This is a nice thread with a ton of good advice.
Chipping in on a few things:
It seems efficient PAs are the go-to weapon for reasons of DPE (damage per energy) and the bypassing of resistances. However, knowing that, wouldn't current pvpers have gone for for MJ over resistance?
No, because the solution to plasma is to be hit by it as infrequently as possible: evasion + active bi-weave regen. A high-resistance, low-mass Ferdie with +10% active bi-weave regen and possibly +x% broken regen also, boosting to 540 or 550 mps, will in the right hands survive against plasma longer than a heavy Ferdie with a prismatic and stacked heavy duty boosters and scant regen.
I was thinking I'd pack a Huge Efficient gimballed Beam for popping SLFs and anyone running pure MJ with no regard to resistances, and 4 Medium Efficient PAs for hulls and those with resistances.
I'd strongly advise against packing a primary weapon set with high draw and a secondary weapon set with high draw. (And yes, even with efficient, I do mean your PA's and huge beam are high draw.) The problem is that the one sucks the wep cap dry and when you want to fire the other, you have nothing to play with. It's too much.
Therefore if you want to keep the quad PA setup, I'd advise dropping your huge weapon down to a multi or cannon or even a pulse, maybe even a frag ... basically anything except a beam.
Alternatively if you want to keep the beam, consider dropping down on your medium hardpoints.
Whatever you do, I'd seriously question the fixed mediums and gimballed huge. Although there are
some excellent pilots that like this setup, it's very sub-optimal in terms of Ferdie placement. You'll get considerably more ToT in a 20 minute engagement with the gimbal(s) on top and the fixed on the bottom.
I plan to do a Brave Sir Robin as soon as my shields go down, and with 500mps boost I should be able to
I'm afraid that could be a death sentence, because many of your enemies will be running at 540-550 mps and packing long range super penetrator rails. Plus missiles and plasma. If you want to run a Ferdie that slow, do your Sir Robin
before the shield drops!
Optimal multiplyer is max 30% on dirty drives with no bonus added
Basically by reason of the secondaries, assuming that the mass multiplier is something in the normal park, +37% is considered the start of 'acceptable', in serious PvP.
+35% is kind of entry point. There are some exceptional builds with around that or lower that are good but only because of an insane mass multiplier.
But with a normal mass multiplier, less than +35% just means more CIF gathering.
There's a thread here about higher level rolls:
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/366176-OK-so-post-your-god-rolls
EDIT:
So what your saying is that even though I rolled 30+ 12 for 42% total with secondary it's probably other factors that are weighing me down as I can do no where near those kind of speeds
Got a screenie? +42% is a god roll, so you should be moving fast even with a crummy mass multiplier. These aren't Enhanced Drives, are they (you have to deduct 15%)? But yeah, it could be that the mass multiplier is the issue here.