No that wasn't the case I can scoop with my eyes closed (plenty of audio feedback). I got into CQC with a monster Vulture, I thought I had a powerful bird, man he wiped me in a heartbeat, I didn't get a glimpse of his loadout to emulate it, to busy dying....It isn't the dying and rebuy that annoyed me it's being reincarnated 10 jumps away from my current location that annoyed me.
Thanks.
What were you flying?
If small ships can be equated to fighters, a Vulture is a heavy bomber. It's classed as a small vessel, but is armed like a medium. Twin Large hardpoints, defaults a class 5 shield. And it has a class 5 slot restricted to military, which can hold a class 5 hull reinforcement package (armor for days? Armor for days). So it's small, fast, tough, and packs a punch.
It's weakness is that it has an under-sized power plant, and an anemic fuel tank. It's really good in a straight attacker build, but you get major sacrifices to housekeeping functions like cargo capacity, jump count before refuels, or secondary functions like interdiction, scanning, or utility slots. So you can't really get creative with a vulture without playing a game of rock paper scissors with the vessel. Which is ZERO concern for an AI that spawns long enough to kill you and then vanish again. It just needs to be tuned to kill, which means everything is put into immediate realspace function. It can run on the default fuel tank or smaller, doesn't need a fuel scoop. Doesn't need the best frame shift drive. So it can afford to go all in.
Running the build, going all in on local system, I can build a vulture that has a boost speed of 394, shields at 389. Hull integrity at 868, two module reinforcements of +70 each, equip it with large gimbaled burst lasers, and have a point defense, chaff launcher, and an FSD interdictor. It can't jump out of the system like this, but again the AI don't need to worry about longevity past five minutes. It's built like a brick and hits twice as hard. Any normal player-outfitted ship design that doesn't have a size advantage and superior firepower by that virtue is going to encounter this thing like a sentence encounters a full-stop. These combat specs are similar to a default Anaconda.
In a 'Fighter'.
So... yeah.
EDIT: Oh, I forgot to swap lightweight alloy for military grade armor. That puts the hull integrity up to 1,140. That takes it from brick, to TANK.
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