Concept for a few ED ship buffs

[CMDRMolecule]

Some ships in Elite seem kind of lacking. I feel like Frontier ship buff these ships: the Mamba and Type-10 Defender.

The Mamba only succeeds in speed compared to its sister, the Fer-De-Lance. The FDL has higher base shields and maneuverability, and it has way higher heat control. It feels like you need a thermal vent beam laser or heat sink on the Mamba, and you’ll just disintegrate if you use a shield cell bank. I believe the Mamba should be buffed in these categories: it’s heat management, maneuverability or even its shields. The Mamba should be as good as the ship it’s based off.

Now to the Type-10. Because of the gigantic size of this ship, it gives me a vibe of an Imperial Cutter, without the rank grind. The T-10 should only get a buff in its shield strength, and that’s it. The base shields of 99 MJ is horrible for a ship of this size. It should be lower than the Cutter though. I’m thinking the shield strength of the T-10 should be around 510 MJ.

 

[Dillon Fallon]

Not going to argue about the T-10 since a big ship needs decent shields, especially when it's that slow that the ease in which you can beat in its powerplant makes all that hull rather irrelevant. However with the Mamba-

It feels like you need a thermal vent beam laser or heat sink on the Mamba, and you’ll just disintegrate if you use a shield cell bank

You might be missing a trick here. It does run hot, but this becomes ideal for putting a thermal conduit beam laser or plasma accelerator up top, especially when you consider the nice central position it has just above your head.

The internals may make it look similar to an FdL, but it's a very different ship in how you use it. It's faster and drifts a lot less than the FdL making it far easier to control (albeit with a lower skill ceiling). The analogy I'd use is to say that the FdL is a scalpel, the Mamba a hammer.

 

[Lateralus]

I'd say that the Mamba is not meant to be flown like an FDL.. it's a straight line alpha damage ship. Heat is easy enough to manage with a bit of engineering... I would say its too slow for those massive engines though. It should be as fast as an Orca IMO

The T10 is designed for fighting Goids, so its supposed to be a hull tank rather than a shield tank. Also I've seen players use T10s very successfully when using it with cell-banks and biweaves.

 

[Vandaahl]

T10 was build for mass locking, and it manages to do so just fine.

 

[sandkid]

Any issues the T-10 have are largely the result of weapon imbalance, not the ship itself. Shields are a bit iffy on it, sure, but it was also designed to be an AX ship - poorly, we all know, but there it is - so a lot of what's wrong with it is related to how poorly turrets perform.

It was clearly intended as a first-of-its-kind turret platform, but turrets are only balanced when engineering isn't in play. Engineering significantly ramps up gimbals and fixed beyond the capabilities of turrets, mostly due to percentile increases vs. linear increases. Just one more example of how balance and FDev don't mix.

The magic mass anaconda is another example of this. It's not that the FSDs are wacky, but that the base number for calculations - many of them percentile/exponential in nature - take such a low mass and ridiculously expand its value. The T-10's many woes for utility stem from these exact calculations, but changing (buffing) the T-10 would only make it more 'samey' to other heavy ships, rather than help it feel unique to its design.

Like a lot of Elite, the core problems - the roots - are as old as the game itself, which is why newer ships (and modules) increasingly fall to one extreme or another: OP or terribly useless. I loved my T-10, but only to goof off in. I desperately wanted to love it, but the game's grind just made piloting it a chore.