Ships FdL Combat Optimization

[SindriAndBale]

Recently rebought my Fer-de-Lance after a stint in the Python, mostly so that I would have less issues doing my combat missions and bounty hunting. I've been attemping to squeeze what I can onto this ship, but I'm not sure if what I've done with it is going to continue working or not, so I could use some advice. In particular what I'm worrying about is that I have no Shield Cell Banks, and putting them on the ship at this point would vastly overburden my powerplant unless I only were to use them with the weapons stowed, which seems suboptimal in heated combat. At the moment with this setup, I run at 20.63 power consumption with hardpoints deployed, and have some modules set to disable when they're on, but I don't know exactly how much I have spare when I do so.

[Fer-de-Lance]
H: 4B/G Cannon
M: 2D/G Beam Laser
M: 2D/G Beam Laser
M: 2D/F Beam Laser
M: 2D/F Beam Laser
U: 0I Point Defence
U: 0I Point Defence
U: 0C Frame Shift Wake Scanner
U: 0E Kill Warrant Scanner
U: 0A Shield Booster
U: 0D Shield Booster

BH: 1I Lightweight Alloy
RB: 5A Power Plant
TM: 5B Thrusters
FH: 4A Frame Shift Drive
EC: 4E Life Support
PC: 6A Power Distributor
SS: 4E Sensors
FS: 3C Fuel Tank (Capacity: 8)

5: 5A Shield Generator
4: 4E Cargo Rack (Capacity: 16)
4: 3C Fuel Tank (Capacity: 8)
2: 2E Frame Shift Drive Interdictor
1: 1E Basic Discovery Scanner

 

[PhoenicianSon]

I have been performing combat missions, RES farming, and PP combat missions in my FDL now for several months. I love it, and I have essentially all but refused purchasing the Python. I use a Clipper as a secondary ship to perform PP/BB cargo runs/missions and light trade with 160 cargo capacity. Anyways, here is what I ended up with when building out my FDL after months of toying with it and refining my setup. The benefit of this ship is the shields, since it has 6 Utility slots you can really boost the shields high, into the 800's or even 900's if you were to push 5 boosters, but that would require some serious sacrifices with other modules to install 5 A boosters. I am currently running 4 A-boosters for 855 shields, and it withstands pretty much anything that hits it, even multiple ships.

As far as your build, I would drop the 4 beam lasers, because you are going to have some serious issues with overheating. The 4B/G Cannon however is surprisingly good, especially once you get acclimated to aiming with it mounted below the ship by keeping your nose pointed towards the target, and it melts away PowerPlants on large ships after impressingly a few shots. I installed 4 of the 4/G medium Pulse Lasers because they never overheat and take apart large and small ships due to their placement and the FDL's manueverability once you perfect your dogfighting with it; and you can fire the pulse lasers for a great deal of time before completely divesting the charge of your distributor requiring recharge - and it does recharge very quickly as does the Engine with 3 to 4 pipps. I would drop the 2 Point Defenses and add 2 more Shield Boosters, which you will be able to when you reduce your power needs with the Beam Lasers. Some people like to use Burst lasers on the top, Pulse on bottom, and with that set up you can still add another A booster, you just won't be able to handle 4 A Boosters for lack of sufficient power. I don't use a Frame Shift Wake Scanner, so I have a Chaff installed instead for CZ combat, which comes in handy when you all of a sudden become the target of 4 to 5 ships in cluster combat.

Get the A Thrusters, trust me, one of the major benefits of this ship is its speed, so you will want to milk as much out of the ship as possible, and the B rated mods are not only slower but also heavier so they also reduce top speed. Change the Sensors and the Life Support to D as well to reduce weight to 4t each reducing the weight from 10t each (saving 12t total). Get rid of the Cargo Rack and Basic Discovery Scanner. I use a 4B Fuel Scoop, and even though you might not want to waste one of those 4 size slots for a Fuel Scoop, trust me you want a large fuel scoop considering the ship quickly overheats when fuel scooping near the star and the tank is too small to get you that far without refueling. If you use a 2 size Fuel Scoop, you will literally have to disengage and reengage Fuel Scooping a couple times because the ship overheats so quickly when fuel scooping any star. You can then work in one 4 and one 2 or 1 size SCB, but will only be able to use them when your HP are retracted. However, with 3 A boosters, you should be high in the 700's, 855 with 4 A Boosters and a 5A Shield so the SCB is really an insurance policy than anything else as your shields are super resilient against fire. Finally, an FSD-I, which I actually used the 1 size slot for an A rated FSD-I at a range of C, rather than the size 2 for a range of B. The ship will only have a 13.5ly jump range with this setup, but it will boost to 404 with full munition.

