you still dont get it.. having an increased lateral speed wont help with botting at all. try it in a corvus vult.. to strafe AROUND a bot you have to alter your course to keep your motion circular because as you apply lateral thrust you also alter your ships facing. you'll never hit the top non-turbo speed., probably you wont get above 50m/s.

as for them being a gun platform... right now they arent ANYTHING. even with the changes i propose they are still not going to ever be a first choice combat ship except in a group situation where they have support from other vessels. The top speed unbalancing them is your opinion, its my opinion that it would add a needed dynamic to combating them, making it at least a little challenging to kill, because while the attacker is focused on catching them, wingmates can get in behind the attacker.

Unless you can come up with some better reasons WHY you think it would unbalance them, i wont be replying to any more of your posts concerning the rangarok or centaur.

I can use the Centurion IBG... and I orbit around bots btween 68 and 70m/s. I rarely get hit. This is why I do 75% of my botting in this little ship. The technique involved use two buttons, a constant holding down of 'a' and frequent taps of 'e'. Using a Ragnarok MkIII and the same technique, I rarely drop below 63 m/s but get hit way more, which is still infrequent. I get the exact same results in any other ship I can fly with a 65m/s top speed, including the Valk. This minor differnce in speed makes all the differnce in the world while botting.

So whatever you are doing that causes you to slow down to 50 while botting just seems to be making it harder on you. Don't tell me I don't get it when it's really vice versa. The only time I have to worry in the Ragnarok as is, is in in the first few seconds of acceleration before I top out. If I put enough distance betwen me and the bot(s) first, this becomes a non issue as I can begin the technique early and let the bot trap itself.

I got my Queen Hunter badge in a Ragnarok MkIII using Plasma Dev MkIIs and the above technique. It took me 3 hours, and most of that was waiting for collectors to jump out and reveal a queen locations. I completely ignored the escorts because my lateral speed stayed high enough for me to avoid their fire. I only had to dock when the queen exploded and tore me down to between 40%-30% hull.

If your suggestion were in place, this task would have went from hairy to laughable.

I will withdraw my objection though if the devs would agree to make the queens qualify for combat flight experince bonuses.

The thing is, Spellcast, having a higher max speed actually does improve your acceleration in Vendetta, since the acceleration goes down as you approach your max speed - higher max speed = higher acceleration curve. But, that said, the whole reason you get hit more in a Rag than a Cent, MechaDragonX, is just as much that the Rag is a MUCH larger target, as it is the change in maneuverability. Think shooting an apple (the Rag), compared with shooting a cherry (the Cent).

As for all Spellcast's suggestions, all very excellent. The one thing that I didn't like, more because it would change how I play than that I think it's unbalanced, is giving the light ships a high turbo drain. That, I think, would kill a lot of the fun in the game for me. When I'm trying to travel long distances, I HATE having to worry about energy managment, even if it doesn't actually take much if any more travel time. So, I'd have to choose either switching ships, just for traveling the long distance, and switching back once I've gotten there (if possible, probably not for the Valk), or grinding my teeth away as I turbo on, turbo off, over & over.

But, I should probably just grin & bear it.

in general, AYE! good post! wholly agree, even with the gauss.

as for Beolach' worry with moving, quite honestly, this is what we need a "taxi-service" in Vendetta for. this "buy a ship to infiboost to go somewhere" is just stupid anyway. even if it took a bit longer, the option of saying "I'd like a ticket to go to Sky Command, here is 25K" would be the way to go.

everyone does the same thing right now, buy a Cent [Mk II] and boost to where you're going, and sell the ship. I mean, it adds what to the game? you can't be caught, you can't fight, you can't trade. well, apart from "special deliveries", which I occasionally do in these circumstances, but the rewards are so itty-bitty that I usually don't bother. what's left?

time.

it takes time. so I say, buy a ticket. for you and possibly even for your ship. make a shipless move take 1m per sector you have to pass through or something -- more than a Cent takes, but so what, you can now chat or do other stuff while you're at it.

if you wish to bring a ship, anything smaller than a Behemoth can be moved in "Transport Behemoths", costing a bit more and taking at least twice the time. does this make hording of ships easier? sort of, but again, so what? people do it anyway, in less time, today.

Quick comment on the sunflares in the original post: a 1 second delay is too much. In one second any pilot worth his salt can get out of the way of a flare unless it's the ultimate sniper flare shot from hell that is perfectly aligned with your movement vector. A half or even quarter second would be better - enough that you can't be right up against the guy but not so much that you have to be outside of 200m. Or even no delay at all. Another solution needs to be found -

Quick maths:

Assume I'm attacking in a flare-valk, going 65m/s forward, against someone in a current SC prom backpedaling for all their worth. I shoot the flares - 65m/s + 85 m/s = 150m before they arm... and anyone can get out of the way of a projectile going 150m/s from 150m away. Turboing isn't much of an option, because you'd have hit an incredible precise window to have them arm on time and even then moving in a straight line means you take 3k damage from rails or a GT burst.

So reduce the delay to give the flare user a realistic change of hitting the other guy. However, the less the delay the more they help a rammer. I can boost in and fire, and the flares won't arm until they're inside or just behind his ship.

