For years I've been wanting a reason to fly the Clipper but honestly I have never been able to fly it for more than a few days. The novelty of it's elegant cockpit and speed wears off by then, and then I start to realize that the ship is suboptimal at best. I've said it in another thread, the Clipper is pretty and useless, pretty useless.
It's internal compartments are nothing special, I would say they're actually quite bad for the size of the ship. The ingame description of the Clipper suggests it's used for trading and passenger transport, so let's talk about those two first.
Cargo hauling is something the Clipper is not terrible at, but it's not incredibly good either, for it's size. The Krait Mk2 is a medium ship with a hull mass of 320T, yet it only carries 12T less than the Clipper who has a hull mass of 400T (242T of cargo vs 230T). If you compare that to the Python, then well, it's obviously worse. Python (350T hull mass) carries 292T of cargo, again versus the Clipper who carries 242T. 50T more, yet it has 50T less hull mass. Keep in mind that both the Python and the Mk2 can land on outposts, the Clipper cannot. For source and return missions or just trading in general this is quite useful. The conclusion is that the Clipper really does not offer any benefit over the Python or even the Mk2. Sure, the Clipper is faster, but the Python and Mk2 aren't incredibly slow either.
With regards to passengers, it gets worse. The class 7 slot of the Clipper is not utilized fully because cabins only go up to class 6, so even the Mk2 already had more capacity than the Clipper. 92 Economy passengers for Clipper and 114 Economy passengers for Mk2. Not going to bother with the Python since it's probably more.
Okay, so what about mining? Well to be fair, the Clipper is not a terrible miner, it's actually decent. Not great, not terrible.
Combat? Well, the Clipper is certainly not a terrible combat ship. Some argue it's great, it's used by a few PvPers for sure. Again though, it's hardpoint placement is bad, which well I wouldn't mind all too much if the Clipper had better shields. Yes, shields. The Empire is a shieldbased faction, the Courier, the Cutter and Prismatic shields. Yet, the Clipper has awful shields. Some like it for this reason because of it's ability to hull tank, but all the Fed and Alliance ships are hull tanks as well. We've got enough hull tanks as is, make the Imperial ships shield tanks, including the Clipper.
Exploration? This one probably bugs me the most. The Clipper has such awesome potential to be an exploration ship, but it doesn't quite hit the mark. If outfitted for exploration it gets about 50ly jumprange, but this will mean paper thin shields (not that it has great shields to begin with) and well I found it to be less optimal than flying my Cobra Mk3, who also has a 50ly jumprange but it was actually so fun to fly I jumped over a 100.000ly with it in under a month. The Clipper needs additional jumprange, and a 5C fuel tank. People want an Imperial explorer so badly, yet they forget the template for one is already in the game. Make the Clipper jump just under 60ly, it will make it a competitive explorer.
My proposed changes:
This would make the Clipper a:
This turned into a massive wall of text, guess it's years of me bottling up my feelings about this ship's potential ;-). Curious to see if others agree or disagree.
This all would probably never happen, but a man can dream right?
It's internal compartments are nothing special, I would say they're actually quite bad for the size of the ship. The ingame description of the Clipper suggests it's used for trading and passenger transport, so let's talk about those two first.
Cargo hauling is something the Clipper is not terrible at, but it's not incredibly good either, for it's size. The Krait Mk2 is a medium ship with a hull mass of 320T, yet it only carries 12T less than the Clipper who has a hull mass of 400T (242T of cargo vs 230T). If you compare that to the Python, then well, it's obviously worse. Python (350T hull mass) carries 292T of cargo, again versus the Clipper who carries 242T. 50T more, yet it has 50T less hull mass. Keep in mind that both the Python and the Mk2 can land on outposts, the Clipper cannot. For source and return missions or just trading in general this is quite useful. The conclusion is that the Clipper really does not offer any benefit over the Python or even the Mk2. Sure, the Clipper is faster, but the Python and Mk2 aren't incredibly slow either.
With regards to passengers, it gets worse. The class 7 slot of the Clipper is not utilized fully because cabins only go up to class 6, so even the Mk2 already had more capacity than the Clipper. 92 Economy passengers for Clipper and 114 Economy passengers for Mk2. Not going to bother with the Python since it's probably more.
Okay, so what about mining? Well to be fair, the Clipper is not a terrible miner, it's actually decent. Not great, not terrible.
Combat? Well, the Clipper is certainly not a terrible combat ship. Some argue it's great, it's used by a few PvPers for sure. Again though, it's hardpoint placement is bad, which well I wouldn't mind all too much if the Clipper had better shields. Yes, shields. The Empire is a shieldbased faction, the Courier, the Cutter and Prismatic shields. Yet, the Clipper has awful shields. Some like it for this reason because of it's ability to hull tank, but all the Fed and Alliance ships are hull tanks as well. We've got enough hull tanks as is, make the Imperial ships shield tanks, including the Clipper.
Exploration? This one probably bugs me the most. The Clipper has such awesome potential to be an exploration ship, but it doesn't quite hit the mark. If outfitted for exploration it gets about 50ly jumprange, but this will mean paper thin shields (not that it has great shields to begin with) and well I found it to be less optimal than flying my Cobra Mk3, who also has a 50ly jumprange but it was actually so fun to fly I jumped over a 100.000ly with it in under a month. The Clipper needs additional jumprange, and a 5C fuel tank. People want an Imperial explorer so badly, yet they forget the template for one is already in the game. Make the Clipper jump just under 60ly, it will make it a competitive explorer.
My proposed changes:
- Make the Clipper a shield tank, not entirely how this mechanically works, but I'm sure it can be done.
- Change the Optional Internals to either 7/6/5/4/4/3/2/2/1 (add C5 slot, remove C3) or 6/6/6/5/4/4/3/2/2/1 (add two C6 slots, add C5 slot, remove C7 slot, remove C3 slot). These are reasonable suggestions I think without making the ship too OP IMO. For reference, both would give the Clipper a cargo capicity of 274T, not better than the Python, but a bit better to make it more competitive.
- Decrease hull mass to 320T(?). Clipper isn't much bigger than the Orca who got a decrease to 290T. This in order to give it a buff in jumprange, it should be able to achieve 55-59ly to make it competitive.
- Replace the 4C fuel tank with 5C fuel tank to give it a better overall range.
- Possibly increase the price 35-60 million credits, if people still care about this sort of thing. The Clipper requires a rank to get, so I don't see it as necessary to increase price since it takes longer to rank up than to get 30 million more credits but I digress.
This would make the Clipper a:
- Pretty decent cargo runner, still not as good as the Python but Python is sort of unbalanced on it's own. It will certainly hold it's own, because of speed and by then jumprange. It could be a viable alternative.
- Good miner
- Good explorer
- Combat I'm not so sure of, I think if done well a rework of it's shields could make it a viable option, not just for PvP.
This turned into a massive wall of text, guess it's years of me bottling up my feelings about this ship's potential ;-). Curious to see if others agree or disagree.
This all would probably never happen, but a man can dream right?
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