Explosives based weapon loadout

[DaraTheNeko]

I'm a simple man with simple taste. I use plasma and rails, aim at thing, pull trigger, thing go boom. Still quite pleasing, efficient, deadly. Before, I used the good old multicannons, fixed as well, need more time on target. And before that, lasers, good thing, does the job, unlimited ammo.

But something was missing. I used thermal, I used kinetic, I used thermal and kinetic, and finally used both and absolute damage together.

I wouldn't even blame players if they just forgot about that other damage type to be honest. Explosive damage, most likely least used in pve, with only so little use in pvp.

I wanna give those explosive weapons some love you see ? Obviously I could pack a ship full of packhounds, which I've already done with my gunship. But that's the easy option, and requires powerplay weapons. But what about the other weapons? Mines, seekers, torpedoes, dumbfire, and I'll even make an exception and count high yield cannon shells here. If I was to bring an "explosives only" loadout into a haz res, would it even be profitable or would the cost outweight the bounties, how often would I have to rearm ?

I'd love to see some explosives based loadouts, get advices on how to use them, maybe even learn to master the one weapon in the game requiring the most skill, mines.

TLDR: Wanna have go boom loadout, help.

 

[Feanor the Tall]

The biggest issue you'll have if you're committed to only using explosives is getting through shields. Reverb cascade mines could work of course. Once you're through the shields you're golden though, I love using dumbfires, especially against big ships. The amount of damage they do to external modules leaves their weapons broken and drives dead before moving in for the kill. Good luck!

 

[Morbad]

Overload munitions are a 50/50 explosive/thermic split.

Packhounds have the most damage per total magazine pool of any seeker weapons, but dumbfires can be nice at short range. High-cap all of them, put overload and drag on the seekers, then penetrator on some dumbfires.

Don't expect such a loadout to work well in PvP.

 

[GoldenSilver484]

Not an explosive only loadout, but my Krait MkII has dual C2 OC beams for shields and smaller targets with three high capacity penetrator payload dumbfires on the larges.

It's able to destroy the powerplants of most ships within 5 salvos, or shread the hulls of smaller targets with just a few hits. Might not be the most effective, but it's different than the beams, frags and multicannons I normally use.

 

[NCFCpaul]

If you can be prepared to put a lasers on you can do very well. I have a Gunship with four Packhounds on it with the rest lasers, it can be very effective.

I have a couple with sturdy mount, it reduces thermal load as well as increasing armour piercing, which I think can be helpful, especially with penetrator effect.

The other two being high capacity one with emissive the other oversized.

Without the lasers to drop shields you can struggle badly. Or at least, I certainly did.

 

[goemon]

i'm running full seeker loadouts on my trading python and trading conda. works well for single engagements with interdicting mission pirates.
does not work at a cnb, as the other pirates i'm not attacking shooting down missiles with their pd.
so - it might work in a haz res, were pirates spreadout a bit.

dumbfires a really close range weapons though.

 

[Ydiss]

If it were possible to use storage up with ammo (and thus lose defensive capabilities) with a module that reloads from storage at a slow rate between fights, I'd use missiles I think.