Powerplay Why no medium size APA?

[sinkarma]

Why is there no medium size Advanced plasma accelerator?
and on that note why no huge APA?

As it stands every power in power play gives 1 special item except Aisling.

Yes Aisling only gives prismatic shields but those prismatic sheilds come in 8 different sizes!
effectively you get 8 times more stuff out of being a member for Aisling than other factions.

Why do other powers not have different sized items?

Though thinking about it a FDL with a huge APA might be a little overpowered...

Though! A small Imperial hammer would be a nice cute weapon (ya could call it the imperial club )

I am guessing this was already asked before but... eh... I wanted to find out

 

[PulsarShark]

I can't say exactly what FD was thinking, but a few relevant observations...

The other powers' items are all weapons. And you do have the option of putting a Small or Medium weapon on a larger hardpoint (inefficient though that would usually be, sometimes it may actually make sense. You can do a lot worse than running a Packhound rack on the belly slot of a Corvette.). But that doesn't work the same for shields. The game will actually stop you if you try to load a Class 2 shield onto your Anaconda; it just isn't big enough.

The other powers' items have almost all received game-balancing buffs or nerfs at some point. Prismatics have not been touched very directly yet, other than getting competition from the introduction of the Biweave shield type.

But I think the hidden advantage to the offensive weapons is that they lend themselves more easily to weapon-collecting. You can pledge to a power, earn access to them, buy some, put them on 'hangar queen' ships, and then pledge somewhere else. That's less convenient to do with shields. There are a lot more sizes to take care of if you want to have them all available. You can only put one on each of your hangar ships. And the larger classes are far more expensive in cr than any of the Powerplay weapons.

 

[Rubbernuke]

Probably because some Power weapons are powerful, even for small sizes.

An example, the Enforcer (multi) cannon is about 1.5x as powerful as an equiv. MC, could you imagine scaling that as a huge MC? It would be fun, but with engineering it would be amazingly overpowered.

 

[Danieros]

I guess they didn't want to force everyone into powerplay. PP weapons would be mandatory endgame if they came in all sizes. And the power draw/weight drawback from the AD shields is HUGE.