Last year, I made some forms and posted them to a bunch of Wormhole CSM candidates, to highlight how they differ, and what they do. I think the result was interesting, but didn’t quite do what I wanted to achieve - putting numbers to peoples heads is hard. Depending on who you ask, I might also no longer be a Wormholer (Such is the life of a C2 → C5 / NS resident).
So this year I am doing something slightly different. Instead of trying to do what everyone else does - figuring out who to vote for, I would like to build some statistics that some of the CSM candidates can hopefully use (also probably a fruitless endeavor).
One of the constants in the CSM Candidate world seems to be Stitch Kaneland. He tries getting in for a few years now, and his portfolio of things that he has spend time thinking about keeps getting bigger. So I think it’s about time that he actually gets do do things (or lose all hope trying). He is also the only guy from last years roster that is running again!
One of Stitch’s proposals is the weapon system rebalance, which fundamentally bases on the fact that the smaller guns of each size are underused. So how much do they actually get used?
Getting the Data
In order to figure this out, I classified the last few months of zkillboard for ship losses, and classified every single ship by it’s weapon system. A full list of weapon systems classified, and what abbreviations I used can be found here.
Ideally, I would figure out hom many kills were achieved with each weapon system, but that is a hard task as not all killmails show the weapon system of the attacker. So I had to go with the losses instead. I used a combination of python scripts and elasticsearch to add this classification to my ever growing zkill database.
Victimship Bias
Naturally, one would think that ships that are sub-optimally fit die more often than ones that are optimally fit. As such there is a chance that these sub-optimal fits (which likely have sub-optimal weapon systems fit for the purpose) are slightly over-represented. This means that the data represents an upper bound on how many people fly sub-optimal stuff.
I decided to break it down by ship type, as that seems to be something that is somewhat close to intuition, and used all the kills from the last three months. Ships without weapons on them are excluded, and ships with some wired other weapon systems are grouped under “Other”.
Medium Projectile
I decided to include all the sub-variants with secondary weapon system, as these seem to be quite interesting.
Medium Hybrids
Medium Lasers
Summary
So all in all, it does look like Stitch is on the money with these Ideas: One can clearly see that the Munnin, Ferox and Eagle as the mainline fleet ships have almost alwys the same, maximum size weapons fitted. For the other ships that aren’t in some mainline nullsec doctrine, ships the variety is significantly bigger.
Autocannons seem to widely be used in all three sizes. Smaller sized Autocannons (D180s and 220s) are most common on antitackle platforms such as the Vagabond and Scythe Fleet. Here it might even be beneficial to fit them when fighting small targets, as in that case the tracking increase more than covers the DPS decrease. But they of course also offer better fitting.
For Blasters all sizes seem to be used as well. Interestingly Blasters types seem to be evenly spread across many hulls, so I suspect that the main reason to downsize is fitting restrictions and the DPS / tracking tradeoff isn’t as important - you usually fight withing web range anyway.
For the undersized weapons (650RT, 200R, D150R, FMPL, FMBL) the most relative use seems to be on T1 cruisers (Rupture, Maller, Omen, Moa). These are probably also the least meta platforms in this comparison. So I think this might be largely people experiment with uncommon hulls and weapon systems.