Ancillary Shield Boosters

Orakkus over at 2nd Anomaly From The Left (mandatory reading people!) did a couple posts talking about the new Ancillary Shield Boosters and I thought I would take a look at them as well.

There are small, medium, large, and extra large versions and the description is:

Provides a quick boost in shield strength. The module takes Cap Booster charges and will deactivate once these charges run out. If not reloaded, it will start consuming the ship's capacitor upon reactivation.

Note: Can use Cap Booster 50, 75 and 100 as fuel. Reloading time is 60 seconds. Prototype Inferno Module.

So the idea is that its a combined cap booster and shield booster, thus saving you a slot to run your active shield tank. Intriguing! So let's compare stats, looking at the Medium Ancillary Shield Booster and the Medium Shield Booster II.

Stat	Medium Shield Booster II	Medium Ancillary Shield Booster
CPU (tf)	58	50
Powergrid (MW)	13	12
Energy Activation Cost (GJ)	60	142
Duration (sec)	3	3
Shield Boost Amount (HPs)	90	146
Capacity (m3)	NA	20
Reload Time (sec)	NA	60

Although the energy cost of the Ancillary shield booster is 142, you can get a full boost of 146 from a Cap Booster 50, 75, or 100. Since the biggest energy bang for your buck is Cap Booster 50 to fill in for 142 energy, and since the module can hold 10 of them instead of only 5 of the Cap Booster 100, it makes sense to go with the smaller charges.

You can run the module without charges in it and in my testing last night I found that with auto-reload turned off, it would run out of charges and keep running off of my ship's capacitor. It also works with a Shield Boost Amplifier so on a ship with active shield tanking bonus like a Harpy and a amplifier, the Ancillary booster gives 273 hit points every three seconds while the Medium Shield Booster II only repairs 168.

The downside is that your cap chargers only last for 30 seconds (10 charges and 3 second cycle time) and after that the hungrier ancillary booster will drain your cap dry... or you wait for 60 seconds to reload it with charges. Either way your tank may be dead in the water in that time and your ship to soon just be dead.

So, this module is not intended for long drawn out fights or for fights where you have to tank hard. Setups where the fight is over in 30 seconds (i.e. high DPS gank ships) or where the enemy is incapacitated in that time (such as a bait ship waiting for ECM reinforcements to arrive) or where you only need to pulse the repper have the time might work with this module that gives a significant amount of boosting over regular reppers. Any setup that needs to run this module a lot will not work unless you have insane capacitor capacity and recharge rates (I can't think of one that can handle it).