Ship fittings in Eve Online are varied and can be very unique, this is what makes ship fittings interesting. All of the ships in Eve Online have many different layouts, these layouts consist of what is called slots. There are 4 types of slots on all ships, this excludes unique ships like shuttles, freighters, jump freighters and other special ships introduced by CCP for special occasions. These special occasion ships can have no slots or some slot, they do vary and the ships may have been given for a christmas prize or spacial time release like 5 year anniversary etc. Anyway the main 3 slot types are High slots, mid slots and low slots, these slots take many different modules. But high sots are mainly used for weapons, repair modulles etc. Mid slots are used for shield modules, afterburner, microwarp drives, webbers, scramblers etc. Low slots are used for Armor modules, hardeners, damage controls, weappon damage multerplier modules and many hull modification modules. I am sorry but there are just too many modules to list all that are used for each slot type, so I have tried to list the main modules.
The other slot on a ship is the rig slots and they basically are used to modify many different aspects of the ship. You can use many types of rigs on ships, but each ship has a certain amount of points assigned to its rig slots and each rig has a certain amount of points assigned to it. The reason for the points is to maintain balance in the game, this is so you cannot over fit certain rigs to give yourself a huge advantage over other players. There are many rig types and their roles vary a lot. There are armor rigs that can improve your overall armor amount, there are armor rigs that can improve the amount your armor repair module can repair on each cycle. There are armor rigs that can make your armor repairer cycle faster so it basically repairs more. Of course you need to train the appropriate skills to use these rigs and once rigs are fitted to a ship they cannot be removed. The only way to remove the rig is to destroy it and some rigs can be very expensive.
There are many other types of rigs, these include shield, weapon, drone, repairing and many others and they can improve your ship in many ways and are definitey worth using. All rigs serve a basic purpose and can modify many different aspects of your ship. This includes changing cycle speeds of modules, overall capacity of modules or base stats. Tech 1 rigs are well priced and help your ships stats greatly, tech 2 rigs can be very expensive and sometimes do not improve the overall stats by that much. So you really need to decide if the cost of tech 2 rigs is worth the bonus it gives.
There are basically 3 ways that ships are fitted, these 3 ways are suited for their individual purpose. The 3 ways are for different players, there is the PvP fit which is used for player verse player. There is the mission runner fit, which is used for mission running, plexing etc. Then there is the insane fits, these fits are unique fits used by people to try and find better PvP fits. Basically each ship has a certain layout of slots, these layouts usually define how a ship should be fitted. Let me try to explain a little of how this works, now as I stated above some slots take specific types of modules, for example shield modules go in mid slots and armor modules go in low slots. What this basically means is if a ship has more mid slots then low slots, you should try set the ship up to use shield modules for its main tank. Tank is just what the ship has more of, so a shield tank will take a long time to lose it’s shield and an armor tank would take a long time to lose it’s armor etc. So if a ship had more low slots, you would make it an armor tanking ship. Well an insane fit, well thats what I am calling it anyway is basically where a player trys to fit the ship differently to the module layout. Some of these fits work some do not, so it can be worth the attempt.
Just to show an example of this the Myrmidon (Gallente Battlecruiser) has more low slots then mid slots, so as a rule most people set it up as an armor tank. But this ship can also be setup as a great shield tank and when you do this it changes the ship greatly, basically when it is setup as an armor tank it’s guns don’t do a great deal of damage. But when it is setup as a shield tank you can add damage modules to the low slots which increases it’s gun damage immensly. So if you were using this ship for PvP your enemy may think you are armor tanked and engage you because he thinks he can take you, but he will be surprised when you are doig more damage then he expected and he dies instead of you. So basically sometimes going away from the normal fits can benifit you greatly, so give it a try.
Now on to the fitting variations and why it usually isn’t good to mission in a PvP ship or PvP in a mission ship. The reason for not using the ships for the oposite of what you have set them up for is because the fits vary a great deal and the role is well defined by this fit. Now with a mission fit players basically go for maximum tank and recharge, so this means they want their ship to tank maximum damage and maintain as much capacitor as possible. So for example a mission runner using a Dominix (Gallente Battleship) would fill his low slots with armor modules, usualy Damage control, armor hardeners, armor repairer etc. Then in mid slots he would fit caacitor modules to keep his capacitor up so if he needs to use his armor repairer he can run it as long as he needs to without running out of capacitor. Because if his capacior runs out, then his tank is gone. If you can’t repair you will lose your armor so the ship needs to be capacitor stable. Now the PvP fits are really way different to this, most PvP fits are made to inflict maximum damage. You will not see many PvP ships fit with capacitor recharges, PvPers usualy use a capacitor booster. The reason for this is quite simple, with cap rechargers you need quite a few to get the recharge rate, so this means you will use multiple mid slots.
Mid slots to a PvPer can be very important, this is because there are some modules that go in mid slots that are important to PvP. These include warp scrambler, webifiers, afterburner, microwarp drives etc. So if you only have a ship with 4 mid slots and you wanted cap recharge, if you fitted cap rechargers you would lose more then likely 3 slots to get a decent capacitor rechare rate. This is why PvPers use cap boosters, as a cap booster only uses one mid slot and uses capacitor charges which are like ammo. They activate the module when they need capacitor and the module uses the charges to inject cap back into the capaacitor. The draw back with this is cap booster charges can take up a lot of space in your cargo hold. But using this module leaves you 3 slots to fit your scrambler, webifier and afterburner.
There are many different slot configuratins for the ships in Eve Online, this keeps the ships unique and balanced for their racial bonuses. Each race in Eve Online has it’s own specialization and this is represented in ship bonuses. For example Gallente ships get bonuses to drones, this is because Gallente are meant to be drone specialists. This means ship slots are usually focused around a race bonus, but it is not always the case. There are many ship types and classes, but the main types are very simple. There is Tech I, Tech II and Tech III. There are also Tier I, Tier II and Tier III ships. The Tier ships are basically a different ship with different bonuses and module layouts, for example the Tier I Minmatar battleship is the Typhoon, then the Tier II is the Tempest and the Tier III is the Mealstrom. 3 very different ships from the same race, the Typhoon is generally an armor tanked gun/missile boat, where the Tempest is a ship that can be armor or shield tanked gun but. The Mealstrom is a shield tanked gun boat and of course the stats between the 3 tiers varies imensly and the price varies as well.
The tech version of ships makes each of them vary greatly, the tech I versions are usually very cheap and easily flown by most players. This is because the training rquired to fly them with modules fitted is relitively short. Now the tech II versions of ships are much different in price and skill intensity. You have to focus your skill training for some time to fly any tech II ship and be able to fit Tech II modules to it as well. There is no real point to flying a tech II ship unless you can do it will, I would not recommend flying a Tech II ship with Tech I modules. Not in PvP anyway the loss can break some peoples bank accounts. The tech III ships are even longer to train for and are very expensive as well, at this stage the only tech III ship tyoe available is cruiser class. These ships are classed as modular and need intense skill training and if you lose one of these ships you will even lose a level of Tech III skill training.
I hope this helps a little with undersandng why ships are fitted differently for PvP and mission running, I may at a later stage do an article on ways to fit certain ships. But I am sure there are many others out there that have already done so. If you have ideas for changing a ships role, you should maybe give it a go. Sometimes insane fits just work, especially in fleet situations. A ship can go totally against it’s role sometimes, especially in a fleet where there maybe 30 of them. Fly safe and try anything that can improve your game.
