Type-10 Balance Discussion - How to make the battle cow viable

I will start this off by admitting the amount of T-10 Pilots out there is going to be small but that shouldn't devalue what could be a very good ship and one that with a few tweaks could be even PVP viable.

This post will be broken down into a few key sections that I think describe what the intention with the T-10 was meant to be and how it could be buffed a little to help it into its own section of the big ship tree, Currently the T-10 struggles in anything other than looking damn cool. The cool kids club love spoilers.

What is the T-10 designed for?
The T-10 is from my view a ship designed to fill in the support role of the big ship line up with some added firepower while being slow as the name of the ship suggests... its designed to defend its space and do it well.

Currently however the T-10 struggles with this due to its extremely low speed and poor defense, the T-10 compared to the rest of the big ship line up is worse in every way other than hardpoint count but can never get in range or stay in range long enough to use those extra hardpoints. The anaconda is the closest of the big ships with a defending/support role though the Anaconda focuses on jump range over defenses and agility, this is fine as the Anaconda fills its role as a long range defense ship.

The T-10 seems to be just like the Anaconda but with a higher focus on combat vs exploration, though lacks all of the main components that make a ship better for combat, so how do we fix this?

Speed
First off the speed of the ship is downright too slow, even when using long range weapons. its slower than ALL of the big ships and vs a Imperial Cutter the T-10 is slower by 175m/s this is insane given larger ships have a much lower acceleration and turn rate than Medium or Small ships. the T-10 will never catch an Imperial Cutter for more than a few seconds during a fight unless the Imperial Cutter pilot decides to fit in front of the T-10, and can just boost once to move out of the range of the T-10.

My suggestion to fix this would be to reduce the mass of the T-10 to 1,000 tons down from 1,200 tons, a T-10 would still be much slower though the window the T-10 would have vs other larger ship would be increased to a much more suitable range considering the main target for this ship is larger ships itself. Another option could be to also add the option to fit Class 8 Thrusters as the Imperial Cutter has.

Defenses
Defenses where always going to be an issue with such a large ship and its no surprise this ship suffers from a shield that is far to weak given its size and speed, a prismatic T-10 with all the boosters in the world will only reach 5,000 MJ of shielding and while this does sound like plenty of shielding for most ships, keep in mind the sheer size of the T-10, its shield is simply far to weak for such a large combat focused ship, for comparison the Imperial Cutter can get upwards of 9,000 MJ of shield, the Federal Corvette can get upwards of 7,000, all three ships are considered combat military ships though the T-10 has less shielding than a Anaconda clocking in at 6,500 MJ.

My suggestion to fix this one is super simple, raise the base shielding to 500 from 320, this would give it more shielding than a Anaconda but less than a Federal Corvette allowing the Corvette to maintain its shield advantage.

Masslock
Most players do not consider masslock when looking for their next ship, masslock is something used to prevent escape or deny an enemy from jumping out and dropping back in for a better position, given the name of the T-10 being a ship meant for defending it would make sense that this ship be given a much higher masslock than other large ships, something it DID have when it was first released but was removed with no patch note detailing why.

My fix for masslock and something I would be very keen to see is a ship outright worse than other larger ships but possessing a higher masslock than even a Imperial Cutter, this would reinforce its support role acting as the anchor for the group the T-10 is with.

Super Cruise
Lol is this broken? its faster to drop and turn vs turning in super cruise... no other ship needs this?! will post a comparison video soon.


I am interested to see what others think about this ship, its fun to fly and could be a competitive large ship to combat the annoying Imperial Cutter spam due to it being outright better.
 
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I love the look and feel of the Type-10 and would love to fly one but yeah in its current form it just isn't a very viable ship for me. Ironically enough the buff to the Type-9 is probably the biggest thing that killed the Type-10 for me as the Type-9 is a great trade-off between cargo capacity, price, and defensibility/agility. The Type-10 costs a fortune to outfit, but carries less cargo than the Type-9 and compares very unfavourably to the other big ships as mentioned. I am not into combat as well though, so...

My hope was that the Type-10 would be the best mining ship in the game, but with deep core mining The Krait, Python, and Imperial Clipper are all far superior. I was very sad to see that mining (like almost every other endeavour in Elite these days other than bulk trading) was optimized for medium ships again, though I have to admit blasting through rings in my mining Clipper is good fun.

I would really like to find a good non-combat job for a Type-10 but yeah, what could I use it for?

I hope some of these buffs eventually happen for you.
 
Firstly, I think the T10 was designed specifically to take on Thargoids. If you're not doing that with it, you can't really complain it's not good at what you are doing.

Secondly, Masslock actually isn't entirely dependant on mass. At least I don't think it is. The DBX is surprisingly resistant to it, for example. Mass has an effect (hull mass does, I don't believe total ship mass does.... go figure) - but it isn't the only determining factor.
 
