EVE Search - Are railguns really that bad?

Valleria Darkmoon wrote:

Whitehound wrote:

Long range turrets are best used with afterburners.

Why? Because afterburner give a speed bonus, which puts a ship's speed in between the speeds of similar-sized hulls with MWD and those without any propulsion.

As a consequence need others either fit an AB, too, or have to turn on their MWD to catch up. And this helps long range turrets, because then they can hit the faster ships easier, because of the MWD bloom. A 5x larger hull is also 5x times easier to track!!

What is either as fast as, or slower, presents no tracking problem and is a piloting problem.

What is smaller and faster both at the same time requires drones, neuts, webs, tank, TCs/TEs ... before it can be killed.

Further do ABs use less PG/CPU and cap than MWDs and allow one to fit larger turrets with more range and more DPS, which further closes the gap.

Once this is understood become most issues with long range turrets less scary and it also seems to be balanced to use ABs together with long range turrets, when MWDs are being used together with short range turrets.

There is certainly some validity to this even if it is not practical all the time or even frequently. One fight in particular that I've been in comes to mind when an EVE Uni blob of about 40 decided to jump one of our ships in Amamake.

With only 6 people active fighting them head on is not really an option especially with the 3 blackbirds E-Uni brought with them. Instead we had 4 people get into mobile ship including 3 kiting frigates and a nigh-unjammable celestis to damp out the blackbirds so we could point things. The job of the frigates when jammed was to get about 150-170 km off the blob and provide a warp in to a pair of Tach fitted Oracles. The Oracles themselves were nearly immobile on grid but would land and destroy lighter (frigate/destroyer) E-Uni ships in one volley. With a top speed under 600 m/s they were not going to outrun tacklers but incoming frigates were extremely easy to hit due to their MWD signature and very low transversal when firing from 175km. It is far more common for me to miss aligning frigates on the gate with their MWD off on an otherwise identical shot. When pursuers got to a threatening range (~50 km) the Oracles would warp off grid to warp back into a fresh spot provided by someone else. After a few rounds of this and E-Uni's support largely destroyed or crippled they decided it best to leave allowing us to quick kill a BB who was slow getting out. Granted this was all with beam lasers but the underlying theory still holds.

A fight like this has not happened since and that was quite some time ago now. It's not that the advice is bad so much as a little bit unrealistic. The thought is sound but hard to achieve in practice as the story tells the Oracle pilots needed the help of the much faster frigate hulls to really take advantage of their massive range. In a solo type of situation I see it being a whole lot harder and the best solution would probably be to land very far away and make them chase you, burning most of their cap in the process while your AB ship doesn't suffer nearly as hard, though the prospect still feels dubious in many circumstances.

All this being said I am still a fan of some long range guns for small scale PvP (I don't do the fleet thing):

-Arty Hurricane has uses
-Rail Incrusus and Atron, the former always fits AB and active tank the latter kites with MWD
-Rail Merlin for fun
-Arty Jag
-Beam Executioner (did a beam Tormentor once, I don't recommend it though, very clunky)
-Light missiles (not guns but long range missile system) on Corax, Dragoon (3 launchers on solo fit because it doesn't pressure cap) and Condor.

EDIT: You'll notice I do use small rails in PvP, I don't really PvE and never fly large rails in PvP (again no fleets thing) though the opinion seems divided on them somewhat. The long range gun variants in small sizes give a marked advantage over small short range guns due to the generally small optimal/falloff on the short range guns meaning that even a small increase in either of these stats can have a dramatic impact assuming you can control the range of the engagement (see rail devil). In large gun sizes long range in general can have an extreme range advantage to the point where you can apply thousands of damage before a short range fit should even consider returning fire. The advantages apply to medium sized guns but not in sufficient amounts to generally warrant the dps or tracking losses.