I love plasma flamers, a weapon added in the ship/weapon pack mod by Dark Revenant. However, despite my love for them, they are a weapon without a use. They're medium ballistic and anything they do, other weapons do so much better. For starters, they do almost no damage to armour, shields or hull. It's a small consolation that they deal hard flux damage at all. Their range is 450, meaning most medium ballistic point defence will outrange the plasma flamer. In the hands of the AI, any AI ships with shields & flamers will take too much hard flux damage getting in close that they will never get to use their flamers at all - even with reckless pilots, or no pilots, they try to retreat to recover flux and die. If there is no shield or you spend OP on a shield bypass, they die before they can overcome the shields of an enemy. Their one consolation that they -could- be used to take out enemy fighters and bombers is cut short by the fact that they cost 9 OP, then you need to expand your ballistics magazine, add a gunnery AI and an integrated targeting unit... And it's just so fucking abysmal when you could just choose any other medium ballistics weapon that would do the job for cheaper.
Counterpoint: plasma flamers are pretty, and there is something just so magical about massed plasma flamers that you don't get with heavy mortars or hypervelocity guns. Pew pew is all good and all, but FWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM is so satisfying.
Long did I ponder how to make the plasma flamer useful. I spent two days starting from a drone tender and doing nothing but space mining, gradually assembled a fleet of mining rockhounds and venture cruisers, all under the protecting gaze of the hegemony. It was really refreshing playing a protracted "civilian" campaign, where I commanded a large fleet of mostly defenceless utility vessels and was completely reliant on hegemony patrols or bounty hunters to keep my convoys safe as I steadily acquired a fortune of 5 million credits without breaking the law or ever leaving a handful of starsystems. With this small fortune I purchased a cathedral class capital ship and explored the galaxy for future business opportunities; what I instead found was a derelict system worth risking battle for.
After nearly bankrupting myself owing to my inability to pay for so many agents & marines, I managed to raid & conquer a star system held by the derelict exploratorium fleets - with the prize jewel being a terran world with extensive domain presence. Most of all, I gained the blueprints for manufacturing rampart class drones.
Rampart class drones very uniquely have four medium ballistic slots. Very few ships are -so- specialised in the medium ballistics department as this lovely hull is. Even better, the drones are fully autonomous so I don't feel bad when one blows up, as I'm risking the lives of no one but the enemy. They don't have shields at all, so they just charge through enemy gunfire instead of getting pinned down.
Once they get close enough to the enemy, their extreme flux efficiency means they will never stop firing. Sure they'll do very little damage, but the damage never stops. Shields overload, engines get overheated, weapons get disabled. It's death by a thousand cuts times by four flamers. Give the rampart drone every single armour-raising and hull-raising module, and suddenly you have a cruiser class kamakaze drone that has more HP and armour than almost all capital-class battleships. Give it safety overrides and now you have a fast-moving battle meteorite.
In a one-on-one duel, a single rampart getting in close to a low-tech or midline cruiser or smaller would result in certain death for the enemy. It would be an extremely slow and inefficient death, but honestly it was too fun not to pursue.
High tech foes with longer range weapons, larger flux capacity and stronger shields were more of a problem, but once the cruiser closed the distance that was it.
Early deployment tests against privateers, pirates and plunderers proved to be hilarious. Large enemy formations would always emerge victorious against my wave of burner drones - but their victory would always take so long that they'd be out of missiles and low combat readiness, just in time for my actual warships to cleanup the broken foe. I could have done the job better and cheaper, as each burner drone took two months to make, but it was all in the name of saving human lives.
As the months turned to cycles and the Cryptominer Faction's use of AI became more egregiously obvious, the luddic church and hegemony began sending vast, advanced armadas to eradicate the wayward manufacturies of the Hudur Bitfortress.
Unluckily for them, my manufacturing capacity had increased.
And I found the blueprints for a frigate-sized drone which was capable of mounting a plasma flamer.
Which coupled with my newfound industrial might...
...Led to this newfound industrial war of attrition, where the freedom of the Cryptominer Faction was measured against the lives of the Hegemony.
I have since acquired all the drone blueprints, but the plasma flamer swarm remains my all time favourite.
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Topic: Starsector [TopDown Sandbox RPG on Space] (Read 370119 times)