Whats wrong with you Sindroms? You keep posting on buffing the transports constantly?
I say I'm fine with that if you lower their cargo capacity.
You want a gunboat gun and 2 missiles? Sure, but lower the damn cargo by 1000 or more. Those things and new power cores and personnel (and rooms for them and those things) need space.
Personally, I feel like transports are greatly protected.
If you want to trade hastely and freely - use damn whale or bumblebee or something like that.
If you want to trade big but trade slow and unprotected take the 5k trains corporations offer.
If you want protection try the Shire or Akegata or Alg Mover or something like that. Lastly, hire those damn escorts. It's really really easy to avoid a pirate gank squad if you have a lvl 30 freelancer in front of you scouting the way.
Trader ships come in many sizes and shapes and offer different approaches to the situations.
I didn't hear that a bomber managed to take down two shires before they could dock.
Well, problem with your ideas is that you'll give me some gunboat turrets as well (to me = to my ptrans) meaning I'll be able to take down even more gunboats and even more traders down.
Hmm well giving gunboat weaponary to transports like say the shire sounds like you want the shire to give something more than a gunboat a bad day maybe a destroyer. Well from experience if you gave my shire gunboat weaponary I think i would call it a Tank or a Gunboat not a transport. Hehe I mean it would be like giving my Royal Liner gunboat weaponary I could call it a light destroyer and the best looking military vessel the armed forces have ever seen.
I don't really see the point if pirates are saying its too easy make the pirates weapons weaker or the hull stronger or yea get escorts apparently thats what they are for but in retrospect your buying a scout not an escort because if you have escorts by your side escorting you the answer is YOUR DEAD.
my experience the only time escorts have worked was once genuinely he scouted ahead and when i fly with a massive escort and it ends up there is nothing i need protecting from otherwise escorts have been pretty pointless.
Hmm So lets take another alternative avenue is there another approach we can take without fiddling without number pushing, ship altering ,and relying on the escort system time to use the old imagination whats the secret element we keep overlooking.
You want to know what a transport would be like with gb turrets? Go fly a salvager. It's a great ship but it still won't stop a bomber without support.
Get a Ptrans. Nine turrets, eight fire forwards, most fire backwards, most fire on each side. Oh, and a very nice CD. And ample cargo space. I pirate in one. Is beautiful.
However, it would be "handy" even "useful" to have a type 3 turret with a refire of 3.03 or 4.00.
The type 1 turrets (shield busters) would be worth using if their muzzle speed would be 700 - 800 m/s. At the moment, it makes more sense to use fighter-class shield busters - less energy consumption, faster muzzle speed and and a higher refire rate for slightly less dps and range. If increasing the muzzle speed seems to be too unbalancing, at least the refire rate should be increased to 4.00.
The type 4 turrets (transport solaris turrets) are, to be blunt, useless to the point of being a liability. We might as well get rid of them all together.
I think Liners(prison liners and lux liners especially) need gb slots though. They are longer than an osirus with only 100k max sheild, and since the transport turret nerf they cant even go head to head with a uni8 armored rogue gunship anymore.
From flying big transports, I'm coming around to the oppinion that transport guns could really use more range.
The liners, especially, haven't got more than 500 meters range in front/behind for most of their guns. Trains suffer similarly.
I'd like to see the transport gun range bumped up to about 1200-1400.
Each transport turret, I think, should be named its name, rather than its type, as well...and then, possibly, we can do interesting things inside the 'types'
Types are rather easy to point out:
Type one are sheildbusters, a line which could be expanded to synch with each other type, or, alternatively, get capitalship like Pulse options, single guns with very large drain and very high shield damage, possibly an anti GB/transport (slower and stronger) option and an antifighter/bomber (weaker and faster) option.
Type Two are what should be called Charons, the heavy hitting, low refire guns. I personally think we could get variants of this type with refire down to .66, and up to 1.5...more damage than a direct transformation at the bottom, and less at the top, because the higher refire does help the aim.
Type Three, the Iron Hammers (ok, I have to point out: why're these names all recycling the names of something else?) could get, as something to make them special and useful, weapon types, such as tachyon, laser, and photon.
Type 4 should be done away with, or brought toward what the transport turret type 4 was like in 83...now, I say this with the assumption that all other guns will get ranges approaching 1400, which is, I do believe, the most important change to transport guns.
+++++
Now, I'd like to addres some points:
Megiddio: The current pulse turret syncs with the Charon gun, which makes for something of a monster pairing given the aid in aiming the things they provide. I currently use almost an even split of Pulse and Charon, and find that a very effective combination.
Escort Crowd: Escorts do work, but not as advertised. They'd be better called scouts. Escorts which run before the careful trader keep one from ever being ambushed by the necessarily overpowering odds of a properly orchestrated pirate encounter. Escorts in a fight are of course pointless, unless they can spew a great deal of CMs.
Pirating Is Too Easy/Hard Group: I'd suggest that the b/b of transports be brought down (to around 3/4 of where they are, to try), if shield drain would come down a degree (and of course, as part of my demands, transport weapons range would increase)
Finally, without any weapon class mixing, transports could use a great deal of love. They've four weapons, total, where every other group has guns out the wazoo, often a set for each faction. No, I'm not suggesting that route, but rather an open market route for guns (Whereby each construction company, Daumann, DSE, BMM, Samura (And Kishiro?) produce a pair of transport guns. The detroit munitions company can produce the shieldbusters...and we can have a wide variety of turrets open to all (perhaps a Bretonian ship won't be buying Kusari goods, but that still leaves BMM, DSE, and Daumann products on the market). Pirates, are, of course, Pirates, and one would expect them to have some access to most any gun, unless they are of a nationalistic bent.
![[Image: omgsig.png]](http://img63.imageshack.us/img63/3852/omgsig.png)
![[Image: sig-15633.jpg]](http://www.clintonio.com/sig-15633.jpg)
![[Image: lunasig2.png]](http://i265.photobucket.com/albums/ii202/Mitraies/lunasig2.png)
