I'd be interested in seeing a coriolis link to the buildout most of you are using? I spent a few hours a couple of nights ago engineering my Keelback with Beam & Pulse lasers and Multicannons and managed some really good luck with respect to mass savings so, while the loadout is like this:
https://eddp.co/u/icRicrFC, the ship still has a 30 LY jumprange
Hey bicarbon8,
Most of us are using 2 small healing beams (either efficient or long range engineered) and high capacity packhound missile racks for our loadouts. Some are using level-5 (no jitter) overcharged multis ... when they don't have access to the packhounds (and I highly recommend doing the grind for packhounds AND buying lots of em! LOL). You can also use medium double shot frag cannons, which are BRUTAL at 500-600 meters to most small and some medium ships (and the screening shell engineer mod makes them reload faster AND can shoot down packhounds with the right trigger timing). I am also using engineered reverb torps and engineered seekers on my stealth PVP build.
We are A rating and engineering the Power Plants, Thrusters, FSD, and Distributors. We are running level-5 thermal resistant biweave shields with a couple shield boosters and a chaff or point defense (my shields are around 400). And the ship launched fighter bay comes standard on our base model this year LOL. You can D rate the Sensors and Life Support to save weight (and keeping twice as much iron as nickel material will now allow you to "synthesize" more life support time in your right hand panel under the inventory tab) ... or you can A rate them like I did and do lightweight engineering, to keep weight down.
If you don't want to (or can't afford to) upgrade your armor, you can go for the FREE additional armor points by engineering your standard "lightweight" armor (on any ship) with ANY armor engineer mod ... without additional weight being added to your ship. (Kind of Frontier's way of quietly helping us out a little with standard lightweight armor ... Shhh!) My "normal" Keelie has almost 1700 armor points currently, with hull reinforcements and resistances all near 40% on all types (and my stealth version has almost 3000).
There also seems to be an overlooked trick to using thermal type weapons with any ship. Pay close attention to the "distributor draw" and the "rate of fire" for pulse and burst lasers ... because the beam distributor draw is a constant value PER SECOND, whereas the distributor cost PER SECOND for a burst/pulse laser SEEMS TO ME to be the "rate of fire x dist draw" which sometimes makes them actually use MORE distributor PER SECOND and shoot for LESS TIME than an engineered beam laser.
Like I have said before, something always brings me back to the "Keelie" to goof off in. And some in our group usually fly corvettes, anacondas, etc ... but there is something really satisfying and enjoyable flying these little "lunchboxes" in a wing ... and we all laugh really hard sometimes, and giggle like school children ... and that is the greatest gift Frontier could have ever given us armchair space commander "grownups".
And for that I say "Thank You" to David Braben, and so many awesome folks at Frontier.
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