Great video, love your FDL series. Unfortunately, I'm one of those people who gave up on C4PA - this is not a weapon for rubbish combat pilots such as myself. I totally agree that it is a great weapon of opportunity, and is probably great for bounty hunting where you have first strike advantage, but in high intensity combat zone furball (and that's pretty much all i'm flying at the moment), i can't predict flight path and aim the weapon at anything farther than a few hundred meters.
Not only that, but power consumption is so great, you can't turtle up (4 Pips to SYS) and still shoot in the event of an ambush (say, a couple of rail gun Asps and Python while you struggle to hit a Conda). And on top of that, you can't use pulse lasers while shooting PA either as you need all the energy you can get.
So i'm going back to my old setup - three cannons through the nose and two beam lasers on the side, all gimballed. Three cannons have almost the same DPS as one PA (23 MJ vs 26 MJ), and really, to strip shields or melt small ships dual beams firing continuously are plenty most of the time. But at least i can turtle up and still smite the enemies with 23 MJ worth of cannon fire. Can't really do this with a PA unless you are a good pilot with quick fingers on power management.
My final verdict on Fer de Lance PA - not a weapon for bad combat pilots in unpredictable situations.
