Fighters, and shades of gunships

[Arisaya]

It seems the progression goes like this:
Fighters - light, fast, short range ships, just a rank above battlepods in pretty much every area but speed
light gunship - an implied class really; this is more of the wolfen's stock setup; fast, fairly short range yet much more self-sufficient, can't mount very heavy armor; an in-between of the gunship and fighter
gunship - definitely heavier, slower, more armor, capable of opperating at extended ranges
heavy gunship - heavy, slower but still quite capable in combat (it's not a capship), much better armor than a light gunship would carry, and able to operate at extended distances without support. The wolfen is incapable of fullfilling this area (neither are the freighter nor the yacht can either; it's sort of like a mating between the wolfen's combat-oriented design and the freighter's heavy armor.

Anyways, some food for thought. I was wondering what a heavy gunship type of playership would be like... Mostly from the iocrym thread - and how I noticed the gap in playership types (not including nigh unplayably light ships, like battlepod level, nor insanely heavy ships, like superfreighters and capships [as the armor balance simply doesn't support them well. Having that much armor is as much, if not more, a liability than an asset, as shown by the Wolfen III, which was like, a super-heavy-gunship that was barely not a capship])

[Atarlost]

I don't think there are any heavy gunships in vanilla except maybe the Iocrym Sentinel, and they rate as heavy only because their sprite is so huge. All the other gunships have a config you could duplicate with a Wolfen. In fact I think they can all be duplicated in the Sapphire with its measly 6 ton armor limit.

[Arisaya]

really? oh well, the playerships can't naturally alpha strike (now they can with wonderful on-fire, but still, that's a mod)

Some ships I've been thinking could definitely be bumped up functionally to that heavy category then - I've got a number planned in TX2 that do indeed fit that role, and indeed, the wolfen can't duplicate them.

[Atarlost]

The only NPC gunships with multiple non-launcher weapons are the Tundra and Barbary. They can't alpha strike either because neither weapon is marked as secondary. The Corsair II and Britannia can alpha, but they have a single primary weapon paired with a launcher and playerships can fire those together just fine.

Arena ships can mount two weapons, but I've never observed them to fire two non-launchers together either.

[Song]

I've never seen them do that either.....thankfully.

You CAN alpha-strike in a player ship in theory without onFireWeapon, but only if you have a massively repeating weapon.....as repeating weapons can continue firing while a second weapon is selected and firing. But that's only in theory.....not usually in practice (although I've used it with a thruster mod I knocked up to get around the annoying problems with laptop keyboards)

[Arisaya]

Given the time restraint on firing again, one would have to mash the 'w' and spacebar with correct timeing to get it to work; and the firerates would have to be short enough inbetween each shot as well