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[Frumple]

Welp. Doing a quick probe drop off at some random cache, flap over to an inactive gate in the system to do the usual drive through, pop out of the gate choice screen thing to notice it's inside a debris field, one of the ones with a junkload of derelict ships. First one I check has structural damage (meh) and a damaged flight deck (somewhat more annoying), but...

... it's a bloody legion. My current combat ships consist of a mora, condor, enforcer, and wolf. Actually going to leave it there for a bit (the skeleton crew requirement is larger than the combined crew max for my entire fleet), but damn. Biggest bit of random salvage I've yet seen, a position previously held by a pristine... whatever the largest or second largest crew carrying civ ship is called.

[Taricus]

Well you can restore and then mothball it and then bring it to port.

[Frumple]

... good point.

That aside, anyone know if something can actually happen when you fly through an inactive gate?

E: Oh what the hell. I scavenge the debris field, hoping to get some extra supply to burn fixing up the legion a bit before heading off, and what do I find but a no d-mod freaking paragon (and a pristine omen and badly banged up wolf). What even is going on here?

[Taricus]

You getting damn lucky, that's what. Don't question it, just ride that glorious example of shipbuilding into the sunset or whatever happens to be the space equivalent of that

[EnigmaticHat]

What do you guys use for the Paragon's large mounts?  I tried it out in the mission simulator (with no officers) and I couldn't decide.

[Taricus]

Plasma cannons for the frontal mounts, and pulse lasers (The regular med mount ones) for the large turrets.

[Aklyon]

If you've got a paragon, why would you waste large slots on med weapons?

First, setup your 64bit java and vmparams, otherwise it will crash.

Do you think this is a problem on Mac too???

Theres a note about Macs at the bottom of the post that macs should only need to set vmparams correctly.

[Taricus]

Those plasma cannons need vents and capacitors, that's why. Better than leaving them bare.

[Frumple]

I'unno, I think I'm actually kinda' fond of the autopulse lasers. Get shield busting stuff on other slots (I'm pretty fond of graviton beams, personally, if only because the range on them when equipped on a paragon is hilarious), tank up (hardened/stabilized shields, lots of vents/capacitors/etc.) to soak up damage until their shields go down, at which point you promptly unload that 1500 burst DPS into their face. It's also cheaper flux wise than most other large mount energy weapons, which means your shields et al get to do more work.

E: Ehehe, the predator or prey mission can be pretty amusing. Turns out hammering burn drive into the astral's face metaphorically shouting, "I bet you blow up first!" works pretty well. I'm sure there's some kind of fancy strategy possible, but barreling through the wall of missiles and fighter detritus and unloading a passel of torpedoes and shield-stripping ballistics into the carrier's face does just fine.

[Flying Dice]

Main problem I find with the autopulses is that their DPS drops sharply once they have to start regenerating ammo. That, and their spread means that they take a long time to burn through armor unless you're at point blank.

Granted, probably better than plasma in 1v1 scenarios because you can fit a stronger secondary and don't need as much flux to fire, but if you have fleet support to take pressure off your shields plasmas are vastly superior.

[JimboM12]

When it comes to front fixed weapons, I've come to like the heavy mortars. They're cheap, low ballistic points, have low flux buildup, do fair damage when firing in auto, and have ok range. They really need the cruiser upgrade targeting computers to extend their range but three of them front mounted can really tear a ship apart quickly. With the correct build, I can have my ai carrier commanders bring the enemy flux so high they cant shield, and then alpha strike once the shields come down and usually kill most destroyers and some cruisers in one or two passes when using my custom eagle.

[EnigmaticHat]

With my Falcon I've taken kind of the reverse build.  Two heavy needlers front, right side turrets go antimatter blaster then ion pulser then tactical laser.  Left side weapons are all normal PD lasers.  Build up a bunch of hard flux on the enemy, then they can't block the ion pulser but the ion pulser makes the enemy completely helpless and the AM threatens to overload them.  Unfortunately it takes a while to strip armor on large ships but heavy needlers are so efficient that once the enemy has their armor stripped the needlers can take out their hull in short order.

[Frumple]

After slamming my head into forlorn hope for a while, I'm pretty sure I'd change weapons, heh. Mix of high intensity lasers and tachyon lances, for the paragon either 3/1 or 2/2, would be the large mounts -- probably the 3/1 in most cases, as you generally don't seem to get much out of more than one lance. Hypervelocity drivers for shield pressure (not even necessarily busting, just something to keep flux up and hard accumulating so the tachs get the bypass off), plain PD lasers basically everywhere else (save a few ions sprinkled around), including the medium energy slots (unless you've got a flux boosting pilot, I guess). You fire the tach more or less on cooldown as the hvds (and PD lasers, if you're close enough) build up (hard) flux, and when they either run out of flux or the tach busts through the shield to wreck EMP havoc on their ship, you burn into them with the HILs and just kinda' laugh as they split in two. That mission gave me a surprising amount of appreciation for tachyon lances, tbh. Really just kinda' incredible support weapons between the hella' EMP and the shield bypass. Not a main weapon, but they're a pretty serious multiplier for other ones.

[EnigmaticHat]

Tachyon lance is an amazing weapon, probably one of the best in the entire game.  The more I play the more I have respect for the ion effect; the AI is normally very good at rapid tapping its shields and taking any kinetic or weak energy weapons on armor.  The ion effect just says fuck you to that, because no matter how much armor and hull you have it'll always hurt to have your shields disabled.  The Tachyon lance takes it a step further and has, from what I can tell, a percentage equal to the enemy hard flux percentage to to just punch straight through the shields.  Its got range, it damages all things equally, its decently flux efficient.  Its everything you want in a non-missile weapon.

However, its one big weakness is that despite being a large energy mount its needs to be combined with hard flux generating weapons or its useless against larger ships.  That plus its sustained fire mechanic means that its much better if its manually fired rather than autofired.  So while I love the Tachyon Lance, I don't think it *particularly* excels on the Paragon.  Its difficult to bring your front mounts to bear but your side mounts will waste all your energy with little effect if you have them autofire.

[Frumple]

Oh, you link the lance and lasers, or at least have neither on autofire. I just link the lot of them, since tap fire on the HILs takes very little flux and they don't have a cooldown more or less period. Hypervelocity drivers are what you have on auto, stuck in those two universals. They'll build up hard flux on basically anything (up to and including stuff like other paragons, iirc... though maybe not something with that hard flux dissipation skill), and at range, at which point you swing around and lance it. Also seem to screw with the AI a bit, cause them to drop shields at odd times... and with the lasers or lances, it doesn't exactly take a lot of travel time to get some hits in. One of the other nice things about the lance is that you both don't really need a sustained hit, and can hit the shield instead of the actual ship, to get good use from it. Means it's actually decent for one of the front slots, since raking fire does well enough.

Use so far has been just the one, on one of those front mounts. Don't auto it, but do fire pretty much whenever something's in front of the ship. Low chance isn't no chance, and all that, and when the rest of your layout besides the drivers (which aren't really all that flux heavy in practice, themselves) is entirely PD lasers with some ion cannons thrown in for flavor, you've by and large the flux to spare for spam. On a max vent paragon, anyway, heh.

E: Huh. Neat. Apparently if you roll up on a dormant fleet that's been sitting inside a corona, they'll have lowered CR. If you jump one that's been idling inside a solar flare, they'll start the fight with a CR of zero. Ganking a drone fleet in the middle of a solar flare may be the most metal thing I've done in this game, so far. The things are surprisingly feisty for flatlined ships, too.