Below is a link to my set up so you can see what it looks like by application. It pushes 99.4% of the powerplant retracted, and 118% deployed, but with proper power management it is completely "doable". I also shut off the Cargo Scoop altogether rather than using power management since this ship is not really one for cargo runs and it is useless anyway if you don't have Cargo capacity so why bother with its power management. The link to my set up will also show how I power-manage my modules when the weapons are deployed. The FDL is definitely my favorite ship, so have fun:

http://coriolis.io/outfit/fer_de_la...4a335d5566.AwRj4yrI.EwBhEYy6bZ3kA===?bn=FDL 1

Hope this helps

 

[SindriAndBale]

First off, damn I didn't know that this Coriolis site was even a thing, this looks way better than the Shipyard tool.

As for the beam lasers, I didn't run into heat issues often because of the time it took to fully recharge them, and only the toughest/high ranking ships would survive more than a few seconds total from all four. Never used pulse lasers much, except for when I used the Vulture, but was unaware how the medium pulses compared to the Large ones.

Point Defense I have since realized is useless, since next to no NPC's and zero players use missiles or torpedoes, but I hadn't thought of anything to replace them with yet. Wake Scanner I also realized is totally pointless because its rarely worth chasing people, and with the FdL's garbage jump range and fuel limitations, you can rarely follow them anyway. I always use bigger fuel scoops, ever since i used a size 1 once and made 3 passes around a star and thought "boy this is stupid". Only other thing I'm not sure on replacing is the second fuel tank I installed. I'm still not entirely sure how much that helps, because I don't fully understand what determines how far you can jump. Thanks for all the advice though, should help a lot.

 

[Sendraks]

As you've got the space, I would run x2 chaff rather than point defence, then 1 kws and the rest shield boosters. Being able to chain chaffs, is a lot of damage mitigation vs turrets/gimbals on npc ships and will save you more shield strength than you'd gain by an extra booster.

The huge hardpoint does take some getting used to. Good against large ships, pointless against almost anything else unless you're practically stuck next to it.

I'm toying with the idea of running a C3 turreted beam in the huge point and then x4 multis in the meds, as I suspect this will be an all round faster ship killer with less effort. The single beam will melt anything smaller than an Asp, whilst the x4 multis should make quick work of anything larger and the damage penalty against the conda shouldn't be that big of a deal. Will eat a lot of ammo to be sure, but should be funny as hell.

 

[PhoenicianSon]

Glad to help... as far as how the hardpoints differ from medium to large is that each large does 1.5 damage to each medium. Therefore, 2 large are like 3 medium, so the 4th medium from the FDL essentially gives you 4.5 power ratio to the 3 of the Vulture. I totally understand that you would want to keep the beams, as I love the beams as well, but you might want to consider having one or two at most and the rest pulse so you can free up some of that power for other modules like boosters, better thrusters, etc.

I was running a small fuel module in the 1 slot for the longest time, but that additional 2t is not going to offer much as far as extending your trips before fuel scooping, and as long as you have a fuel scoop, you are better off investing that module into something that will support combat. As far as measuring distance, the coriolis.io website will also show you how far you can jump on a full tank by ly distance. It is a phenomenal tool, and that module management platform makes it infinitely more functional than the shipyard tool, which I believe everyone starts with when building their ships outside the game.

