Luminus said to me yesterday: “Oh my – what a fail post did you do?! So much wrong info you go in there it makes me want to eat Fedos for breakfast just to get my stomach straightened”
Granted, the first post had some bad information and calculations – but the theory is there, the practice shows us that this is the way to go vs Sleepers, so I had to dig deeper and actually learned quite a few on how Resistances / Tanking works 
So sometimes you post, or sometimes you post, you get feedback, you edit, you get more feedback, admit you are a total newb, cry for hours and then repost…
Major thanks goes out to gsputi from battleclinic.com forums and our very own Vessper (/bow) and Luminus for their feedback and comments.
Battleclinic.com threads:
Proteus Class 5-6 Utility Ship
Armor Tanked RR Wormhole Fleet Raven
If you are looking into ways to maximize your fleet effectives vs Sleepers, I hope you find this post useful. If you do, please do post a comment 
QP
——- Updated Post follows:
The question we need to answer is:
Effective HPs by adding Buffer tank? – or by increasing your Resistances?
Which is best for Sleeper PVE engagements?
Q: Which is better? A ship with 70% omni-tank and 15.000 Armor HPs, or a ship with 95% omni-tank but only 2.500 Armor HPs?
Let’s see what we have here:
| Armor HPs | 15.000 | 10.000 | 5.000 | 2.500 |
| Armor Resistances (omni) | 70% | 80% | 90% | 95% |
| Sleeper DPS | 3000 | 2000 | 1000 | 500 |
| Reaction Time | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 |
| Single RR (HP/Sec) | 85,4 | 85,4 | 85,4 | 85,4 |
| Single RR Tankability (DPS) | 284,6667 | 427 | 854 | 1708 |
| # RRs Needed to Compensate | 11 | 5 | 2 | 1 |
Armor HPs: Base Armor HPs, including plates or not (a single 1600mm Reinforced Rolled Tungsten Plate adds 4200 HPs)
Armor Resistances (omni): The % Resistances you have on your setup. Obviously, you don’t have the same resists on each type of damage, but we are trying to prove a point here, so we assume all are the same % and we don’t split between different types of damage.
Sleeper DPS: I assume that in a Class 5, Sleepers can do about 10.000 DPS on a 0% resistances target. I’ve seen 4 Sleeper BSs bashing a 85% omni-tanked Dominix with 75K EHP in just 15sec from full shield to structure… so yeah that sounds about right…
Reaction Time: This is how long you can hold before you pop – unless you get the below number of needed Remote Repairers to compensate. Your fleet members holding the RR have this time to start healing or you die.
Single RR HP/Sec: With related skills at V and using LRAR II that is about 85,4 HP/Sec
Single RR Tankability DPS: The amount of Tank (in DPS) each LRAR II’s will add to your ship, taken into account the resistances of your setup.
# RRs to Compensate: The number of Remote Repairers needed to out-heal the Sleeper DPS, given the tankability from above.
Notes:
For ease of calculations, and not trying to be realistic, I assume that Sleepers in Class 5 encounters can do 10.000 DPS on a 0% resistances target. This is not very far off the real DPS 4 Advanced Sleeper Battleships can dish out in a Class 5 btw This guide post has that in mind, but it might be different tactics needed in Class 6 wormholes and if you can shed some light in this please do!
I tried to keep up the same reaction time for reference. 5 sec is not too much but not too little either for your PVE Fleet. If you feel you need more reaction time, then see the below mention, but given that the cycle for LRAR II’s is 4.5 sec I think that 5 sec should be enough reaction time.
Verdict:
The more Resistances, the fewer RRs you will need to get in order to survive. If you can withstand the Alpha strike (not taken into account here) you should be fine as long as your teammates are not slacking.
Other Things to consider / Ways to improve your setup:
If you could add plates, or any other way of increasing your Armor HPs, but without lowering your Resistances – what would you accomplish? Well it wouldn’t change the DPS you receive, nor the Tankability of the RRs, not even the # of RRs you need to balance the incoming fire. The only thing it will improve is the reaction time for your fleet members. So if you have lots of lag when you fleet up, or your teammates are known to go AFK without warning you should consider adding a Plate. But if you are low in resistances, try to buff up your resistances first and work on your reaction times!
