Your thoughts on Cannons?

V'larr

V'larr
I don't like cannons myself, they move too slowly...knife-fighter weapons, in my experience.

To be fair, I haven't tried the fixed variants with the buffed velocities...someday I may try a gimballed-laser, fixed-cannon setup for fun on an Eagle, I guess, maybe with long-range to get the velocity increase? But I doubt I'll take cannons seriously. I feel much more comfortable with fixed lasers and gimballed/tracking-anything-with-travel-time. (So if the gimballed variants get higher velocity too, or I feel like experimenting with gimballed long-range cannons, that also may give them a chance with me!)
 
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StiTch

StiTch
V'larr said:
I don't like cannons myself, they move too slowly...knife-fighter weapons, in my experience.

To be fair, I haven't tried the fixed variants with the buffed velocities...someday I may try a gimballed-laser, fixed-cannon setup for fun on an Eagle, I guess, maybe with long-range to get the velocity increase? But I doubt I'll take cannons seriously. I feel much more comfortable with fixed lasers and gimballed/tracking-anything-with-travel-time. (So if the gimballed variants get higher velocity too, or I feel like experimenting with gimballed long-range cannons, that also may give them a chance with me!)
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If you are someone that ever fights in a wing, try get yourself an iCourier w/ at least two engineered cannons on and perhaps one lazor, pair up with a bigger ship, and you'll get more of a feel for them.

Use lazor to stop smaller ships dominating your bigger brethren (at closer range cannons will also mincemeat them), but on bigger enemies just help to take the shield down and the aggro should still be on your wing mate enough that you can just march up to his PP and hold down trigger for the cannon fire.

If you like fixed lazors you are set. For PvE, fixed efficient beam on bottom slot and two gimballed cannons on nacelles is exactly what I use. Very deadly.

In moments he will go from shields down to PP down.
 
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Ozram

Ozram
Philip Coutts said:
I love cannons, get in close and boom!
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Yeah, any flimsy excuse and I fit them. I especially like putting long range mod on them. A G5 long range can make the velocity of a cannon shell as fast (or slightly faster) than a multicannon round. Cannons have good effects too. I especially enjoy force shell, but even with no special effects they're nice. On my FGS I have a single, small turreted cannon with force shell. I like to activate it when fighting near the asteroids. So much fun when you can push another ship into the rocks. One of my FAS's has three cannons along the bottom and a rapid fire pulse on top. The cannons are all long range (fast projectile). The mediums have force shell and the large is HY. It's a lot of fun.
 

Ian Skippy

Ian Skippy
Sylow said:
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I am not a PvP player, and i actually enjoy RES tours in a small ship. That being said, i still like my ship to be efficient, and cannons at the moment are an inferior choice. The only thing which i did not cover in my statement is: if you put them on a large or huge hardpoints, cannons actually still are very good in killing big ships. Just like any other large or huge weapon. I left this out as my posting refered to the "punching above their weight class" for cannons, which large or huge weapons can't do any more.
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I am not claiming that cannons are not useable, but there currently is no role for them, which another weapon could not do just as well or even better. Disclaimer: This is all with engineers in mind. Would we be speaking of exclusively non-engineered weapons, i would still see a role for cannons, but not only are Engineers the games status quo and won't go away any more, but engineering weapons is also part of the discussion of this thread. So when taking Engineers into account, there's nothing where the Cannon outshines other weapons. At the same time, other weapons can do the same job but are still better for different aspects.
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E.g. a PA has adequate penetration value and hull damage, so it can match the cannon for hull and module destruction. At the same time it has much better shield killing capabilities than the cannon. Sure the base version suffers from capacitor drain and heat buildup, but this can be helped a lot with an efficient modification.
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And that's why i say, cannons are not adviceable at the moment. There's simply better alternatives available, so telling people to use cannons is bad advice. (Unless we're now suddenly speaking of a beginner in a non-engineered ship, which if i don't mention it yet here, will certainly suddenly come up in a followup posting. )
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That is way too simplistic. Taky my high-speed Viper: I cant run efficient PAs becausecthat woukd increase my weight with 7t. ThevPD drain would be enormous, rewuiring multiple pips in wpn, dropping my agility below 40 and making the entire ship useless.

Blanket statements such as "PA beats cannon" are rarely true.
 

Bortas

Bortas
Ozram said:
The mediums have force shell and the large is HY. It's a lot of fun.
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Was considering force shell for my cannons but the jitter kept me away so far... is the jitter low enough to be acceptable? Do you have numbers?
 
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K-Rose

K-Rose
If I were to set my Anaconda up with Turretted Cannons, what would the recommended engineering build be?

I'd like to go all Cannons apart from the Large & Huge on Bottom which would be something to take down shields.

I'm wondering if High Capacity Magazine & Autoloaders are a good idea?
 
