Suppose all you really need to unlock in CQC are the rapid cannons, which you get early on. Set pips to 4-0-2, and hold the fire button until your target dies in a couple seconds lol.
Since the rapid cannons use no weapons distributor, 4-2-0 is definitely superior to 4-0-2, and 2-4-0 is even better if no-one's returning fire. Only having to manage two bars is an interesting tradeoff for their disadvantages.
Since the rapid cannons won't hit a light fighter flown by anyone of decent skill, of course, lasers and learning to manage your pips properly usually beats both, however. Good for taking out Eagles, though.
I believe there is one cqc elite player that uses only keyboard.
It's doable. You get access to a *lot* of controls without having to move your hands much, at the big cost of not having anywhere near as easy fine control. So I can fly FA-off or I can aim, but not both at once, for example. Takes a lot of practice and rebinding controls over and over until they work out - the default bindings really aren't suitable - but it's definitely possible to be reasonably good.
and would all wholeheartedly welcome a mode of CQC where we could mix and match engineered modules with all of the main game ships.
...and if it had a reliable way to set up a specific four players versus another specific four players, even better.
A fair portion of the DMs I played were effectively TDM where I couldn't see the teams some of the other players had organized themselves into with 3rd party comms. Proper TDM's matchmaking has always been a little iffy, even if players were trying for a clean game, and a clean game wasn't always a given. These things were generally outliers, but the presumption that everyone being in ships of vaguely similar performance meaning that there is going to be balanced is flawed.
Not to mention that quite a few of the people saying "we want a fair fight" get into CQC and then assume that the vets have some super-secret weapons they don't have access to ... like "knowing what the power distributor does and where the lateral thruster controls are". Conversely it's possible to have some fair - and interesting - fights with seriously mismatched ships. One of my early fights was FDL + PvE Anaconda + D-rated Viper III vs PvP Anaconda. Result was basically a draw - the lone Anaconda took out the two weaker ships opposing, ran out of shield banks, but the FDL was out of ammo to finish the job. You can't even start to set up any scenarios like that in CQC.