For doubling the reaction time to 10 sec you would need to double the amount of Armor HPs without sacrificing any resistances!
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#1 by Luminus Aardokay on September 14, 2009 - 02:50
Quiv, that 10k DPS mark you’re assuming is excruciatingly high. 4 Sleeper Battleships can dish out about 5 to 8k volley damage, which is nowhere near that 10k mark.
That being said, gsputi over at battleclinic is right about those calculations being wrong as the amount of Effective hit points is dependent on the hardeners.
Even so, the whole trick with the sleepers is that a fleet’s effort is not to outlast them as they do sport formidable tanks, but to outheal their damage output.
Plates will indeed help until the team switches targets and start remote repairing, but since their presence means usually lower resistances, the absolute number of hit points registering as damage is going to be bigger and therefore pose more of a strain in remote repairing. More repairers needed, longer cycles, more cap, and it then goes downhill.
This is more apparent considering that on the more difficult sites there are multiple waves of sleepers, which if handled wrong can eat through buffer tanks like butter by outperforming the remote repairers.
In the end, Quivering’s numbers might be way off the scale and the calculations wrong, but the denominator is the same.
#2 by Noah on September 14, 2009 - 15:03
This is very interesting to me as I had a similar realization about 2 nights back, realizing that in a prolonged PvE scenario, an active tank is actually hindered by the use of plates, given the alternative uses for lowslots.
However, one of us is misunderstanding dps repaired. Firstly, I understand dps to be damage per second, or volley/rof.
Dps eqilibrium requires the same calculation repaired/rof. So if a lrar2 repairs 384 armor every 4.5 seconds, expresable as 85 armor rep-second, or dps tanking potential.
So to update your numbers, 1000 dps would require 11.75 lrar2′s to hold the tank. That ungodly 2500 dps would need a staggering 29.4 lrar2′s.
#3 by Luminus Aardokay on September 14, 2009 - 15:46
Well I guess this post has caused more chaos than the one it tries to solve =)
All numbers on sleeper damage are guesstimates and pretty far from the true ones, which give really silly and absurd results.
Sleeper damage is harsh especially when coming from the advanced battleships, but a focus fire of 3 BS’es on a 80% resisted armor tanker can be withstood with the help of 4 large RR’s.
If my calculations are correct and It’s not the spiced quafe talking, those 4 RR’s are able to rep up a 340 dps damage output. So if that 340dps is what bleeds through the 80% resists, 3 sleeper advanced Battleships have a total damage output of 1700 dps (566dps per BS) on a paper tank. The numbers of course are empirical approximations and they should by no means be taken into account as accurate ones when fitting your ship.
With the above damage model, my 60k EHP domi will pop in about 35 seconds with no RR support.. sounds about right =)
Similarly the 90% 30K EHP ship (namely the utility proteus) if standing still, will be accepting 170dps from those three BS’s, requiring only two large RR’s to compensate. Of course the reaction time falls down to 17 seconds before the proteus goes pop, but it’s plenty of time for at least two teammates to react.
#4 by Quivering Palm on September 15, 2009 - 15:06
/bump for updating the post
your comments below:
#5 by haav0c on November 20, 2009 - 02:07
shame on me for taking my eyes off the directional to type this, but as a math headed dude(dont ask what i mean by that, i’m not sure either), i noticed this thingy the first time anyone explained to me what a buffer tank was, with my first thought being “that’s gonna be hell to rep” and my second being “why would you do this thing”. a few days ago, we were clearing sleeper sites and the FC accidentally warped just himself to the next site instead of the fleet. needles to say, when we got there, his cane was @ 25% armor. by the time i actually had a lock on him, he was at 30% structure. he dropped to 20% before our cycles went off.
not sure why i just said that, something about we were able to rep him, but it was terribly inefficient or something or something like that.
the moral of this story is not to talk mindlessly on comments on blogposts unless you have to keep watching the direct-ohshitsistersgottago
#6 by Quivering Palm on November 20, 2009 - 10:56
lol! see you in wspace! watch that directional!!