Gosomo's Guide to Multi-vector bombing.

These are the sorts of bombing runs that the likes of Mister Vee, Old Hroft, and Dingo (among others) do to make ridiculously sexy explosions that end up in dozens of billions, if not hundreds of billions of isk, blow up in the course of 10 seconds.

You need three main things to pull off a multi-vector bombing run: notice, perches, and patience. Of course I'll go over the mechanics and how to optimize multi-vector bombing runs as well a little later.

You cannot feasibly set up a multivector bombing run on the fly. It takes at the very least 5 minutes making the 4-6 perches you need, and you also need to know where the fight is going to take place so you can make the appropriate bookmarks/cyno chains to begin with. It also really helps to know what your targets are going to be in. You would want to hit a BL. Maelstrom with Shrapnel, while on the other hand a GRR GOON Megathron is weak to Electron bombs. When in doubt; use shrapnel. Explosive is the least common damage dealt in the game and as a result it is generally the lowest tanked resistance; unless you are bombing ahacs, in which case please don't bomb the ahacs unless you have 100 bombers what are you thinking

Again a rather basic concept, you are going to need 90* perches in 1-3 different vectors (x,y,z axis). I'll get to the why you need 90* perches later. Now they don't technically have to be directly up, down, left, right, forward, back, but you are going to have a hard as fuck time properly gauging angle, So I really recommend against it. For multi-vector bombing runs you want as much space as possible so try sitting near the edges of grids. For POS, SBUs, IHUBs, and Stations this is generally 250-300km in a single direction from the center of the object. Chances are when there are 200-500 dudes on a single grid it is going to expand a lot. I always fly off grid, burn back on grid plus another 10-20km, and then BM the location. But if you want to be lazy you should be safe with 250km. Keep in mind gate grids often get fucked up so be ready to improvise if it turns out your beautiful 250km bookmark is suddenly on an entirely separate grid.

This one is by far the hardest. If you have 42-48 bombers in your fleet (a full bomber wing) they are going to be ADHD raddled children with raging boners to kill anything on grid. This is by far the biggest reason I stray away from bombing because I have no patience for those people and I don't like to yell, but anyway you should always wait, wait, wait, wait….wait..g- no…wait, okay go. If you warp in after the HIC I pilot puts up his bubble, or try and bomb a bunch of nados after one second of them landing you are going to completely whiff your bombs. Not only that but chances are you are going to lose a bunch of bombers in the process. As soon as you lose your critical mass of bombers thems the breaks; You can no longer pull off a sexy bombing run and you're usefulness to friendly fleets has gone down dramatically.

Okay so you've got your intel. Black Legion are going to bring Alphafleet to shoot a CSAA against a bunch of AHACs. You setup your covert cyno chain, ask 2000x times in fleet if everyone has Shrapnel bombs loaded, get everyone to their perches, and you've waited patiently until the perfect moment shows itself: Black Legion are warping down to the POS and they are perfectly positioned to get hit by all six of your squads. You, with smug oozing out of your face, use your prober to warp your fleet at 30km to murder those silly maelstroms aaaand…they all live.

You've just experienced the hard cap of bombing, that is to say, if a bomb gets hit by more than 7 bombs of the same damage type (1 of any other damage type) they will blow eachother up. Now 7 bombs will always go off assuming the bomber survives the bomb landing, but you can never do more than seven bombs, unless of course, you warp from different directions at an extended range. Geometry, hoooo.

This is your typical parallel bombing run. The pink square is a bomb detonating, and the gray area around it is the explosion radius. Every square represents 1KM, and the black square in the center is your bombing target. As you can see, any ship (black square) within the Venn Diagram Of Death will get hit by 14 bombs, while only the bombs in each individual squad will affect each other. The optimal warp distance for a parallel (14-16 man) bombing run is 37.50KM, however I prefer 38.00KM because it is a nice round number and it reduce variables such as ship landing location/bomb direction messing up with bomb collision.

Now 2 squad bombing runs are cool and all, but holy fuck you want to destroy an entire double plated armor battleship fleet. Let's do it. You get 4 perches setup, you warp your fleet at 38km like a god damn professional aaaand…they all live. What the fuck.

This is what happened. As you can see, you don't have have a beautiful Venn Diagram Of Death, you've got a morbidly obese butterfly. The bombs on the x axis are hitting the bombs on the y axis. This is due to our friend Pythagoras's Theorum. a2+b2=c2. You warped at 38km from your target, meaning the bombs were ~8km away from the target and 16km away from each other on a single axis. However, the shortest distance between two points is a line and not a right angle, so you're 16km distance between top bomb and bottom bomb is only 11.31km away from left and right bomb. That is not greater than 15km resulting in bombs killing each other. So what is the perfect distance? Technically it's about 30+10.61km (root of (10.61km^2)*2 = 15.005km) making the optimal 2 vector bombing run 40.61km, but we want to err on the side of caution so I would suggest 40.75km to 41.00km. Again, this helps to nullify variables of ship location as well as angles because chances are the enemy fleet is not going to be sitting @ 0 on the strategic objective that you used as a point of refernce for your perches. The end result of your beautiful bombing run is this

I showed 42KM because it provided a more clear image of the bombs interacting with each other, again you can technically push it all the way up to 40.61km but don't go any lower than 40.75km. Now what about three dimensions? Am I going to have to warp in people at 44km to do a 3 vector bombing run? The short answer is no, 41km is still fine. There is really no easy way to graphically represent it without 3d modeling, but basically just imagine that diagonal line between top bomb and side bomb. The distance between top bomb and side bomb will be the same as top bomb and forward bomb, or forward bomb and side bomb. The third dimension is pretty bro in that regard.

Congratulations, you now know how to pull off advanced bombing runs. If you manage to get perfect timing you can deal upwards of 300,000 raw damage in a 6km deathsphere, of course less damage as you radiate outwards.

tl;dr numbers on bombing Bomb HP Limit: 7 (same type) bombs

Single Squad Limit: 7 || Optimal Warp Range: 30.00KM

Parallel Bomb Limit: 14 || Optimal Warp Range: 38.00KM

2 or 3 vector Bomb Limit: 28 or 42 || Optimal Warp Range: 41.00KM-42.00KM

In my opinion it is always healthy to have 8 people per squad if you can afford it. This means that if you lose a few bombers during the bombing run you are still dealing maximum potential damage. You can technically have 9 per squad for redundancy, but you are wasting bombs at that point and it would be much more efficient to do multiple waves of bombing runs. Happy bombing.