Ship Builds & Load Outs Meta Discussion Fast FSD boot or shielded?

[don carnage1]

I’m starting to fly a large ship in Open, and obviously that makes me a juicy target. I’m torn between:

1) B-rated FSD with fast reboot and double braced. 133 integrity.

2) A-rated FSD with shielding and mass manager. 257 integrity.

Option 1 may better protect me from Grom bombs.

Option 2 will better protect me from module sniping.

I have strong shields and Guardian MRPs. I plan to flee if my shields go down.

I guess the question is... what am I more likely to be vulnerable to? Before this I had only really flown fast mediums in Open, so my speed and agility never let me down. I just used regular long range FSDs on my mediums.

Apologies if this has been asked and answered before. Google has proven to be a needle in a haystack for this particular topic.

 

[TheGrimCorsair]

Grom bombs have a grace period after the effect wears off that'll give you enough time to high wake if you're paying attention to it. Railguns care not for your fast boot, though.

Further, it seems fairly safe to assume you're not skimping on defensive equipment, so you'll likely make it through the encounter long enough to highwake as long as the FSD is intact. If you're not rocking a fair bit of spare hull, you might want to consider fleeing before your shields pop. The bigger danger is losing your engines after your shields pop, as with your shields down they'll be toast long before your FSD and that'll be just as effective as losing the FSD for preventing a jump.

 

[Morbad]

Fast boot if you absolutely cannot power the FSD through malfunctions (they don't fit below 40% with your thrusters).

Shielded otherwise.

The bigger danger is losing your engines after your shields pop, as with your shields down they'll be toast long before your FSD and that'll be just as effective as losing the FSD for preventing a jump.

Usually a good idea to face the most dangerous opponent until you are only a moment away from waking, to make it harder for them to damage drives.

 

[TheGrimCorsair]

Usually a good idea to face the most dangerous opponent until you are only a moment away from waking, to make it harder for them to damage drives.

Absolutely, but as the OP stated they were looking towards large ships, it's no guarantee they'll be able to keep their thrusters away from their attacker long enough to keep them intact with shields down (no idea what the OP is looking at for guts on their ship, hopefully there's an MRP or two in there somewhere).

 

[CMDR Cknarf]

Is PvP your focus, or are you just generally flying in open?

 

[Sethiest]

I run high shields on my Type 9. The idea is that if the shields go, it's kinda gameover anyway. SO with that in mind, I go faster boot, that enables me to fight groms more effectively. Also, if the attacker is persistant, I fail the interdiction so both our FSDs reboot. If I'm lucky, they won't have a fast boot FSD, therefore I get 20 second or so jump head start on them. And I wont have to high wake. Unless they have a heavier ship than mine.

 

[Bigmaec]

Absolutely, but as the OP stated they were looking towards large ships, it's no guarantee they'll be able to keep their thrusters away from their attacker long enough to keep them intact with shields down (no idea what the OP is looking at for guts on their ship, hopefully there's an MRP or two in there somewhere).

Especially not without Palin ... puts shades on

 

[don carnage1]

Is PvP your focus, or are you just generally flying in open?

Sorry for the weeks-late response to this thread. For some reason I didn’t get notified that people responded to it!

But I’m responding now in case anyone stumbles on this later with the same question.

Focus is on both PVP and general flying. I don’t seek out fights usually but if it seems a fair one I’ll stick around.

I always use at least a size 5 module reinforcement + balanced resists on armor. In the end I opted to go for the shielded FSD + a point defense turret for (theoretically?) full coverage.

I also use armored PP, so that’s two out of three vital internals covered.

Grom bombs have a grace period after the effect wears off that'll give you enough time to high wake if you're paying attention to it. Railguns care not for your fast boot, though.

Further, it seems fairly safe to assume you're not skimping on defensive equipment, so you'll likely make it through the encounter long enough to highwake as long as the FSD is intact. If you're not rocking a fair bit of spare hull, you might want to consider fleeing before your shields pop. The bigger danger is losing your engines after your shields pop, as with your shields down they'll be toast long before your FSD and that'll be just as effective as losing the FSD for preventing a jump.

I didn’t know that about Groms having a grace period. Thank you! I feel more confident in my shielded decision now.

Engines are my remaining concern. As you said... sometimes hard to keep facing the enemy in a large ship. I’ll just have to flee if I can’t.

 

[CMDR Cknarf]

I use increased range on most of my stuff for convenience, but if it's a dedicated PvP ship I'm just going to have transferred everywhere, shielded makes sense.

Players are the real threat to your FSD in most cases. You should be able to shield tank against NPCs so well that you probably won't lose shields, and if you're in something smaller, you can generally outrun them and reboot manually if you have to.

I'd say always go with the A rated FSD (unless you need to shave weight in a smaller ship). In this case, 200+ integrity before module reinfocements should be plenty. Like someone mentioned, FSD disruption has a cooldown before it can be applied again. You should be able to spool up and jump by the time they can stop you again. Of course, that's assuming you aren't being mass locked while trying to low wake. In a high wake situation, you'll be OK, so long as you don't waste any unnecessary time.

The amount of MRPs you equip kinda depends on how much armor you have. If you have 4000-6000 hull on something, one MRP isn't going to cut it.

You want to find that balance between hull and module reinforcement. You don't want to be flying a useless brick at 85% hull, but at the same time, you don't want to overdo the module reinforcement to the point you're sacrificing too much overall HP.

 

[don carnage1]

The amount of MRPs you equip kinda depends on how much armor you have. If you have 4000-6000 hull on something, one MRP isn't going to cut it.

You want to find that balance between hull and module reinforcement. You don't want to be flying a useless brick at 85% hull, but at the same time, you don't want to overdo the module reinforcement to the point you're sacrificing too much overall HP.

Cheers for this, mate. Very helpful. “Scaling up” from a medium has been a bit of a learning curve.

As to NPCs... NPCs ceased to be a threat to me a long time ago. They aren’t even part my thinking.

 

[CMDR Cknarf]

That's just the base hull number, without factoring in resistances. That said, if you have that much armor, it likely means you have a lot of Heavy Duty hull reinforcements, which give you resistance boosts on top of the base hull increase. With enough of them, you'll be somewhere in the 30-50% range without much trouble.

There's a little more to balancing shields/boosters, and you're more likely to see high raw MJ numbers with out of whack resistances there.