Engineers Advise with Multi Cannons on Gunship?

[Elprez]

Looking for some advise. I am not that great of a combat pilot but not that bad either. I recently got a gunship after watching a video of one melting ships Right now it has all MC's outfitted with all of them at level 3 over charged along with 3 of them loaded with incendiary rounds. I went and tested it with decent results until I ran up against a deadly FDL. I took him down but only after losing my shields and down to 80% hull. I am going to finish upgrading my FGS this weekend. How should I go about modding my remaining MC's? I have my class 3 at level 3 and was thinking of going to level 5 with incendiary rounds to get that melting advantage towards the NPC shields. I understand that I dont need to have incendiary rounds on every MC due to heat.

Any advise is appreciated.

 

[Conch]

your forgetting the biggest weapon of the dropship,gunship and FAS... its the shields
get some core dynamics composites, and just mod the HRP and hull to crazy amounts. even on my FAS i got a few grade4 armor mods and have 3100 armor. when my shields go down i do not have to worry.

most of the extra effects on weapons take a damage penalty. so i would go for all overcharged grade 5 with 1 corrosive mod.

 

[Elprez]

your forgetting the biggest weapon of the dropship,gunship and FAS... its the shields
get some core dynamics composites, and just mod the HRP and hull to crazy amounts. even on my FAS i got a few grade4 armor mods and have 3100 armor. when my shields go down i do not have to worry.

most of the extra effects on weapons take a damage penalty. so i would go for all overcharged grade 5 with 1 corrosive mod.

Excellent. Thanks for the advise!

 

[Conch]

also like to note that i use the gunship as a support ship myself. i know it has enough firepower for being infront of the line, but the turnrate doesnt fit me.

and having people in a wing to back you up with a healing laser helps allot with the fed ships

 

[Sylow]

First of all, overcharged is in the state of "go grade five or forget about it" at the moment. The main reason for that is that at lower grades it looses damage due to jitter. While the term "jitter" tells me more about the code behind it and anybody a little familiar with firearms would rather use the term "spread", that's not the main thing to consider here.
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The important part is that spread/jitter reduces accuracy and thus eliminates a lot of the damage advantage you gain unless you are very close to the target. As the gunship is not exactly considered a fast ship, you won't always manage to stay close enough to ignore the damage loss of this effect. But due to magic (or balancing oversight) the overcharge mod does not have any jitter at grade five. Thus unlike lower grades, the grade five version can project the massively increased damage output at full accuracy.
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So as long as overcharged is implemented the way it currently is, anything but grade five is a bad idea to use. Mind you, Frontier already announced to take a close look at the wreck overcharged currently is. After all it not only outperforms any other modification in terms of damage output (even those like short range blaster, which pay for additional damage by the hefty price of a massive range reduction) but also at the same time significally improves the efficiency of the weapon, not only by damage per ammo but also damage compared to distributor draw. So if you go for the effort to upgrade all your multicannons to grade 5 overcharged, take it with this more than small grain of salt: it is very likely that this modification will be reworked and will be significally nerfed. So if you invest all the work for full grade five overcharged modifications, you have to be aware that the next big patch might undo a lot of the advantage you gained from that.
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On the part of heat efficiency and incendiary rounds: while they have been a little nerfed compared to the previous version, they still are the number one experimental effect on multicannons. But the very same which i wrote on overcharged also is true for this effect: Frontier announced that it will be in focus again in the coming patches, and it very likely will be nerfed again. And on the whole heat meta: i don't have a gunship, i can't tell you how that ship now performs with a full loadout of incendiary multicannons. I guess somebody else will be able to help there, but the question also depends on what you want to use this ship for. In PvE i would not worry, i think it's still very much possible to build a ship with good enough heat efficiency to run full incendiary multicannons, if you mod your reactor accordingly. On how things develop in the PvP metagame, i could not tell you and i also think this is something which needs a little more time for people to completely figure out.
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[CMDR Corlas]

I disagree on claimed negatives of jitter, especially on multicannons. With multis, you generally aren't going to be firing from long range anyway, so the downsides of a bit of jitter, like you get in a grade 3 OC mod, are extremely minimal. It makes it a bit harder to take out subsystems, but it's not really that much of a problem to be honest.

 

[Mystweaver]

You are going to have heat problems with all Overcharged. My loadout initially was 5 MC's all OC and 2 Turreted Cannons with dispersal field. Sadly when firing the MC's, the heat just shot up. Going to turn the mediums into efficient.

 

[Sylow]

I disagree on claimed negatives of jitter, especially on multicannons. With multis, you generally aren't going to be firing from long range anyway, so the downsides of a bit of jitter, like you get in a grade 3 OC mod, are extremely minimal. It makes it a bit harder to take out subsystems, but it's not really that much of a problem to be honest.

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I guess you just like me fly a faster ship, where you generally have influence on the distance to the target. But i have watched videos of well-renowed players when using slower ships. They use MCs to ranges up to 2 km, where jitter makes a good difference. And i think the gunship very much qualifies as slow ship which might have to fire at longer distances.
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[kenworth]

I'm just about to fully rank up with Tod the Blaster and need to make a decision on my Python. Currently running 3 large gimballed MC's and 2 medium turreted beam lasers. Was originally thinking of applying the grade 5 OC plus incendiary to all of the MC's, and lightweight mounts plus thermal vent for the beams since they are nearly always striking the target. Since 2.2 rolled and incendiary has been nerfed somewhat, I'm wondering if this is the best strategy now.

 

[Elprez]

You are going to have heat problems with all Overcharged. My loadout initially was 5 MC's all OC and 2 Turreted Cannons with dispersal field. Sadly when firing the MC's, the heat just shot up. Going to turn the mediums into efficient.

I am planning on 2 mediums and the large at level 5 OC with incendiary. The rest as efficient. Hopefully that will be a good mix. Since after you apply the rounds you have to rank back up I will test the build out in a nearby res as I upgrade.