Ships Imperial Courier Critique my Courier :)

[Shadowscream]

This is my current PvE courier,
the Hammer is on the nose.....The 2 MCs are Gimballed + Incendiary
The shields look weak but I’m relying on very fast recovery/recharge + SCBs

Coriolis EDCD Edition

A ship builder, outfitting and comparison tool for Elite Dangerous

s.orbis.zone

Any improvements?

 

[d8veh]

What do you propose to do with this Courrier?

I think you're going to find that your SCBs don't work. Your shields will go before you reach the button. SCBs work much better with strong shields, like prismatics. Also, you've got no heatsinks to stop your ship from boiling when you fire off the SCBs.

A build like this has shields that have more three times the strength compared to what you proposed, and you don't run out of SCBs, nor boil your ship, nor have to worry about gambling when to fire SCBs:

Coriolis EDCD Edition

A ship builder, outfitting and comparison tool for Elite Dangerous

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One other thing i just noticed: Your lack of jump range could be a real problem if you get sent to a prison ship. A couple of guys got stranded because there was no shipyard and they didn't have enough jump range to get away. Without a fleet carrier, I'd want at least 12 LY jump range.

 

[GloatingSwine]

You can probably drop the AFMU, Module reinforcement, and SCBs to be honest. That will let you drop down to a 3A power plant and get you a considerable amount of extra speed. If your shields look like they might go down put power to engines and hit the GTFO button. Your recharge and rebuild speeds are pretty fast anyway.

AFMUs take too long and are too fiddly to use in combat, and the courier's hull is likely to give up before any modules do anyway.

Fast Charge on the shields won't give you an advantage unless you can put 2.5 pips to SYS and that reduces the amount available for weapons and engines, and the Hammer is going to be a thirsty beast. You can change it to Force Block and have pretty much as good a recharge rate but more protection vs. multicannons and only need 2 pips to get your max recharge speed.

Also: Consider Lightweight engineering on the Imperial Hammer.

 

[Shadowscream]

the AFMU was going to be turned off.....it was a space filler

 

[GloatingSwine]

Don't worry about filling space. On a Courier an empty slot is moar speed.

Here's a variant of your build that trades a bit of hull for shield and hits the magic number for maximum zoomies.

Coriolis EDCD Edition

A ship builder, outfitting and comparison tool for Elite Dangerous

s.orbis.zone

(You may want to put a fuel scoop on if you aren't parking it in the same system you want it to work in).

 

[AlSki]

As the others have said, your jump range is a bit on the light side.

What do you propose to do with this Courrier?

It looks like its for combat, and if so I think your biggest problem will be DPS. I find Lightweight weapons just don't do enough damage, so I trade a little speed.
Compare with Warbird which is a real export from EDMC that I use, and is similar with your hammer on your nose, but 2x Beam instead of 2xMC, however I actually find that a Beam + Corrosive MC combo feels even more effective (must put it back at some point!), it just lacks the drama of trying to hit your target with all three slugs in the Hammer burst

 

[GloatingSwine]

As the others have said, your jump range is a bit on the light side.


It looks like its for combat, and if so I think your biggest problem will be DPS. I find Lightweight weapons just don't do enough damage, so I trade a little speed.
Compare with Warbird which is a real export from EDMC that I use, and is similar with your hammer on your nose, but 2x Beam instead of 2xMC, however I actually find that a Beam + Corrosive MC combo feels even more effective (must put it back at some point!), it just lacks the drama of trying to hit your target with all three slugs in the Hammer burst

The Beam/MC combo will feel more effective* because its DPS isn't purely theoretical.

Beams + Hammer seems like a poor combo on a small ship to me. Beams get their damage from sustained fire, but the Hammer is going to bottom out the distributor when you fire it so the beams have to stop as well.

You'd get more real-terms DPS by switching the two beams to Efficient/Incendiary Multicannons.

So often the DPS of beam lasers looks good on paper but turns out to be actually off in the magical pixieland of infinite distributors.

(I use Lightweight/Thermal Conduit Plasma Accelerators on mine, embrace the toastiness)


*Except against heavily hull stacked targets such as in CZ.

 

[AlSki]

Beams + Hammer seems like a poor combo on a small ship to me. Beams get their damage from sustained fire, but the Hammer is going to bottom out the distributor when you fire it so the beams have to stop as well.
...
So often the DPS of beam lasers looks good on paper but turns out to be actually off in the magical pixieland of infinite distributors.

So the really nice thing about 2 Efficient Gimballed Beams on a Courier, is that they balance the full Charge Enhanced/Super Conduits distributor almost perfectly, so that you can run them indefinitely. When using the hammer as I have it set up, it knocks something like 30% off of the distributor charge. Its enough that you can put a few hammer salvos into something large without stopping the beams at all. The problem actually comes from heat...

(I use Lightweight/Thermal Conduit Plasma Accelerators on mine, embrace the toastiness)

...which I combat with Thermal vent on the beams, so that normally I run cold. What's less effective here is while that the Hammer does have great DPS, it still is mainly thermal. Its great for taking out modules, but I really was after it for decimating hull.

When I switch to Corrosive MC, its the corrosive that I'm after, not the DPS. By just sprinkling 2-3 rounds every time the Corrosive effect symbol disappears, you buff the beams to a level that they burn through hull and module, and then you've got something that got handle 10 or so Low CZs without a restock.

To be fair, I really ought to try a decent Efficient/Incendiary multicannon build. It's just that I've got a Mamba with Huge Beam + Twin CytoScramblers to remove shield, then switch fire group, so its Huge Beam + twin Large multicannons. Bizarrely even though that build is great at eating it's way through CZs, I need to re-fill the MCs often enough that the Courier build is about as good, and a bit more fun.

 

[sinisalo]

Lots of good advice here. I also found lightweight weapons lacked enough punch. The Courier is already firepower-challenged, and lightweighting the weapons drops it below acceptable levels, for me. So when I was building my Courier I found it was ludicrously fast to start, but the speed fell as I modified it to be useful and survivable in combat. That meant full-weight beams and I added a HRP for integrity, and speed fell drastically. In the end it was not as fast as I had hoped, but it's balanced in my eyes. A ship this fast is not in much peril from AI boats when flown well. The real threat to a fast Courier is collision, so I felt integrity was crucial.

I also ran through an enormous combination of weaponry before finally coming full circle and mounting two beams and a corrosive MC. This ship was a special project. My intention when building it was a ship that would be flown flat-out, full time. A ship that makes gunnery passes, and doesn't saddle up. Wide open, slashing attacks against fleeting targets to get tags. If I kill it that's great, but the idea is a ship that extends from the furball at speed, then carves a big arc to make another high speed attack, not unlike a Focke Wulf 190 making passes against a stream of B-17s, ya know?

And because of this I found many weapons were not suitable, like frags, which, while devastating, are ill-suited to such closure rates. Same with rails and any fixed weapon. The beams and MC combo work well enough, but with fall-off the effective window is fairly narrow. But tags are what I am looking for, not kills start to finish. I have other ships that do that.

And it is a lot of fun flying combat like this. G-loc is common, and the thrill of these types of attacks as you navigate at very high speed through a target-rich environment never gets old. I did lose it one time in a collision with a NPC named Andrew Knox. Been looking for him ever since

This is my Courier, which despite it beginnings, evolved in to sort of a 'tweener. Fast, but not that fast. More of an all-rounder in the end.

Courier