Newcomer / Intro Best kit for a Viper?

[Commander Jameso]

Dear all,

After a LOT of trading I saved enough money - over 1m credits to kit out a viper. I thought I'd done the basics right - getting 2 beam lasers at 70,000 credits each, and power plant costing around 150,000, power distributor the same - 150,000, upgraded sensors and costly shields.

What happened is that, having learned a painful lesson some time ago, I thought I'd check the lasers to see if they worked when I left the station. Predictbly perhaps I had a systems failure and was told I had 5 minutes of oxygen left. I made it back ok but where am I going wrong?

 

[zumbledum]

sounds like you over spent power and life support turned off .

you need to go to the right hand panel (shift+d) check the module sub tab now you need to set power priorities, i put all the main essential stuff at 1, shields, life support ,thrusters, sensors, i put the weapons at 2 , everything else at 3 excpet if its not needed at all (cargo hatch in a viper with no cargo room for example) then i put to 4 anything that cant be deployed with weapons. fuel scoop frame, shift drive etc

that way when you deploy weapons modules you cant use with weapons deployed turn off first (allows a viper to run at about 105-108%)

vipers a power hog upgrading stuff to C is good but you will need an A power plant asap

 

[willowfan]

To be affective the Viper really needs A-rated power plant, even then you must make careful use of priorities.

 

[Tepescovir]

and set things in power systems to low priority, ie frameship drive, cargo scoop etc. things you cant use with hardpoints out anyway

 

[Commander Jameso]

Thanks guys (and possibly girls).

Daft question: what's the difference between class and rating?

 

[Feldspar]

With modules, class is size and rating in how good they are.
With weapons, just pay attention to class, rating is confusing.

 

[willowfan]

Not daft at all

Class is the size of the component and is scaled from 1 to 6* (*6 being the largest afaik unless Anacondas etc have bigger slots) and determines what will fit where in the component slots of a particular ship.

Rating is the type scaled from A to E (G for weapons) (E being the cheapest or stock type). In these the types D are very lightweight and B are very heavily shielded.

 

[Commander Jameso]

Thanks.


I changed the priorities, but it hasn't changed the perccentages off power used, which is still too high. I'm guessing I need to upgrade to the 500,000 credit power plant. That's bad though, right? I've got 2 beam lasers in fire group 1 but I cant use them unless I have a mega expensive power plant?

 

[willowfan]

The Viper really does need that A Rated power-plant.

 

[Commander Jameso]

Ok. Back to that hauler and to earn more Wonga.....

 

[NewYears1978]

Yeah I concur. I got my Viper last night and you really can't load it out without the A power plant. I would post my build but I am not home. It consists of mostly A3 items except Life Support... I messed with it for hours last night.

Eventually I dropped my BEAM lasers for Pulse...got it under power but still have to use power management to turn off Cargo Hatch and FSD when hardpoints are out. Trying to make any bigger weapons work was near impossible..I ran it with 2 Plasma Accelerators for testing and that was a trick to get going (and I didn't enjoy that either)

I think the changes they made to Viper at some point sucks as it's just hard to load it out now.

 

[Jank]

4 gimbaled pulse lasers will rock their worlds, works great on my Viper.

 

[purf]

just to reiterate this point which is easily important about the Viper:

use power management to turn off Cargo Hatch

as in: manually.

 

[Feldspar]

Class is the size of the component and is scaled from 1 to 6* (*6 being the largest afaik unless Anacondas etc have bigger slots) and determines what will fit where in the component slots of a particular ship.

There's a size 7 on the Anaconda and a size 8 on the Type-9, both of which are scarily expensive to fill.

 

[InMemoriamSirocco]

After experimenting with Viper loadouts, this is what I came up with:


Medium hardpoints: 2F/Gimballed Multi-cannons
Small hardpoints: 1E/Fixed Beam Lasers

Utility 1: 0I Point Defence Turret (automatically tracks and shoots incoming missiles and mines)
Utility 2: 0E Kill Warrant Scanner (2km range, 10 second scan)

Bulkheads: 1I Military Grade Composite (Lightweight alloys will give you +1 ly jump range)

Internals:
3A Power Plant (12.00 MW)
3A Thrusters
3A Frame Shift Drive (13 ly jump range)
2D Life Support (7.30 minutes emergency oxygen supply)
3A Power Distributor
3D Sensors (4.5 km range)
2C Fuel Tank (Capacity: 4)

3A Fuel Scoop
3A Shield Generator (Strength 115,57 MJ)
2B Shield Cell Bank (5 shield cells, D rating)
1A Frame Shift Drive Interdictor


What you need to do to make this loadout work is as follows:

-Under your modules tab on the right UI panel, switch off your cargo hatch manually. You don't have any cargo space anyway, so you won't need your cargo scoop.

