Rifter

Description

The Rifter is a very powerful combat frigate and can easily tackle the best frigates out there. It has gone through many radical design phases since its inauguration during the Minmatar Rebellion. The Rifter has a wide variety of offensives capabilities, making it an unpredictable and deadly adversary.

Special Ability: 5% bonus to velocity and projectile weapon damage per skill level.

General Tactic

Orbit at 5 km and leave your afterburner on. NPCs shouldn't hit you that often and when they do it will be for very little. Like .9 and such. Sometimes when you're going up to your orbit from a distance you're still going straight and this is when you may get hit for a little bit. I've seen wrecking hits of 30 or more. Don't be alarmed. Once you're in your orbit you shouldn't be getting hit. If you find yourself to be getting hit more than you like, find that named afterburner or train up acceleration control, navigation, evasive maneuvering even for agility to make a tighter orbit faster.

If you find yourself not hitting anyting, train up motion prediction. Remember it's no good to do twice as much damage if you only hit every other time. You really want to be landing as many hits as you can and of course for as much damage as you can. Usually you'll use a 150mm unless your motion prediction is really low, then use a 125mm and if it's really high, use a 200mm. You will hit with the 200mm every now and then if you can hit with the 150mm most likely. However, you won't be hitting as much.

If you're in 0.0, you may not want to orbit at 5km. You can be webbed and scrambled. Then you die. So stay outside 10km. Your light missles will still hit, but your turrets will not. You'll probably be at a 15km orbit. This also presents the option of the enemy running unless you put a warp disruptor on your rifter. Note that the warp disruptor will require higher skills as it uses more capacitor.

Recommended Setups

Missions

High Slots

(2x) Standard Missle Launcher Bay (rockets can also work if you're in a 5km orbit)

(2x) 125mm or 150mm Gatling AutoCannon (if you have a high enough motion prediction you can even use the 200mm cannon for even more damage)

Medium Slots

Capacitor recharger

Afterburner

Low Slots

Micro Auxiliary Power Core

Gryostabilizer or tracking enhancer

Player vs Player

High Slots

(1x) Nosferatu

(2x) Standard Missle Launcher Bay (rocket launchers also are great. if your rocket skills and missle launcher skills are trained high enough the math adds up and rockets will do more damage over time than light missles! Just a shorter range which shouldn't be a problem if you're scrambling and using a nosferatu anyway.)

(1x) 125mm or 150mm Gatling AutoCannon

Medium Slots

(1x) 10MN Afterburner II (yes, the cruiser module)

(1x) Warp Scrambler (named ones better of course for range)

Low Slots

(2x) Micro Auxiliary Power Core

Recommended Skillset Beginner

Navigation level 3+
Afterburner level 4
Acceleration Control level 2+ (this adds speed)
Fuel Conservation level 2+ (really 3 if you don't want to use cap recharger or need lvl5 skills)
Engineering level 4
Energy Sytems Operation level 4+
Energy Management level 3+
Energy Grid Upgrades level 2+ (if you need cap recharger)
Science level 1
Targeting level 1
Electronics level 2+
Weapon Upgrades level 2+
Gunnery level 2++
Motion Prediction level 2++
Small Projectile Turret level 1++
Missle Launcher Operation level 2++
Standard Missles level 1++
Propulsion Jamming level 1 (if you want to scramble people)
Shield Operation level 1+ (if you don't want to use auto target or scrambler and use small shield booster instead)

External Links

Official entry EvE Item Database

Uncle Yaman's Rifter Outfitting Guide