Engineers Best mods for plasma accelerators

Pyrotiger

Pyrotiger
Hi everyone,

I want a bit of advice concerning Plasma Accelerators. I got bored of gimballed weapons in October and have been getting used to fixed weapons, while engineering my ships to the max. Now, I want to try Plasma Accelerators, but I want to engineer them, as well. Power plants and PDs have all been engineered to the max. I want to use them in PvE, and outfit FDL, Corvette (only on the Huge hardpoints) and maybe put them on a Vulture for the lolz.

Even with the engineered PPs and PDs, would Overcharged be impossible, or another blueprint altogether be the best way to go?
 

GammaZ

G
I use efficient.
~5-10% damage increase, massive (like ~90%) heat decrease and ~30% power and distributor draw decrease.
Overcharged is an option too, but for example on corvette with charge-enhanced distributor it will use almost all wep capacitor to fire 2 huge PA-s. I find efficient to work better, because i can fire other weapons too and do not have to worry about heat at all...
Vulture with a pair of efficient PA-s is just crazy, they can be fired non-stop, like pulse lasers...
 
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CATPAIN KIRK

CATPAIN KIRK
Spacebaboy said:
Even with the engineered PPs and PDs, would Overcharged be impossible, or another blueprint altogether be the best way to go?
Click to expand...

Personally, I go with a mix of lightweight and efficiency mods (all G5). Worked very well on an all PA FAS for me and since I've run out of ships I want to fly and mod, I rebought another FDL today and went the same route.

Caveat: I only use fixed weapons, so I never mix weapons with different projectile speeds since it would mean splitting damage. Therefore I either go full PA or none at all. One dispersal field, one target lock breaker and one dazzle shell neatly complement each other.
Moreover I don't PvP at all, so I can't say how effective it would be in PvP.
 

Crazy_One

C
I applied a level 5 rapid fire mod last night and the dps is now at 50. I also managed to get reduced thermal load and better armor penetration. While long shots are tough I find that hits are very effective at both shields and armor.

On a second note be careful applying additional features. I did that twice and each time the reduced damage was significant. I had a role of 45 damage and go the free target lock breaker, applied it then went to outfitting and saw my damaage was no only 35.
 

Innocentius

Innocentius
I am really torn here. I am standing at engineer's workshop with 3 PAs that I will put to my FAS. 2.2.03 is coming up soon and will bring its changes. I do not know what to do with the PAs. Will I overheat in the FAS if I do not put efficient? Will the Rapid Fire's jitter be noticiable? Is overcharged the best bet here? What about the changes that are coming with the patch: how will they affect me...

And should I take plasma slug if I intend to do any bounty hunting with this loadout...
 

GammaZ

G
Innocentius said:
I am really torn here. I am standing at engineer's workshop with 3 PAs that I will put to my FAS. 2.2.03 is coming up soon and will bring its changes. I do not know what to do with the PAs. Will I overheat in the FAS if I do not put efficient? Will the Rapid Fire's jitter be noticiable? Is overcharged the best bet here? What about the changes that are coming with the patch: how will they affect me...

And should I take plasma slug if I intend to do any bounty hunting with this loadout...
Click to expand...

Put on 3 unmodded PA-s and try to shoot. Note capacitor draw. Consider that overcharged will increase it by up to 50%. If it still look like you can shoot all 3 at the same time, and if resulting fire rate will be satisfactory you can use overcharged. If you want higher fire rate then efficient will be a good choice. Rapidfire... i do not think that fire rate will be limited by weapon, it will be limited by capacitor.
Also from what i've seen in beta plasma slug will be useless with 16T fuel tank, you will run out of fuel faster than out of stock PA ammo.
 
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goemon

goemon
running focussed mod. range increase is direct projectile speed increase, and that helps massively to hit with PAs.

as a special: plasma slug, so you don#t have to care about ammo.

running a double PA DBS with that. projectile speed of MCs.
 

Innocentius

Innocentius
goemon said:
running focussed mod. range increase is direct projectile speed increase, and that helps massively to hit with PAs.

as a special: plasma slug, so you don#t have to care about ammo.

running a double PA DBS with that. projectile speed of MCs.
Click to expand...

Doesn't it bother you that the differnt PA's travel at different speeds (when you have more than 2 and you have different rolls on the focused)?
 

GammaZ

G
goemon said:
maybe it depends on size of the plasmas and all total fuel consumption via powerusage? i run out of MC ammo of a small G5 high capacity MC before running out of fuel.
Click to expand...

Plasma slug uses fuel to recharge. 2 large plasmas seem to use something like ~1.5T per clip...
If we are talking about 1 large + 2 medium...
 
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goemon

goemon
Innocentius said:
Doesn't it bother you that the differnt PA's travel at different speeds (when you have more than 2 and you have different rolls on the focused)?
Click to expand...

well, i made several rolls to get both PAs to nearby the same projectile speed .... difference is 13 m/s between the two... hardly visible.
 

Ceekay

Ceekay
Fitted four L5 efficient PA's to my FAS it has just enough power with the stock 6B plant and no serious heat issues at a fairly warm comp nav beacon, it's a huge fun weapon array and very effective against medium and large ships but smaller fighters are quite difficult to hit, as mentioned the limited ammo is the main issue, possibly a mix of PA and pulse laser for more extended BH might be worth a try.

https://coriolis.io/outfit/federal_...29v624.AwRj4y2GSA==.Aw18QjEA?bn=FAS CPL 5C Bi
 

Innocentius

Innocentius
I commented there earlier of not knowing what mods to take. In the end it went up with what materials I had at the moment (after having to make a few not so good rolls) and I just went with that. I currently have the bottom 3 on my FAS as PAs. So that is 1 large and 2 medium. The top one I had as a thermal vent gimballed beam to handle those smaller ships, but that did not work out well (I think it was producing more heat than it was venting). Then I noticed that Zm4arc0 had large pulse turret there on top (probably with phasing sequence). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aM4QmqwHAHg At first that looked like a weird choice from such a skilled pilot, but I decided to give it a shot anyhow and put an unengineered pulse turret on top. >> Great choice. My accuracy with PAs climbed a lot as I could properly concentrate on them and did not have 2 confusing targeting circles there, also the turret produces practically no heat at all and it gives enough pressure on some of the smaller ships that I do not have to worry that much about them.

So the PAs themselves. I have currently all 3 with plasma slug special. If I were into pvp I would have probably something different in there, but I just fly for fun and challenge of using these fixed weapons (as a long time user of gimballed weapons). The large PA is overcharged one. One of the other medium ones is a G5 rapid shot (the jitter is so small on that, that it is not noticeable at any reasonable distance that I would be using these weapons anyhow). The last medium is G4 lightweight that just happened to end up as plasma slug and which I kept for now. I have a bit of a heat issue because of my overcharged power plant so if I had a good roll on armored powerplant with nice heat efficiency I would have either 3 overcharged or 1 overcharged and 2 focused/rapid fires. With my current PP I would say that it would be best for me if I had 1 overcharged (large) and 2 efficient ones. Then again even though the heat meter keeps warning me, it is more or less in sync with my weapon capacitor... it is close that this heat efficiency would be enough (if my PP roll would be heat efficiency under 0.5 that might be enough). With this setup powerplant heat efficiency contributes directly to burst damage.

Anyhow, its been fun flying this ship. I just need to stop treating it like a multirole and devote all module slots to combat and engineer hull and rest of the HRDs. It is still much too fragile when shields drop and they DO drop in FAS.
 
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