-Set your FSD Drive, your Fuel Scoop and your Frame Shift Drive Interdictor to Priority 2. They will automatically turn off once you deploy hardpoints. This also means that you will have to wait until your weapons are completely withdrawn and tucked away before you can attempt to charge your FSD, so keep that in mind when entering a battle.

 

[Commander Jameso]

And here was me thinking a Viper would be a small and deadly killing machine...

Any sign of a fer de lance out there? I remember them in the original game as being buggers to kill.

 

[the100thmonkey]

And here was me thinking a Viper would be a small and deadly killing machine...

It is. It's just not a dirt cheap small and deadly killing machine.

Any sign of a fer de lance out there? I remember them in the original game as being buggers to kill.

I'm sure it's around somewhere. I bought a Vulture last night and finished kitting it out earlier today. If you think the Viper is difficult to get a working loadout for, wait till you try the Vulture.

 

[InMemoriamSirocco]

It is. It's just not a dirt cheap small and deadly killing machine.

The loadout I posted earlier costs 4.550.534cr. The rebuy cost is 227.527cr.

That's still below a stock Asp. With a price tag of 22 million, the Vulture is not viable as a fighter for me. You can only sustain it via bounty hunting if you never get destroyed.

 

[Tall_Toot]

May I direct you to here:

ED Shipyard

Here you can tinker with your ship layout to your hearts content without running out of oxygen (). Simply pick the ship, fit the modules and keep jiggering around until you have a power useage equal or below 100% for the selected drive. Simples!

 

[the100thmonkey]

The loadout I posted earlier costs 4.550.534cr. The rebuy cost is 227.527cr.

That's still below a stock Asp. With a price tag of 22 million, the Vulture is not viable as a fighter for me. You can only sustain it via bounty hunting if you never get destroyed.

I was replying to a comment specifying a Viper, and seeming, to me, to indicate that it wasn't a killing machine, which it is, but it's not cheap to a newcomer. I may have misunderstood though.

In addition, bounty-hunting has been revamped. I've made over 1,000,000cr today in the Vulture in three sessions at a RES totalling less than 90 minutes. It's quite possible to sustain a Vulture through bounty-hunting, even if you do get blown up (which, I'd add, is rather unlikely given how much of a dinosaur it is! Trust me mate - it's an absolute beast)

By the way, point defense is unnecessary, imo, on a ship with shields - dumbfires and seekers do minimal damage to shields, and the Viper has arguably the best in the game.

My current Viper looks like this:

[Viper]
M: 2E/F Multi-cannon
M: 2E/F Multi-cannon
S: 1E/F Beam Laser
S: 1E/F Beam Laser
U: 0C Kill Warrant Scanner
U: 0I Chaff Launcher

BH: 1I Lightweight Alloy
RB: 3A Power Plant
TM: 3A Thrusters
FH: 3A Frame Shift Drive
EC: 2D Life Support
PC: 3A Power Distributor
SS: 3A Sensors
FS: 2C Fuel Tank (Capacity: 4)

3: 3E Cargo Rack (Capacity: 8)
3: 3A Shield Generator
2: 2A Fuel Scoop
1: 1E Basic Discovery Scanner
---
Shield: 115.57 MJ
Power : 9.73 MW retracted (81%), 12.83 MW deployed (107%), 12.00 MW available
Cargo : 8 T
Fuel : 4 T
Mass : 105.1 T empty, 117.1 T full
Range : 14.14 LY unladen, 13.17 LY laden
Price : 3,029,238 CR
Re-Buy: 151,462 CR @ 95% insurance

The excess from not running a point defense lets me bump up the KWS to 3KM.

May I direct you to here:

ED Shipyard

Here you can tinker with your ship layout to your hearts content without running out of oxygen (

). Simply pick the ship, fit the modules and keep jiggering around until you have a power useage equal or below 100% for the selected drive. Simples!

If you want any utility mounts running on your Vulture, you're going to have to become familiar with module priorities in the right UI panel. The same is true, to a lesser extent, with the Viper - both are fighters, and both have been balanced by forcing their pilots to make compromises to get the ship to run with an optimal combat loadout. This is especially true of the Vulture - it is extremely lacking in flexibility, and works best in conjunction with a wing, where you can let someone else do the kill warrant or cargo scanning for you.

If your Viper is running at less than 100% power usage with all modules set to priority 1, you don't have a PvP-ready Viper.