Ships Nose weapon?

I've been playing around with my weapon setup lately now that I've finally bumped up to the A-tier power plant. I have 2 med beam turret "fly swatters" on top and 2 lg gim pulses on top as well. I started with a lg gim pulse on the nose but I wanted to play around a little. I put hammers on the med spots and a lg beam turret on the nose but that didn't track as well as the 2 med's on the top and it all felt ineffective. Now I've put my fly swatters back on top and I added a lg gim cannon to the nose. That has been fun but I'm quite curious to see the class 3 plasma accelerator in action. Is it worth the upgrade from a cannon?
 
You might run into heat issues with the PA.

Some q:

How do the gimballed pulses stack up to beams? I'm also looking for a large beam turret, are they slower than medium for tracking fast ships?
 
The "fly swatters" on top in the medium slots are quite effective. I have a firing-group set up w/ them and one w/out them. I really only switch to them when I'm getting outmaneuvered or when I want to drop my adversary's shields. If I could have afforded to experiment with 2 lg beam turrets on top instead of pulses, I would have. I guess then I would have put either pulses or Imp. hammers in the medium slots.

I put the gim cannon back on the nose after trying out the PA. I didn't so much have heat issues as I did with aiming issues. I've been playing a while and I still can't hit anything with fixed weapons. I'm hoping the gim cannon will help "train" me! The lg gim pulses are really great, btw. They punch through everything in the game right now. The tracking is fantastic and each pulse is pretty much a hit so you get excellent damage/energy. You lose the additional punch into the hull with beams that pulses bring plus I've found the tracking issues with beams is annoying. They are only hitting my targets about 50-60% of the time if I hold them down. I tried using a gim lg beam on the nose and treating it like a pulse but I eventually realized that the pulses were that much more effective.
 
When I get back into the python, I'm going to have to try out a frag cannon, or two, maybe the two top size 3 h-points.
 
I thought about the frag cannon on the nose also but was concerned about ammunition. I've never used one before.. it looks like a 3 shot burst or close to it? That would only give 10 "blasts" with it before it was empty.
 
I'm trying two PAs on my Python - simply because I'm bored of always using Pulses. I'm not sure what they're accelerating because the plasma is so slow you have to lead the target by a huge amount, makes hitting anything a challenge.

But if you can sneak up on a Wanted craft, and hit it with both plasma weapons.. shields insta-down! It's worth it for those rare moments!
 
upside i ran the same as you: gimballed large pulses, medium turretted beams.

what i tried:
- Large PA. if you get close to another ship or are very good aiming, it's very effective. bring heatsinks. but python is slow, and usecase is rare.

- Large gimballed cannon. PP sniping. works against pythons, anacondas, asp. for me a rare use-case (i'm not going often to a CZ).

- Fragment-Cannon. fragment-cannon needs to get close, Python is slow...

so. i'm back to running a turreted large burst laser down there. i leave that weapon group, if targets shields are down.

not that running a large turreted burst laser is much more interesting than running a gimballed pulse, but hey!


edit/add: fragment-cannons are devastating, if you are close and targets shields are down. but if targets shields are down, your large pulses are anyway near to finish that target off...
 
Last edited:
Back
Top Bottom