Honestly, even after being through the past year and a half of vendetta, I'm finding it harder and harder to see what's so bad about ramming. It hurts me just as much, and if you let me get that close well... you had it coming. I think the "solution" to ramming is already partially in place - sunflares weigh a lot. They make a ship less agile, and therefore the other guy has more of a chance to get out of the way. The only ship where this doesn't hold true is the prom, which can move the flares and a screamer around with too much agility for the target to escape. Cut the thrust a little on the ships with a lot of hitpoints so that they have a harder time getting in close to their targets and ramming will be less of an issue - both parties are equally damaged, and dodging a ram is a lot like dodging any other weapon.

And as a related aside, the days of the ramming flare-jock are largely over. With the advent of super agile light fighters and very strong heavies, the valk either can't get close enough to ram or is outclassed armor-wise. Once the prom becomes a little less light on its feet, I think rams are going to happen less or be tactical decisions instead of "HAHA my tank's paint is scratched while you're sucking vacuum".

actually it wouldn't be 85m/s + 65m/s, as effectively you can take the frame of reference to be moving with the ships, so it would just be 85m/s * 1s = 85m arming distance. If both ships are moving with the firer chasing, then the flares would have to travel further to catch up, so the speed of the firing platform cancels out.

85m is fine really..

"-Assume I'm attacking in a flare-valk, going 65m/s forward, against someone in a current SC prom backpedaling for all their worth. I shoot the flares - 65m/s + 85 m/s = 150m before they arm... -"

good math... logic mistake. :)

while the rocket may travel 150m, the distance between ships can be as low as 85m. Your velocity and the velocity of the target ship cancel each other out, leaving a relative velocity for the rocket of 85m/s. 1 second is 1 second, regardless of how FAR the rocket travels, and 1 second isnt really a lot of time to evade. I regularly take rocket shots at a distance of 200m or more if the angles are right.

edit: heh you beat me to it soul. I started this post about 35 minutes ago and had to afk for a bit. lol.

I'm glad to see someone else wants justiced served for the raggy, she would be worth pvp if you could actualy sustain firing, but it's the same problem as the hornet: no more than 4 seconds of firing (pardon any overexaggarations) So it realy can't dish it out enough to compensate for its bulkyness. I've always seen heavies as a whole other class of fighting style that was just as effective as other ships in the right hands of a good pilot, I'm hoping this comes to pass.

Just trying to fit numbers to experience. I can't get closer than 150m without getting killed by an AGT or his rockets. My point is actually stronger with that error corrected...

C'mon spell. 1 second is an eternity in any of the current fighter ships, especially in the hands of even a mediocre pilot with a rudimentary understanding of movement. Flares are fine the way they are now, and ramming is far less of an issue than it was in the alpha (with the noted exception of the prom, which would be addressed by it simply being less agile).

if you cant get closer than 150M then the arming delay wont affect you at all starfisher. :)

and how is the point stronger????

No, it would be irrelevant because only a retarded monkey couldn't dodge un-turboed flares at 150m :P

EDIT. main post adjusted to reflect the balancing of monday march 14th.

Spellcast and I talked a bit about this tonight and there is one small issue. the suggestion so far tries to make the "food chain" something like this:

heavy -> light -> medium -> heavy

the problem here is that for a heavy ship in VO to be able to hit and kill a light ship like a Cent, it'll also hit a medium with ease. adding armor won't really help for the medium fighter, since it basically makes it a "fast heavy". so, the only real threat to heavies is agility.

the changes suggested could just as easily be seen as making the food chain something like this:

light -> heavy -> medium -> light

the cents and vults dart around and (eventually) wear down a heavy, while the heavy eats the mediums, who again take care of the lights. the idea here would be that a Hog becomes a wellrounded fighter that can deal with lights (it'll need to be fast enough to track them) while it can use the same speed to keep itself alive against heavies if used well.

now, this should in no way be seen as "you shouldn't be able to kill a cent in a heavy", of course you can -- it just requires you to do some more work then you would against a hog, which you'd eat.

what changes are required? not a lot of big ones, some minor ones though. I agree to cutting Cents armor, probably down to around 5500 for the top models. and, with Spellcasts suggestions to the ships in general, I think we'd be close.

so, if you flew by yourself, all alone, what would you fly? well, like today, you could fly a cent if you dare to live with 5500 armor and -5N thrust or so from today. also, your hogs would be faster and better suited to carry AGT and rockets. so, what if you took a Hog instead? if you met a Prom, you'd not be overly happy, since you're not that much faster, but you have half the armor. so maybe you take a prom? you'd be happy until you met the speedy bastards you had to work hard to track, but, with 5500 armor, it doesn't take as much as now to down it

to be quite honest, the hardest ship I see to balance is the Valk, but I think Spellcasts suggestions are a start. if it proves too good, cut armor.

every ship can still win every matchup. but every ship has different inherit strenghts. now, the big win for making this happen would be group combat, we'd have situations where people would want wingmen to fill specific roles. sure, you don't have to, but it'd give groups a lot more tactical angle.