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Taranis Dekker

Taranis Dekker
K-Rose said:
If I were to set my Anaconda up with Turretted Cannons, what would the recommended engineering build be?

I'd like to go all Cannons apart from the Large & Huge on Bottom which would be something to take down shields.

I'm wondering if High Capacity Magazine & Autoloaders are a good idea?
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I used to have 2 OC medium cannon turrets and 2 OC small frag turrets on my Conda, with the rest of the loadout being MCs. Can't remember whether they were rank 2 or 3 engineered, but it worked very well. I only had to worry about aiming & firing MCs, and the turrets looked after themselves. This was really before I had DD5 from Palin, so the lack of manoeuvrability made the turrets especially useful.
 
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Ozram

Ozram
Bortas said:
Was considering force shell for my cannons but the jitter kept me away so far... is the jitter low enough to be acceptable? Do you have numbers?
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In practice (I have several force shell cannons) the jitter is hardly noticeable. The real tradeoff there is that the cannon is no longer a module sniper. Instead, it shoves the enemy ship about. There are YouTube clips available if you're curious. TBH HY seems to be the greater disappointment. Dispersal Field is not bad either. I have one on my Conda just for that effect.
 

Sylow

Sylow
sleutelbos said:
That is way too simplistic. Taky my high-speed Viper: I cant run efficient PAs becausecthat woukd increase my weight with 7t. ThevPD drain would be enormous, rewuiring multiple pips in wpn, dropping my agility below 40 and making the entire ship useless.

Blanket statements such as "PA beats cannon" are rarely true.
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Read it as "PA generally beats cannon". Is my statement still false?
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Sure you just described one very specific setup where cannons might be advantageous, but mind you that your setup also needs a second set of weaopns to kill the targets shield. With PAs you could leave the second pair of hardpoints empty, mostly mitigating the mass disadvantage of efficient PAs. And with efficient modification, the capacitor draw of PAs is not that bad any more. Sure you have to do a bit more pip juggling, depending on the situation, but considering what you gain for it, it's sure worth it.
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So i still stick to my point of view: generally cannons are not great weapons. They had their niche before 2.2.03, but the PA occupies most of that by now. Upcoming changes of 2.3 will hurt the smaller size cannons again, as they get no compensation for hardness buffs for the big ships. After all cannons always were there for "big game", for small and medium ships the MC always was the better choice and this remains unchanged.
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I'd wish i could say better things about this weapon. I love the C2 cannons model and painjob, along with the "Manticore" logo on the side of the barrel. It's a pretty. But even on my lightweight iCourier, where low-mass engineering was the absolute focus, i in the end stored my lightweight cannon away to replace it with an efficient PA. It's a so much better weapon that i couldn't justify sticking to the cannon just to save close to 3 tons of mass.
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Chris Simon

Chris Simon
Sylow said:
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Read it as "PA generally beats cannon". Is my statement still false?
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There is nothing like "the best weapon" in Elite. It's a combination of weapon, distributor, heat exchange and ship's agility that makes combat performance. PAs are objectively a great weapon, yes, but not always. That's what we are trying to say.
 

Sylow

Sylow
Chris Simon said:
There is nothing like "the best weapon" in Elite. It's a combination of weapon, distributor, heat exchange and ship's agility that makes combat performance. PAs are objectively a great weapon, yes, but not always. That's what we are trying to say.
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It takes some discipline here to not insult you now, based not so much on what but how you write it. So the short version:
- Please tell me where i claimed it to be "the best weapon"?
- My point, if you read the whole posting or earlier postings here, is that it by now is very easy to make other weapons do the job of the cannon and even more, by making a proper configuration.
- So yes, i jused the PA as premium example. Depending on the configuration, the new and improved railgun can even poach in the traditional field of the cannon. I just don't use that one as example, as replacing a cannon with a railgun still requires more extensive adjustments and people might argue that it's a different ship configuration. (And also, you can't replace too many cannons with railguns before running into problems. )
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V'larr

V'larr
StiTch said:
If you are someone that ever fights in a wing, try get yourself an iCourier w/ at least two engineered cannons on and perhaps one lazor, pair up with a bigger ship, and you'll get more of a feel for them.
Use lazor to stop smaller ships dominating your bigger brethren (at closer range cannons will also mincemeat them), but on bigger enemies just help to take the shield down and the aggro should still be on your wing mate enough that you can just march up to his PP and hold down trigger for the cannon fire.
If you like fixed lazors you are set. For PvE, fixed efficient beam on bottom slot and two gimballed cannons on nacelles is exactly what I use. Very deadly.
In moments he will go from shields down to PP down.
Click to expand...

I'm pretty sure just about *any* weapon would work well in a wing...especially in an I-Courier that can just run any time it draws aggro. In that situation I'd probably want to give dumbfire missiles a try?
 
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