Ships Guns advice

[Robin of Spiritwood]

Working on an experiment with a slow Asp Scout. How to make it more viable in combat? PvE combat. Did Dirty Drives 5 and Drag drives obviously as the first thing.
Everything else seems faster, cannot control the engagement range.

Had the idea to slow down the enemy with drag munitions on a small frag cannon, and put corrosive on the second one. Initiate combat with the frags, to keep the target sluggish, and just intermittently pop them to offset the speed advantage.

Is the drag effect big enough to be worthwhile?
Do drag munitions work through shields?
Would just one or two pellets from the cannon apply the drag effect? Or do we need all? Or some?
How long does the drag effect last?
Would seeker missiles be better than the frags for this purpose?

Main guns are 2 efficient burst lasers. They work fine with a class 4 power distributor even unengineered.
One has scramble spectrum legacy roll, which is good, keeping it.
What would be a good choice experimental for the other gun?

 

[Morbad]

Is the drag effect big enough to be worthwhile?

In PvE it's debatable. If you have good thruster control, it's probably not worth it, but you are still getting the hang of that, go for it.

Do drag munitions work through shields?

Yes.

Would just one or two pellets from the cannon apply the drag effect? Or do we need all? Or some?

It's entirely binary. One pellet is full effect.

How long does the drag effect last?

Five seconds, and I don't think it has a cooldown anymore either.

Would seeker missiles be better than the frags for this purpose?

Probably not enough ammo, and arming time makes it dubious at close range. NPCs also tend to carry PDTs or ECM.

Main guns are 2 efficient burst lasers. They work fine with a class 4 power distributor even unengineered.
One has scramble spectrum legacy roll, which is good, keeping it.
What would be a good choice experimental for the other gun?

Not many good secondaries for burst lasers other than scramble, but phasing is worth considering as it adds about as much absolute damage to the hull as the effect costs upfront.

 

[Robin of Spiritwood]

Ok, got the Frag cannons. One Drag, one Corrosive.
They work exactly as outlined above, thanks, Morbad.

Overall, a big improvement from small multicannons. Quite apart from the added effects, they hit pretty hard with just Hi Cap mods.

 

[S0rkvild]

Don't work on Asp Scout, you will end up frustrated with results and wasted engineer materials. This ship will still be a flying manure under all circumstances. I tried everthing in this ship and what it does best is being an average explorer.
In my opinion when it comes to small ships or medium ships with hardpoints taken from small ship - best thing is to maximize the damage output. Two small hardpoints - definitely cytoscramblers. They strip shields pretty fast They and because Scout is quite agile keeping on target wont be a problem. Then you need something to crack the hull of your target. A pair of cannons, multicannons, frags. Or you can combine one of these weapons with gimballed corrosive multicannon. For example my Viper MK4 besides cytos uses gimballed corrosive multi and short range fixed cannon and it works quite well. But seriously ditch the Scout and arm the Explorer. AspE has more hardpoints, more utilities, better internals and thus better protection. Four cytoscramblers on the Explorer, damn this is really strong. If you don't know, dps from a single cyto is slighly better than dps from a class 3 fixed beam laser So if you got four of them strapped any lick to the enemy shield will be devastating, but keep in mind cytos aren't effective against the hull.

 

[Robin of Spiritwood]

Don't work on Asp Scout, you will end up frustrated with results and wasted engineer materials. This ship will still be a flying manure under all circumstances. I tried everthing in this ship and what it does best is being an average explor

Not untrue.

The modules can be used on other ships, so it's not a lost cause. I just want to see if I can make something passable out of it.