Drones, small or large, are pretty fast, I think. They actually can do an OK job at snarling up NPC ships and keeping them busy. But, obviously, you lose a lot of drones that way.

I use them like Joe, I tank everything and only send out drones after I have established aggro.

However, running around in my battlecruiser, I have a hell of a time with frigs that get inside my effective range. I use my drones to take them out, but my medium drones seem to take forever. I'm not sure if switching to the light drones would help in this situation or that the frigates are just tough.

Also, if I use a webber on them, I still can't hit them, but they seem to repair their armor faster. When I turn it off, my drones start making very slow headway again.

In a sense, yes, although not quite. A light drone will still do the same amount of damage on bigger ships as it would do against frigs allowing for the same damage resistance. The opposite is not true. The drones themselves have the same attribute list as the player ships with different values. So what is generally true for player ships is true for the equivalent drone including tracking and rate of fire.

There's an optimal solution to your problem... but I don't know what it is. I'm not much of a drone user. In fact, I hate drones coz other than warp disruptor bubbles, drones are the only thing that consistently kill me.

i personally love drones. but it depends on the ship i am flying what i use. on my raven (mission runner) i use 1 small 2 med, and 2 heavy on my apoc, i use all heavy's (apoc = miner/pvp) but with my cruisers and frigs, it depends on the drone bay really...and what skill you have in drones. it sometimes is better to have more little guys than 1 big guy...especially if you have more skills on light ones.

Hehe, well with starting ships (cruiser sized and smaller) I will say that. With the larger ships it does start to change a bit specifically for problems like this. For example my mission running raven many times was setup with small light lasers to deal with the webbing/warp scrambling frigates because if you launch drones in certain missions they can make the rest of the spawns present active just by flying close to them. However I typically find the best solution to be a mix of drones + missles but it does depend on the ship you are flying and what type of high slots it has as well as the size of the drone bay. Of course the optimal drone use is tech 2 medium drones. They do close to the damage of tech 1 large drones, but have the MWD speed, tracking, and orbit speed closer to tech 1 small drones (ie the best of both worlds). As someone said above drones are just like player ships, the smaller ones have better tracking and speed, while the larger ones do more damage but can't track or even keep up with smaller targets. And even inside the sizes of drones the MWD speed, Orbit velocity, and tracking changes (ie warriors don't have the same stats as say acolytes even though both are small drones) and so I don't care as much about damage as I do about getting better tracking/orbit velocity because that will end up meaning higher overall damage to small fast targets. Target painters and webs should also help with hitting those pesky little frigates. There are also moduales you can fit which increase the tracking speed of drones as well as thier optimal range and I think velocity, I don't use them a lot mainly because I don't run a ton of missions anymore and use t2 mediums which are a good overall compromise if a tad on the expensive side.

On a side note about getting aggro/keeping aggro when using drones. As I mentioned earlier it can be hard to do in certain missions because your drones will go out and start attacking ships as soon as they kill there current ship, and this can put them in a position to "activate" a new group. My general solution is to not use drones until the last group but sometimes that isn't possible, in those cases I won't use the drones unless I know they won't activate the other groups. One way to check this out is to send one drone to scout the way, and just pay attention to the drone tab and see if it starts taking shield damage, if so order them back to the drone bay asap. Drones recharge all their shields once they enter your drone bay, and you can use remote armour rep's on them to repair there armor if you have a high slot you want to waste on that.

BTW Khianna which ship are we talking about here, I could probably come up with a decent setup which would deal with them for you.

I usually run my Ferox with 4 heavy launchers and two normal missile launchers for the lickle frigates.

You might also want to learn skills like Drone Navigation and Drone Interfacing, which increase the speed and damage of your drones, respectively.

Official forums would tell you to get rid of the AB since you're going to be slow anyway. Just use a separate ship to loot and salvage. Maybe throw in a target painter instead?

But the official forums also told me I could handle that level IV in my Drake "n 10 minits np ^_^" so...

I generally just leave the 4 wrecks where they lie, so I guess you could be more lazy.

I don't want to drop money into a cap rig since I really am not comfortable with my setup yet. I will drop the AB for a target painter after I get that skill trained. I will also try to fit that targeting computer into the setup.

I do still have some questions with my tank though. I need to play around with it more rather than just keep doing the same thing. I just have too many distractions right now.

I was reading a bunch about Amarr ships last night and it was sounding like the preference was to use pulse lasers on the smaller ships (BC and less) and try to stick close to the targets. Try to increase ROF and ability to hit targets. The general idea being that most people have high resist to EM which is primary damage for lasers, so you need to apply the damage quickly and not miss. I can see this working when flying small ships, but not sure how well it would work when you have to fly a long way to targets, since the pulses don't seem to have good range.

Anyway, my training is just getting split between trying to get into low sec mining and improving my combat skills. If I could focus, it would probably do me more good, but I get tired of doing one thing and go to the other for awhile.