I finally managed to take out my first interceptors over the weekend, because I finally decided to ignore all the Clipper hate, ignore the metas cooked up by pilots who are better than me, and try the Clipper out for AX combat. I actually first only built it to harvest materials from Cocijo to put Ram Tah magic on my other ships, but when it turned out those ships still sucked, I swapped out the abrasion blaster on the Clipper for an AX missile rack and gave it a try.
The Clipper is better than the Krait Mk II for shieldless builds in some substantial ways. Yes, it has one less large hard point, but it trades that for more speed, more agility, and more base armor. Yes, it has wide hard points. Gimballed AX multicannons work just fine, though, and the azimuth variants are only available gimballed. The smaller power plant slot makes it a tight fit to get the whole armament on a low-emission power plant, but it does cover everything I wanted just barely (I did put thermal spread instead of drag drives on my thrusters to keep heat and power slightly better managed, but it still outruns the KMII). It can also equip the 7A Universal limpet controller, and AX combat is perhaps the only instance where the universal controller is useful as it's the only way to do collection, decon, and repair from one controller, so for harvesting mats to unlock those Azimuth guns, I gave one slot to limpets instead of two. For those who prefer not to collect anything, that's another 5D Hull Reinforcement
And the buyback cost is about half of a fully kitted KMII or Aliance Challenger.
And it's the best-flying large/medium ship in the game.
My Clipper
Note: EDSY doesn't calculate the the power consumption quite right. With FSD, auto dock, and supercruise assist turned off, this only clears its power needs with hardpoints deployed by .14 mW. Even swapping out the heat sink launcher for a second caustic sink puts it over. It does fine with conventional AX weapons; the engineered versions gobble more power.
The Clipper is better than the Krait Mk II for shieldless builds in some substantial ways. Yes, it has one less large hard point, but it trades that for more speed, more agility, and more base armor. Yes, it has wide hard points. Gimballed AX multicannons work just fine, though, and the azimuth variants are only available gimballed. The smaller power plant slot makes it a tight fit to get the whole armament on a low-emission power plant, but it does cover everything I wanted just barely (I did put thermal spread instead of drag drives on my thrusters to keep heat and power slightly better managed, but it still outruns the KMII). It can also equip the 7A Universal limpet controller, and AX combat is perhaps the only instance where the universal controller is useful as it's the only way to do collection, decon, and repair from one controller, so for harvesting mats to unlock those Azimuth guns, I gave one slot to limpets instead of two. For those who prefer not to collect anything, that's another 5D Hull Reinforcement
And the buyback cost is about half of a fully kitted KMII or Aliance Challenger.
And it's the best-flying large/medium ship in the game.
My Clipper
Note: EDSY doesn't calculate the the power consumption quite right. With FSD, auto dock, and supercruise assist turned off, this only clears its power needs with hardpoints deployed by .14 mW. Even swapping out the heat sink launcher for a second caustic sink puts it over. It does fine with conventional AX weapons; the engineered versions gobble more power.
