Sentry Tanking
At every stargate and station in 0.4 to 0.1 systems (inclusive), there are sentry guns. While there is no CONCORD presence to instantly pop you, committting a criminal act near sentry guns will cause them to attack you. Some people mistakenly believe that sentries are the equivalent of concord but restricted to gates and stations to enable belt piracy. This is not true, sentries are nowhere near as powerful as concord. It is actually quite easy to tank them if you know how. While teh ship of choice is usually a battleship, it may not hold up for very long. Often, you only need to tank the sentires for at most a few minutes - until your target is dead or has paid ransom and left. A tricky problem is that if you cannot tank them indefinitely, you are on the clock when asking for a ransom, making it difficult to execute when pirating.
Sentry Damage
Sentry guns were made as lazilly as Concord - with no regional variations whatsoever. The Amarr ones do not actually fire lasers and the minmatar ones don't fire projectiles, no matter what the graphics may say. The sentry guns of each race have identical stats. This data used to be in the Data Export that is made roughly yearly or with every major patch but for some reason the sentry gun info were forcibly removed from the data export before release. but thanks to the wonders of The Wayback Machine, that data is not lost. You can find the stats on the sentries here.
It should be immediately obvious that they deal more kinetic and thermal than EM and Explosive. The stats are as such:
EM: 16, Explosive: 16, Kinetic: 28, Thermal: 28, Damage Mod: 3.5, Rate of Fire: 1.75.
This gives damage proportions of 18.18% EM, 18.18% Explosive, 31.82% Kinetic and 31.82% Thermal. At a stargate in low sec, there are 2 sentry guns that will fire at you. This totals to a combined DPS of 352. A tall order for a battleship but easilly obtainable by a HAC. When designing your tank, these proportions should be kept in mind. Most people will simply get all of their resistances over 80% and run two repairers but this will not let your ship last very long at all. By prioritising resistances by the weightings above, a more effective tank is developed.
Note: The sentry damage may have been changed in a patch and I have not verified it by actively testing it on the test server.
What's the best ship for the job?
There are a number of ships and setups availible for tanking sentries. The favoured ship type, because of the raw damage, is the battleship. While a battleship can be set up to tank the sentries constantly with Tech 2 gear and capacitor boosters or nosferatu, once those limited resources run dry, your tank will fail. In addition, any damage your enemy deals, should he decide to fight back, tears chunks straight out of your ship's hit point reserve. Alternatives include using dual-BS setups, some of which I have found are quite amazing, and running the tank off a can full of cap 800s. However, there are other choices.
The weightings in damage types dealt by sentries were developed to account for Tech 1 ships - if they dealt mostly EM or explosive, shields and armour would each be able to harden against their weak point and end up tanking sentries easilly. Kinetic and thermal damage is considered raw damage, since armour and shield resist it roughly equally. This, however, is not true for Tech 2 ships. The Deimos, Eos and the Astarte have an increased base resistance to thermal and kinetic which allows them to tank sentries amicably. They can also still dish out significant damage. The Ishtar can also take that much damage but sentries cycle targets and will instantly pop your drones if they fire on them.
Some common methods:
* Gank and run - Kill your enemy before the sentires kill you. This is popular among the brand of pirates who would rather kill you and sift therough the loot than ransom you. I personally beleive that a lot of these people collect killmails for fun and are not real pirates but nevertheless it remains a valid piracy method. It is also favoured by non-pirates, people looking to enforce their own personal agenda when wardecs do not cover the enemy e.g. if you want to take out a newbie corp pilot or kill a pirate when he isn't expecting it.
* Support tank - A dual-BS or dual HAC setup using remote repairers rather than standard ones can tank sentries and then some - on both ships. A spider tank could even keep a whole team alive with some co-ordinated effort.
* Cap boosters - This one's simple, youi just leave a secure can of cap 800s by the gate with an industrial ship and then use them to power a dual repairer tank. This would give a pirate ample time to ransom his victim.
* Swift support - It may be possible to get a gangmate to warp to you in a support ship, repair you and warp out before the sentries attack him. It would require a good set of bookmarks such that he will be aligned once the repair cycle finishes.
* Sustainable tank - Tricky to do but it is possible for some ships to sustain a tank based on capacitor recharge alone. This would again give a pirate ample time to ransom his victim.
* Ganged up - Since sentries switch targets occasionally (every 30 seconds, I think), it is possible to send a fleet of expendable Tech 1 ships to a gate and have most of the fleet survive long enough to kill a target. This is a short terms solution and is generally used for ganking.
* Nosferatu - While I had initially dismissed nosferatu as a viable method of tanking sentries indefinitely, relegating them to short-duration combat, a fellow called Joseph Thomas just reminded me via email that it is possible to get a freind fitted for cap recharge and nos them sustainably. An iteron full of cap booster charges and with small cap boosters in the mids will produce a lot of capacitor for you to take and the iteron can hold a lot of cap charges. The ship you are nossing will not be criminally flagged as they would if they used remote energy transferrs on you.
Sentries are a selection pressure acting on the combat, against the attacker. If the person being attacked fights back, he has the advantage of around 350DPS on his target for free. Another thing of note are that if you aid someone who is under sentry fire with remote repairers etc, you will become flagged and the sentries will engage you. Whether you're tanking them for piracy, anti-piracy or legitimate warfare without a wardec, I hope this information helps you.
edited by Nyphur at 16:54 27/07/2006. Corrected damage - only two sentries are around gates, not four. Whoops.
edited by Nyphur at 21:09 27/07/2006. Alright, I'll lay off the gankypirates :). Also added another method to the list - Nosferatu.
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