Patcom weapons loadout

I say leave the girls at home, too. They're just too hot-headed and will start shooting when you may choose to not shoot, leaving you no room to move on the whole hostile/neutral issue. I loaded mine up with quad lights and disruptors, too. Pretty much everything fell before my awesome might.

I liked the Heavy Corvette, too but for different reasons than the Hemp Monkey, I think. I liked the feel of it and how it moved (like a big spaceship). I liked how much punishment it could take before I had to light out. Since the Dreadnaught player ship mod is available, try playing the game through with only that (the whole game)! Makes the so-called elevated challenge of the elite mod look like a pantywaist milquetoast poseur's tea paty. If you can do that, THEN try it with only a Puffin!

--
Hot4Darmat

Thanks for the input guys! I think I'll start looking for neutron PBCs (not on my trade screen yet). I like the Idea of maximizing quad-lights though--I hardly use the one I have since it is only one.

Poob

The rather hopefully-named "aim assist" only works out to a range of maybe 6 klicks, anyway, so you might as well equip to unleash a torrent of fire at short range where it can hit.

Never mind the alarms screeching over heat and emissions and all that -- just keep firing and let the ship cool down later. Your guns are programmed to cut out just before your ship fries itself.

The girls are much better-behaved when you undock them. Their default behavior is to protect you, whereas when docked they "fire at will".

As for their effectiveness, having 3 nodes of mobile firepower is extremely useful to me. The girls actually took down a destroyer almost entirely by themselves when I moved my pirating operations to the Marauder-controlled areas around Frostfire I. The destroyer bird-dogged me while they wailed on it with Pulse PBC and Deadshot fire. On those "defend the freighters" missions I can concentrate on getting disruptors into as many attackers as possible while the girls tear into the bad guys with gats.

The self-defense program was quite robust in its dealings with the Marauders, but I doubt I'll ever have reason to use it because of the disappointing performance of the remote fighter. I wanted it to handle like a Petrel and it handled more like a Tug.

well the aim assist on a quadlight only works to about 6.5km because thats it max range, which is in and of itself the one downfall of it, though it is fun later in the game to get like 7-8 of em and place some extra hardpoints in the ships .ini, get a omega heatsink with an active cooler and go rapid fire blast all to hell:D. all in all though i like to carry only pairs of cannons, neutron pbcs and regular pbcs, or recoil damped pbcs(great for hitting fighters). i dont like the gatling cannon though, they are horrible for hitting anything at over 7km and shooting them at a fighter or interceptor class ship is just watching your ammo stream away to no avail, assault cannons arent too bad because they remove the limited ammo pain, but they take cargo space, which is a pain if you want a secondary ring and internal magazine.

"Faith lies in the ways of sin"

I take a decidedly different approach, most of the time. If I absolutely need missiles for some reason, I'll use a setup where every hardpoint that can has an RF-pbc, and quadpacks on the missile segments. Quadlights have good damage and all, but the heat always seems to be a major problem, and I really hate how short the effect range is.


Most of the time though, I leave the cannons to the ladies. Both T-fighters, each with the best pbc I can get my hands on (heavies then neutrons, usually), and any missile I feel I have too many of. I keep em docked on fire at will - sure, they're trigger happy, but when it gets right down to it they don't shoot at anything I wasn't intending to blow up anyway. The three medium mounts each get a cutting beam, and the light point stays empty. Not like a single quad is gonna do me any good.

The girls will take out anything fighter class, and can usually do some serious damage to patcoms or even corvettes. That and they can keep firing with the cannons while I'm using the beams, which makes them a heck of a lot more useful on their turrets then on my hardpoints. The trike cutters have really worked out well for me. It only takes a few moments of that firepower to convince a megafrieghter to drop the loot, and it's flat out impossible to beat cutters if you need to take on a capital ship. Fly by it's side, turn off all the fly-by-wire stuff, and drag the beams across it's hull.

Patcoms and corvettes also seem to be easy enough to victimize. In the initial joust, trike cutters will often do as much damage as a pbc array. The trick though is to catch them when their velocity is going down - most enemy ships will have near dead-points when making a turn. This is especially true of the vettes, and a corvette caught by trike cutters with no momentum is space dust.

Fighters would be real trouble - but that's where the ladies earn their pay.

i agree with the RF-pbc, they are a good weapon, but they build heat faster than a quadlight, if you have a good heatsink 3 RFpbc is not a bad loadout, but they are inaccurate as hell. do you use heavy pbcs over neutron pbcs on your t-fighters? i dont really like heavy pbc they fire a slow bolt, they just seem hard to hit with for me, on the rare occasion that i do use t-fighters i tend to give them either a rf-pbc and no missiles for either(because they are crazy enraged bitches that are missile religous, until they are all gone, usually within their first 5-10 mins of combat)or a pulse pbc, so i can save the neutron pbcs for me. i like using 2 comms lasers that i modded for better range and capacity on salvo fire, beam weapons are just fun.

"Faith lies in the ways of sin"