Ranting again about this because holy hell. Let's take Imperial Cutter. It's one of the strongest ships in the game. Kudos to Newts by the way again.
We have bought a Cutter! Our first Cutter is just a basic one, with no boosters. We give it a class 8A shield and be on our merry way. Let's trade! This one has 943 shields and 720 hit points.
We decide to be bloodthirsty and outfit The Cutter for just combat. But we dislike engineering. Let's give it military armour, 8A shields, 1x8 and 1x6 SCBs, 1x5MRP, 3A interdictor and rest HRPs. For s and giggles I throw in 3x Heat Sinks and rest are shield boosters. We're looking at 3790HP and 1886MJ shields with 7500Mj in SCBs. This is a lot, over 5 times the HP and almost 10 times the effective shield we'd have in non-military specced 8A-shielded cutter.
Then we go insane: let's throw basic engineering to that combat Cutter so we have heavy duties all around, with a size1 therres HRP and couple of resistance boosters on top of heavy duties. We're now looking at 6430HP and 3370MJ base shield. With Specialized Cells, our entire shield is now over 11k MJ. Like lol, we have 9 times the HP (without calculating in resistances) and 11 times the MJ of our original model.
We're bored, and become gods. We implement a limitation: our Cutter now has some protection but can only utilize 2x shield boosters and HRPs/MRPs/SCBs are limited to military slots. With military grade nonengineered build we have 1320 shields and 1790 hull, since I'm not taking a C5 SCB but opt for an MRP+HRP. We have 140% the shield strength and 2,5 times the hull of the first off-the-shelf Cutter.
And if we engineer those, we can have around 1884Mj shields and 2734 hull. I throw mostly resistances here. This is still significant, but we're having twice the shields and 3,8 times the HPs of the store one (again without resistances). This is something I could perhaps expect to see. [Note that many Combat Zone Viper IVs have effective hull strength above this value.]
Now, the question is:
In what situation is it sensible to be able to have 11x the shields and 9x hull points (plus significant resistance buffs practically doubling those values) of the standard model, while damage output has only increased 100%? What sort of gameplay does this promote? How does this translate to PvP interactions, since a ship outfitted for just combat can have almost 20 times the defensive stats of a stock one? Like, even if the defendant could actually shoot back, is there ever a situation where the defendant could kill or damage the offender?
Like... ugh. If you want to have a Cutter and be able to sometimes defend against a PvP opponent, you already have to sacrifice a lot for HRPs and SCBs and SBs. If you want to be competitive, you basically fill your entire ship with HRPs and SBs. With more limited slots the situation would be bad, but it wouldn't be THAT hopeless.
Ugh.
Edit: A fully PA-kitted Cutter with no engineering does a total of 507 absolute damage per shot. 60 % of this ignores resistances and the rest hits something like 50/50 resistances, so we're looking at effectively 405 damage per salvo. This means that if a defender hits perfectly with no damage falloff, he/she requires a total of 45 salvos to kill the superhardened Cutter. With a fire rate of 0.3 per second, this means a total of 148 seconds of just holding down the trigger. But it gets worse! Since we know that player can only get at most two salvos per one complete distro charge, we have to count in the recharge time that is 10 seconds with 4 pips in weapons. This averages to about 1 shot every 7 seconds (roughly), so we're actually looking at over 5 minutes of uninterrupted, point blank, no-miss shooting with 4 pips in weapons.
We have bought a Cutter! Our first Cutter is just a basic one, with no boosters. We give it a class 8A shield and be on our merry way. Let's trade! This one has 943 shields and 720 hit points.
We decide to be bloodthirsty and outfit The Cutter for just combat. But we dislike engineering. Let's give it military armour, 8A shields, 1x8 and 1x6 SCBs, 1x5MRP, 3A interdictor and rest HRPs. For s and giggles I throw in 3x Heat Sinks and rest are shield boosters. We're looking at 3790HP and 1886MJ shields with 7500Mj in SCBs. This is a lot, over 5 times the HP and almost 10 times the effective shield we'd have in non-military specced 8A-shielded cutter.
Then we go insane: let's throw basic engineering to that combat Cutter so we have heavy duties all around, with a size1 therres HRP and couple of resistance boosters on top of heavy duties. We're now looking at 6430HP and 3370MJ base shield. With Specialized Cells, our entire shield is now over 11k MJ. Like lol, we have 9 times the HP (without calculating in resistances) and 11 times the MJ of our original model.
We're bored, and become gods. We implement a limitation: our Cutter now has some protection but can only utilize 2x shield boosters and HRPs/MRPs/SCBs are limited to military slots. With military grade nonengineered build we have 1320 shields and 1790 hull, since I'm not taking a C5 SCB but opt for an MRP+HRP. We have 140% the shield strength and 2,5 times the hull of the first off-the-shelf Cutter.
And if we engineer those, we can have around 1884Mj shields and 2734 hull. I throw mostly resistances here. This is still significant, but we're having twice the shields and 3,8 times the HPs of the store one (again without resistances). This is something I could perhaps expect to see. [Note that many Combat Zone Viper IVs have effective hull strength above this value.]
Now, the question is:
In what situation is it sensible to be able to have 11x the shields and 9x hull points (plus significant resistance buffs practically doubling those values) of the standard model, while damage output has only increased 100%? What sort of gameplay does this promote? How does this translate to PvP interactions, since a ship outfitted for just combat can have almost 20 times the defensive stats of a stock one? Like, even if the defendant could actually shoot back, is there ever a situation where the defendant could kill or damage the offender?
Like... ugh. If you want to have a Cutter and be able to sometimes defend against a PvP opponent, you already have to sacrifice a lot for HRPs and SCBs and SBs. If you want to be competitive, you basically fill your entire ship with HRPs and SBs. With more limited slots the situation would be bad, but it wouldn't be THAT hopeless.
Ugh.
Edit: A fully PA-kitted Cutter with no engineering does a total of 507 absolute damage per shot. 60 % of this ignores resistances and the rest hits something like 50/50 resistances, so we're looking at effectively 405 damage per salvo. This means that if a defender hits perfectly with no damage falloff, he/she requires a total of 45 salvos to kill the superhardened Cutter. With a fire rate of 0.3 per second, this means a total of 148 seconds of just holding down the trigger. But it gets worse! Since we know that player can only get at most two salvos per one complete distro charge, we have to count in the recharge time that is 10 seconds with 4 pips in weapons. This averages to about 1 shot every 7 seconds (roughly), so we're actually looking at over 5 minutes of uninterrupted, point blank, no-miss shooting with 4 pips in weapons.
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