an enemy "Alpha strike" is a lower risk. Additionally, the extra low slot freed up can be used for another hardener, adaptive nano or a damage control to increase your resistances and further increase teh damage you can tank. Not just that but remote repairers use significantly less powergrid than their self-repairing counterparts, allowing a freer use of setups that are heavy on powergrid.
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Now that the theory is out of the way, an example setup should illustrate the point well. I have personally tested this out, with good results but limited use:
2 x Dominix:
High: 1 x large 'Solace' remote repairer (best named), nos/guns.
Mids: cap rechargers, mwd etc, whatever you like really. It is reccomended you use at least one ECCM module.
Lows: 1 x EM Hardener II, 1 x Thermal Hardener II, 1 x Kinetic Hardneer II, 2 x explosive hardner II, 1 x Energised Adaptive Nano membrane II, Internal Force Field Array I (best named damage control).
This setup can tank approximately 600-700 raw damage per second from any damage type, depending on implants and skills. Compared to a normal setup, this is approximately double the raw damage per second that is normally able to be tanked solo. In a PVP situation, mid slots may be used for one or two large capacitor boosters with Cap 800 charges, giving the ability to run a second repairer for several minutes, doubling the raw DPS each ship can tank to approximately 1200 to 1400 on both ships. Impressed yet?
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Unlike the spider tank, there is no limit to the number of people that can operate in this system. Since each ship only repairs one other, only one target lock is required for each member of the chain. Additionally, while there is some room for co-operation between different size classes (such as a battelship and battlecruiser working together), the powergrid usage renders it best to use similar size classes of ships.
The usefulness of the system, however, is in question. It relies on a target lock that could be disrupted by ECM and uses a lot of capacitor. It has, however, proven a most valuable strategy for tanking sentries and pirates alike.
-- Nyphur
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