Firstly, I think the T10 was designed specifically to take on Thargoids. If you're not doing that with it, you can't really complain it's not good at what you are doing.

Secondly, Masslock actually isn't entirely dependant on mass. At least I don't think it is. The DBX is surprisingly resistant to it, for example. Mass has an effect (hull mass does, I don't believe total ship mass does.... go figure) - but it isn't the only determining factor.

Well fighting Thargoids is combat, like I said in the OP the other larger ship are better for the reasons mentioned, a good AX ships is also good at PVP.
 
AX builds forgo resistances on shield and hull. The MRPs, the HRPs, etc, all engineered for health over resistances.

Anti-Xeno builds are so different. I believe this is why the T-10 is designed the way it is.

This is not correct, defense wise the ships are built for same, a PVP Anaconda can be switched to AX with the exact same shield setup.
 
A PvP Annie will get destroyed my the first interceptor it runs across.

Why are you so resistant to the idea that the T-10 was designed as an AX ship?

I can show you my anaconda doing AX just fine with its PVP shield setup, there is nothing baked into a ship that makes it an AX ship, ships fall into only a few types, Combat, Trade, Exploration and Multi-purpose, the T10 is a Combat ship... a military one at that just like the Cutter and Corvette.
 
A PvP Annie will get destroyed my the first interceptor it runs across.

Why are you so resistant to the idea that the T-10 was designed as an AX ship?
Because it wasn't really. AX turrets are crap, the c3 hardpoints of a T10 are too far away for fixed and the c2 slots aren't optimized for guardian gauss. I question the design as an AX vessel, as much as I would like to have one...
 
My Type-10 has NO weapons and is used for big-ticket trading. Shooped the Armor and Hull of course, but thanks to the bizarre mass-lock thing only Anaconda's and Cutters slow it down - even under PA fire I can submit then supercruise-outrun anything. Which is guud, obviously, with 460T of Platinum….
 
I tried the T-10 as a Thargoid scout "killer" very recently, but abandoned it as a bad idea and went back to the Krait Phantom. It may be the same problem I had with it in PvE combat - poor manoueverability:

but fit a SLF and the T-10 becomes very effective at PvE, assuming the weapons are sufficiently engineered for efficiency, etc. etc. It is like a massive weapons base supporting the SLF.

Presumably, this was the idea for it to be a Thargoid killer, but I can't see it working against Scouts on its own, which are just too fast for it, and SLFs are no match for the bigger Thargoids (are they any good against scouts?). But then, as OP has said, it is intended to fight as a defender with other ships.

Unless someone has got it to work on its own against Thargoids ? ..............

Meanwhile, it's a splendid Explorer :) But, yes, supercruise handling really needs a review.
 
Okay. Following the thread. I'll step back and use this opportunity to learn.

Do you think it is good as an AX ship? What do you think could improve it for AX? You can still go along with the focus of the thread under the premise it was made to fight bugs.

but fit a SLF and the T-10 becomes very effective at PvE

This is what I found as well. I built, engineered, scrapped and sold two T-10 before I finally decided to do the whole SLF/crew thing. Once I had a crew member trained up I decided to try the T-10 again with it, lots of hull and high resist bi-weaves, mix of gimbal lasers and MCs with some drag packhounds to slow down stuff when need be, and it is a very capable and efficient PVE ship. It pretty much retired my Vette for CZ's (when I want a large ship). I don't PVP, so I'm sure a lot of its deficiencies just don't matter as much for me.

I do agree the SC handling is unduly atrocious, I've actually built an explorer T-10 and turned back after a few K ly because I just couldn't take it anymore.

I also don't understand why bad handling ships are bad at pitch, roll & yaw. I could see a T-9 and T-10 having bad yaw and maybe roll, but I'd think that pancake would pitch pretty good.
 
Would uprating the base shield stat and upping the hull hardness by 5 more (up to 80 to give it a clear advantage over the Corvette and Cutter at 70, Anaconda at 65), and go for the class 8 thrusters?

The Armour on the T-10 is fine, its one of the better big ships in terms of armor and for its size the armour makes sense, frontier did an excellent job on the armour side of this for this ship, it doesn't stand out as the best armour tank though its balanced well.

Increasing the base shield to 500 from 320 would bring it close to the Federal Corvette in terms of shield and hull power as the Federal Corvette has a base shield of 555.

Class 8 thrusters alone will not fix the speed issue though I personally would be happy with the shield buff and thruster size buff alone.
 
I do think lifting the limit of four experimentals (T-10 only) would bring close it to where it needs to be as an AX ship.

While this would help set it apart from the competition the issue of convergence remains for the T-10, something that can currently be worked around unless you do AX combat.
 
Gimbaled experimentals.

I know, It's a long way to go to get it near the design intent.

Well this would assume they are going to add a whole new section of weapons... would be far more simple just to fix the T10 though I would like to see gimballed versions of AX gear.
 
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