Alien Hunters:  Fact or Fiction?

a skeptic's observations

A consistent TIB debate centers around the the Alien Hunter special.  The devs, to my knowledge, haven't released any specific calculations about bonuses for resource and loot drops only the damage increase against alien NPCs. I've heard many rumors such as the device is useless unless augmented to legendary, works better on red server, does absolutely nothing.....    UPDATE: Shinji has told me what the precise 0.5 * (Rarity - 1); Rare = +1 EPV; Ultimate = +3 EPV formula is for alien NPC drop bonuses. It is as follows:



I've done a semi-scientific experiment to try to quantify the effects of the AH on resource and loot drops.  I used my farming team of four assassins with stripped down gear to minimize as many off-target effects as possible  Here is the following load-out:


I ran this team for multiple 20 minute farming expeditions on 4 separate days, with and then without an equipped ultra-rare alien hunter.  At the conclusion I had six runs with an AH and six without.  I restricted myself to the following rules: 
1.  Each run was exactly 20 minutes of farming, the timer was stopped while unloading resources at spaceports,
2.  Only Hets and Wyrds were engaged, no pirates or elites of any kind.
3.  If a stack was encountered, priority was always low to high hull.

Scoring was based on:
1.  the total credit value of the resources pooled from all four ships
2.  the total number of loot drops pooled from all four ships
3.  the rarity of the loot dropped.

Here are my raw data:
Of course this is preliminary with limited replicates. 

These data indicate that while using an UR alien hunter there was an average of 14 drops per run with a total of 84, with two uncommons and one rare.  The sum of the resources was 365,713 credits with an average of 60,952 credits with a standard deviation of 4,330.

Without the use of this special, I saw an average of 7.7 drops per run with a standard deviation of 1.96 for a total of 46, all commons.  The average credit value per trip was 42,405 credits with a standard deviation 2,033 for a grand total of 254,435 credits.

I haven't tried this using legendary AH's, but feel free to donate your BD's to Bunsen.  All specials will be augmented for purely scientific reasons ;)
Feel free to try this experiment and post your results in the forum section under the General Section under the "Alien Hunter: fact or fallacy" thread.  If you have any questions please feel free to mercilessly bombard Street and Papa with pm's until they ban you from the corp before rage quitting themselves.
Good hunting AMD!
-Bunsen