I agree about the wake scanner, but to each their own as they say and I wasn't sure if you used that to expand upon the missions available during supercruise when NPC pilots ask you to follow them by scanning their drop. If you don't really plan on using it, lose it for the KWS and the chaff. Others go for 2 chaffs, but in PvE, I really think as a personal preference, it is an overkill. A 10 shot of chaff is generally more than enough for me and I have spent hours upon hours in combat zones without spamming chaffs, which I have only needed occasionally when "ganged up" on my numerous ships.

Although you may not run into heat issues in RES, you might run into them in CZs or Nav Beacons, because for the former when you get attacked by beams and are shooting beams your heat increases exponentially, and near the sun in Nav Beacons your ship runs hotter in general with beams. If you truly want to keep all 4 beams, I would invest into a heat sink or two for one of your utility slots. Really though, a combination of pulse beams is probably even better than my 4 pulse, but I use the 4 pulse so I can push out more power for the boosters, thrusters, and shields, since the pulses require half the power that the beams require.

Whatever you choose, that ship will be quite potent, but at the very least, you will want to sacrifice power to weapons and components to include all A rated parts for your shields, thrusters, powerplant and FSD.

 

[SindriAndBale]

I wound up trying your setup, and man did it work a lot better. Most notably the thrusters, didn't realize quite how much of a difference it made. Took me a while to tweak all the power settings for hardpoint deployment, but I got it down after a while and mopped the floor with some intense RES ships which usually were more irritating since previously, I only had about 608 shield strength and no SCB's on top of being less maneuverable. I think that's what I love about the FdL, is that finishing a build on it and having to set it up to work just right makes it really feel like its YOUR ship, and its customized. Had the same experience in the Viper, which was another fantastic ship. My ultimate goal is to hoard enough dosh to get a Corvette when it comes out, but I sure as hell won't sell the Lance for it. I just wish it had some better skins.

 

[PhoenicianSon]

I wound up trying your setup, and man did it work a lot better. Most notably the thrusters, didn't realize quite how much of a difference it made. Took me a while to tweak all the power settings for hardpoint deployment, but I got it down after a while and mopped the floor with some intense RES ships which usually were more irritating since previously, I only had about 608 shield strength and no SCB's on top of being less maneuverable. I think that's what I love about the FdL, is that finishing a build on it and having to set it up to work just right makes it really feel like its YOUR ship, and its customized. Had the same experience in the Viper, which was another fantastic ship. My ultimate goal is to hoard enough dosh to get a Corvette when it comes out, but I sure as hell won't sell the Lance for it. I just wish it had some better skins.

I am happy that it worked out for you, and that you are enjoying the build. I have a secondary ship, the Clipper, and mostly I use it for PP cargo runs and some light combat, but it is nothing like my FDL that can simply take a beating and not lose so much as a ring of shields. I absolutely love the ship, and will never part with it.

If you need to refer in any way to the power management, since my build pushes the power to its limits, take another gander at the corolis.io link on the post and it will show you how to manage the modules when the hardpoints are deployed. It is quite an astonishing ship all despite the power limitations, as to push 118% of the power plant but still be able to deploy hardpoints with power management it is essentially pushing close to another 20% of the available power.

Welcome to the club, and make sure you post your FDL on the FDL appreciation page

Enjoy!

 

[simo2003]

This is what I use on my FdL:

http://coriolis.io/outfit/fer_de_lance/05A5A4A4D6A4D3C0u1b1b2727040m040400004d5d5d2o66.AwRj4zNEg===.AwhMJBGaZq1EA===?bn=Fer-De-Lance%20(Hunter)

I've used a cannon and a plasma accelerator on the Class 4 hard point, but they have a few problems - the projectiles are usually too slow to hit things, they draw a lot of power and are only used in a certain set of circumstances. I switched these out for a fixed Class 3 beam - lower damage but the firepower is more constant.

I D-rated the shield generator for two reasons. One is that it allows me to run a 4A shield cell bank with my hard points active (the second is deactivated until the first is exhausted), which makes power management much easier in combat. Secondly, the reduced weight brings the total mass of the ship below 50% of the optimum for thrusters, which gives the ship a big manoeuvrability boost. With the shield boosters, I still have 616.16 MJ of shields. I also used to have point defence turrets, but missiles and torpedoes apparently do nothing to shields.