Bit too small and too close in capacity to the Cutter and T9 to have any right to be a separate ship.
Keep in mind that I was trying to avoid going too crazy with the ship.
While it is true that the FE2/FFE Panther Clipper had 2100 tons of cargo space, it is important to remember that this 2100 tons of space was also used to mount the hyperdrive, fuel for the hyperdrive and weapons, none of which take up cargo space in ED as they have their own dedicated slots. Knowing that players would want to mount a class 8 hyperdrive in their panther clipper (for a laden jump range of 9.1 LY), we can automatically deduct the mass of a class 8 hyperdrive (600 tons) from the gross cargo capacity of the ship, giving us a 1500 ton net capacity for cargo, fuel and weapons. Considering that the class 8 hyperdrive would consume up to 81 tons of hydrogen fuel per jump, we can further reduce the net capacity of the ship by 81 tons for every max range jump that the Panther Clipper can do. Assuming that the panther clipper is set up to do 3 max range jumps (a deduction of 243 tons), we now have a net capacity of 1250 tons for cargo and weapons (we can assume the extra 7 tons was used by the scanner, autopilot, radar mapper, auto-refueller, ECM, and cargo scoop upgrades which are now standard or have their own slot). Moving on to weapons, the FE2/FFE Panther Clipper had 4 hardpoints and 8 missile pylons. The missile pylons can be filled with a single 1 ton missile or proximity mine each, for a total of 8 tons (which I will round up to 10 tons). For the hardpoints, anything larger than a 20MW beam laser is complete overkill, as a 20MW beam laser can destroy any pilotable ship in FE2/FFE in with only a few seconds of sustained fire. As such, I'm assuming that all 4 hardpoints have been filled with 20MW beam lasers, each of which have a mass of 75 tons for a total of 310 tons of weapons (inculding missiles).This means that our theoretical Panther Clipper has a projected 940 tons of cargo space in ED.
As it turns out, I was only off by 44 tons of cargo space with my Coriolis builds.
That said, I will take your advice and modify my old Coriolis builds (which I have now updated and renamed to
1.0 and
1.1) to their new
2.0 and
2.1 setups. The difference between the 1.x and 2.x setups is that the 2.x upgrades one of the size 7 slots to a size 8 slot for a total of 1024 tons of cargo unshielded and 896 tons of cargo shielded. While this is in my opinion a bit overkill, I still think that it is fairly reasonable (even if it is on the upper limit of reasonable for a large class ship). A few other options that I considered to increase the cargo capacity were:
- Add another size 8 slot (which I considered too extreme based on my previous math)
- Add another size 7 slot (this would result in the same cargo capacity as the chosen solution)
- Add another size 6 slot (It's a cargo ship that can't mount a size 6 shield, why would it need a second size 6 slot?)
- Add another size 4 slot and another size 5 slot (this would bring the total number of slots to 12, giving it as much utility as the Anaconda, something I was trying to avoid)