Large Plasma Charger that is coming is basically useless. On Thargoids it's not focused enough to be reliable. We needed the Large Gauss with the update to make effective use of all the "anti-thargoid ships" that have nice large central hardpoints that we have to undersize. The Shard Cannon and the Plasma Charger (while cool) are effectively useless. I mean Shard Cannon could be good if you have a mega hull tank and just intentionally ram the Thargoid over the heart that's vulnerable but otherwise it's pretty much useless since you can't engineer it for distance or narrower spread.
Instead Frontier gives the impression that they are hell bent on making sup-optimal design choices designed to bait out and milk more time, only unlike an MMO where this is a common and acceptable practice, there isn't enough content worth doing this for in Elite. I can understand not giving size 3 actual Railguns because then the railgun meta returns with a vengeance for PvP, but Guardian tech, even Gauss, is still more or less useless on human ships (on NPCS above Dangerous they start really sucking, and against player super engineered ships they do basically nothing).
As always FDEV fails to impress. Here I am wanting to throw money at more cosmetics... but they don't make them. Here I am wanting nice new ships, instead they intentionally gimp them to keep Conda / Python / FDL as gods. Honestly I'm getting sick of this poor development process, especially when I have a steam library full of other games (Including Overload, the new Descent basically). I find myself rarely on Elite except to farm or unlock something each patch before quitting till the next update. I'm far more active here than I am on the dang game, that shouldn't ever be a thing.
