The 500MN Ishtar: A Ratting Experiment Worth Reading

2026-10-08 · #pve #nullsec #fits

One of the best posts on r/Eve this week wasn't a war report or another Ansiblex argument. It was a semi-scientific essay about ratting in an Ishtar, with control groups, error bars and wreck-distribution charts.

The author is Ziggarot Cadelanne (u/Ziggarot), or "Ziggy", as he asks to be called. All credit for the idea, the fit, the testing and the numbers below goes to him. This is my summary of his work. Go read the original for the charts and his full write-up.

The short version

Fit an Ishtar with a 500MN MWD, set your Default Orbit Distance to 20 km, and orbit the first wreck. The rats end up spinning in place, their wrecks clump together, your drones travel less, and you make about 1.18× the ISK of sitting still, for a fit that costs about 1.03× as much.

Where the idea came from

Ziggy was reading up on Abyssal sites, where the guides tell you to put yourself between an enemy and the barrier so the enemy comes back toward the gate. He'd noticed that ratting NPCs are dumb in the same way. They try to keep range and slowly orbit you.

So if you control where you are, you control where the rats go. Orbit fast on the far side of where they want to be, and they never get far. Shorter distances mean less drone travel time and better tracking, and that means faster ticks.

He tried it with a 100MN afterburner first. Then, in his words, he "took a big hit of my vape" and fitted a 500MN microwarpdrive to a cruiser. Several iterations later, he had a fit that orbits at over 2,000 m/s.

The fit

About 160m ISK:

[Ishtar, 500mn Ishtar]
Mark I Compact Power Diagnostic System
Power Diagnostic System II
Drone Damage Amplifier II
Drone Damage Amplifier II
Drone Damage Amplifier II
Drone Damage Amplifier II

500MN Y-T8 Compact Microwarpdrive
Large Shield Extender II
Enduring Thermal Shield Hardener
Cap Recharger II

Medium Ancillary Current Router I
Medium Ancillary Current Router I

Wasp II x5

The MWD balloons your signature radius from 170 m to 595 m. As Ziggy points out, any MWD adds the same sig bloom, so you might as well take the speed. This is not a beginner fit. He needed most engineering and navigation skills at IV–V to make it fit and stay cap stable. Even then, cruiser waves take his shields down to about 40%.

The experiment

He compared three setups in Guristas and Serpentis Forsaken Hubs, using the same implants, four Drone Damage Amplifier IIs and no drone tracking or navigation mods in every test:

The procedure for the orbiting runs:

1. Set the Default Orbit Distance to 20 km.
2. Warp into a Forsaken Hub.
3. Orbit a battleship.
4. Find the battlecruiser closest to where they usually spawn, then lock and kill it.
5. Orbit that wreck until the site is done.

He discarded the first site of each run, because you usually arrive mid-tick. Then he ran three more sites, recorded four ticks and measured where every wreck landed.

The results

The error ranges don't overlap. Moving is clearly better than sitting still, even with the cheap afterburner fit.

On cost, the stationary fit pays for itself in about 13 ticks, the 10MN orbit in about 12.5 and the 500MN fit in just under 12. The 500MN fit pulls ahead of the stationary method after about 3 ticks (one hour), and ahead of the 10MN orbit after about 5 ticks.

Why it works

The wreck maps tell the story.

• Stationary: wrecks land anywhere from under 10 km to 50 km away, with a big spike of battleship wrecks around 35 km. Heavy drones go for battleships first, then whatever is closest to you, not to the drones. So they zig-zag across the whole site.
• 500MN orbit: at 2,000+ m/s with a 20 km orbit set, the ship slingshots out to about 35 km, which is right where the rats want to sit. Almost every wreck except the frigates lands within 10 km of each other. Drones barely have to travel, and the rats are probably moving slower, which helps tracking too.
• 10MN orbit: the wrecks are more scattered, but still mostly inside the orbit ring.

Someone in the comments asked why not just set the orbit to 30–35 km. EVE's orbit doesn't throttle your speed to hold the radius, so you'd get flung out even further.

Caveats, straight from Ziggy

• He's only tested it against Guristas and Serpentis. He isn't sure it works against Sansha or Blood Raiders, and it won't suit every site.
• The skill requirements are real. If you can't fit it, a 100MN afterburner gives a similar effect with more room for tank. Even the 10MN orbit gets you 1.07×.
• Escaping a neut is slower. You have to pre-align, turn off the MWD and wait for your drones. If it comes to that, abandon the drones.
• As he put it in the comments, NPC frigates can't catch you at that speed, and the drones still hit them.

From the comments

• Overpropped Ishtars aren't new. People have been strapping 100MN afterburners on them for years, and Ziggy said so. The new part is orbiting the first wreck at 20 km to herd the spawn, and actually measuring the result.
• One pilot reported a steady 14m per tick in Guristas Forsaken Hubs, up from 10–11m in a regular XL shield booster Ishtar.
• A few people suggested using combat logs for a round two. EVE logs every drone shot to Documents\EVE\logs\Gamelogs, and tools like the qsna.eu log analyzer can show cumulative damage and missed first shots.

My take

I've pressed F1 for a lot of people over the years. Most "new meta" posts are a fit with no evidence behind it. This one has a hypothesis, controls, discarded warm-up runs and error bars, for ratting. It's the most EVE thing I've read in a while.

Even if you never fit a battleship MWD to a cruiser, the takeaway is free: stop sitting still in your ratting sites. Orbit the first wreck at 20 km and let the rats come to you.

Thank you, Ziggy

Thank you to Ziggarot Cadelanne for doing the work, writing it up and sharing it with everyone, rivals included, when he could have kept it to himself. His closing line is good advice for all of us: go experiment, and accept that your ship can get blown up at any time.

I hope to see a lot more from u/Ziggarot in the future. The comments are already asking for the PI essay. o7

Everything in this article is Ziggarot Cadelanne's original work, summarised with credit. The fit, the numbers and the conclusions are his, posted on r/Eve on October 3, 2026.