Thinking Ahead To Thorax vrs Brutix

Yesterday was a short night of Thorax combat in the 0.2 belts. Close and nasty stuff - great fun! The ramped up armour hitpoints meant combat with the high bounty cruiser 'Rats (the 100,000 Isk Guardian Trooper several times throughout the night) went just as well as it used to in my Brutix. I also changed my ammunition for Antimatter rounds, thereby dealing better for the most part. The normal Serpentis Cruisers, often coming in pairs, fell quicker than they had the night before. The next steps will be to look into fitting a couple of cruiser-level blasters and investigate integrating Tech II modules into the setup.

The Channon IV shows a Serpentis Chief Sentinel what a Blasterax can do.

Looking at the Thorax and Brutix statistics I'm immediately struck by the fact that my beloved Brutix is not actually that much better than the 'Rax. In fact, with only half the drone bay it's actually almost worse. The armour tanking potential is the same, with an equal five low slots. It would be ideal if the seven turret points could handle at least five medium blasters, but (and this is without checking a setup) it really doesn't look like you can. The differences in powergrid and CPU between the Brutix and 'Rax are laughably small (which has already led to plenty of complaining forum goers), so a significantly more damaging Blasterax setup on the Brutix (but with five mediums and a second Cap Recharger in the extra mid slot) doesn't seem possible. This is a shame, because that would have made the Brutix a very suitable change in ship class - a super-Thorax, but without the full heavy Drone capabilities to prevent it being too over-devastating.

The drone bay presents a problem more specific to me. I've been using close to ten medium drones in all my long term ships, and more recently eight lovely Ogre heavy drones in the 'Rax. With the power of heavies demonstrated to me, I'm now torn between flying nine (soon ten) Hammerhead mediums or four Ogres. That I have to make such a drastic choice is a notable weakness of the Brutix.

Ultimately I will have to experiment more with a Brutix setup to do my best to turn it into a large Blasterax. Tweaking setups is more fun that I expected, just so long as it doesn't go too horribly wrong.