Who kills Who - T1 Frigate, the result of some Data Mining

I did a little bit of Data Mining with the goal, to find the "best" Frigate for Solo-PvP in Lowsec. While for players active in these areas its pretty easy to say which ships are currently used and which are apparently OP, i wanted to check how many of these statements are true and if there are even OP ships.

Before i go i bit more into detail, the following graph is the result of collecting Solo-KM’s from Lowsec, parsing them and then visualize them in a graph.

Kill Graph

Edges from a Node to another Node represents an imbalance of kills. A thick edge means that ship A killed B more often than otherwise. I dropped some nodes and edges from the full graph for a cleaner visualization, the edges which i dropped had mostly not enough support or both ships almost killed equally each other.

Creation

To created this i parsed all kills of “combat capable frigates” from zKillboard. To limit the amount of data i only focused on nine regions: Black Rise, The Bleak Lands, Metropolis, Placid, Heimatar, Devoid, Verge Vendor, The Citadel, Essence. These were chosen due to their high pvp activity since these their lowsec systems are mainly part of the faction-warfare area. The timeframe i chose was from mid january to the 2013-11-19-1400, the date of the last patch. While the last patch didnt changed any T1 Frigate directly, i thought this would be limit to avoid data from different "meta's".
After i had the KM's, i did a little bit of filtering since i didn't allowed KM's with less than 4 Modules to filter out unfitted ships, the next step was to collect all the kills and create of these the graph. In the next i step i pre-filtered the graph in Gephi, did some coloring, labeling etc. The final graph that was shown above is made with sigma.js.

Short Analysis

I think for many PVPler this is no surprise, that the Tristan is a pretty strong ship in the current meta. It can't be (scram)-kited due to its drones and even in short range brawling mode it still has a decent tank while provide good dps with blaster (or when neut fit, eliminating the enemy tank).

The second dominating ship, the Breacher, although is a bit surprising. While the ship itself is not that strong (imho), the reasons for its success is probably the high usage of the breacher from pirates, which often use force-multiplier in form of HG-Imps, Ganglinks and Drugs. A famous example of this was the kill of an Chremoas by a Breacher.

A big surprise to me was the lack of dominance of the Kestrel & Condor. While these two ships opened the "era" of Light Missile kiting with dual ewar-support, apparently they don't dominate the current meta as they used to be. As a little sidenote, since many people argued about which of these two are better, it looks like the condor is the winner of this discussion, since in generally it wins more fights.

Conclusion

So is the Tristan etc... OP? There are too many factors to call a ship really OP, some ships only work with support, i only have limited data (due to zKB "weird" definition" of solo), how the Ship works with force-multiplier and of course how difficult a ship is to fly.
I found it quite interesting that a clear pattern is visible and i definitely will keep some of this in mind when engaging in a T1 frigate in Lowsec
I want to thank zKillboard for their API (and their general services), Gephi for their great graph-viz tool and last sigma.js for their beautiful framework.

Edit:
As by request, here are the number of KM i have (after removing empty KM, before i removed nodes/edge manually). Also i updated the Graph to now show percentages.

Crucifier Kills: 83.0  Killed: 97.0  Sum: 180.0
Executioner Kills: 408.0  Killed: 603.0  Sum: 1011.0
Punisher Kills: 128.0  Killed: 490.0  Sum: 618.0
Tormentor Kills: 646.0  Killed: 444.0  Sum: 1090.0
Condor Kills: 1386.0  Killed: 1570.0  Sum: 2956.0
Griffin Kills: 23.0  Killed: 138.0  Sum: 161.0
Kestrel Kills: 895.0  Killed: 1200.0  Sum: 2095.0
Merlin Kills: 1264.0  Killed: 1521.0  Sum: 2785.0
Atron Kills: 1640.0  Killed: 1719.0  Sum: 3359.0
Incursus Kills: 2519.0  Killed: 1442.0  Sum: 3961.0
Maulus Kills: 93.0  Killed: 164.0  Sum: 257.0
Tristan Kills: 2703.0  Killed: 1446.0  Sum: 4149.0
Breacher Kills: 1120.0  Killed: 478.0  Sum: 1598.0
Rifter Kills: 504.0  Killed: 1593.0  Sum: 2097.0
Slasher Kills: 705.0  Killed: 1192.0  Sum: 1897.0
Vigil Kills: 3.0  Killed: 23.0  Sum: 26.0
Total KM's: 14120.0