Liners - their loadout and role, bringing back an idea from 4.84

[eigos]

Some of you may have been around (certainly not many of you) when we had two liner ships in Discovery 4.84, the vanilla Prison and Luxury liners.

At that time, gunboat turrets were class 8, transport turrets - class 7.
And those 2 liners had 3 slots level 8, able to mount gunboat missiles (and use them).

My thoughts currently about liners is that they are nothing special, but they should be. Liners are carrying the most valuable cargo of all - humans (passengers, slaves, tourists, VIPs, refugees, scientists, spaceship crew, even captured pilots).

There are very few liners in service of the military and the bounty hunters guild, for the sole reason that they are really nothing special at the moment - their manueverability is painfully clumsy, the loadout is ridiculously low-grade (considering they should be able to fend off at least a fighter).

I propose adding some gunboat turret slots for them, so they may participate in combat RP events and fire from more than 1k range, thus being more of a challenge and not just dead weight in the group.

Powercore: 250,000 or 300,000 (less than a gunboat)
Power regen: 35,000 or 40,000 (almost enough for a gunboat razor, just fine for a pulse cannon, or good for 2 cerberus turrets)
Slave liner - 2 slots lvl 5
Luxury liner - 3 slots lvl 5
Shukensha - 4 slots lvl 5 (just cause Renzu and [IND] want to be awesome)
Prison liner - 2 slots lvl 5

EDIT: Also, factions can use their own custom primaries on them. Should definetely be interesting and varied.

Discuss.

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[Pancakes]

Would be interesting to give a try, however in the case of Prison and Pilgrim liners it could make them a bit OP as piracy ships.
I like the idea, and I think it should be given some tryout.

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[Zayne Carrick]

Would be interesting to give a try, however in the case of Prison and Pilgrim liners it could make them a bit OP as piracy ships.
I like the idea, and I think it should be given some tryout.

Implying current gunboats are OP as piracy ships

[Karst]

Would be interesting to give a try, however in the case of Prison and Pilgrim liners it could make them a bit OP as piracy ships.

Actually, they are currently entirely useless as piracy ships because their thrust and impulse speeds are lower than any other transport - and that's a far bigger problem than their weapon hardpoints, if you ask me.
(as a side note, I don't know why everyone assumes transports with lots of guns and armor are best for piracy. You're much better off in a small-medium transport that has higher thrust speed and can dodge effortlessly)

I'd really like to see liners being more useful and I think having a few gunboat turret mounts would be fair, but upping their thrust speed to battletransport level is more important.

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[Zayne Carrick]

(as a side note, I don't know why everyone assumes transports with lots of guns and armor are best for piracy. You're much better off in a small-medium transport that has higher thrust speed and can dodge effortlessly)

Because transports with lots of guns and armor usually have enough cargospace to loot dead transports. While AT hadn't.

[Karst]

Take a Behemoth, it has only 300/600 less cargo space than a passenger/pilgrim liner while being about one-millionth the size and having plenty of turrets. And more thrust speed.

Or a Taureau or Ptrans, for that matter.

Yes, I consider this to be on topic because liners are bad at doing the one thing they should excel at -ensuring their priceless cargo reaches its destination safely- compared to much cheaper mid-size transports.

Edit: As an example, a Behemoth will win in a 1v1 against a bomber. A liner won't.

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[Zayne Carrick]

A pair of gunboat turrets won't help them. Maybe except for 400k core and dual-razors.
I suggest making liners equal to light transports in terms of thrust(160), but remove their CD, so they will perform good in escaping from hostiles

[Curios]

I don't know why everyone think that transport must have any combat capabilities. Would be better to make transports to be like Kujira or so.

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[Zayne Carrick]

Because you know, space pirates, hostile militaries and so on.
It will be simply unwise to build defenceless transports. Zoners and GMG rely on their totally neutral relationships.

[Pancakes]

Would be interesting to give a try, however in the case of Prison and Pilgrim liners it could make them a bit OP as piracy ships.

Actually, they are currently entirely useless as piracy ships because their thrust and impulse speeds are lower than any other transport - and that's a far bigger problem than their weapon hardpoints, if you ask me.
(as a side note, I don't know why everyone assumes transports with lots of guns and armor are best for piracy. You're much better off in a small-medium transport that has higher thrust speed and can dodge effortlessly)

I'd really like to see liners being more useful and I think having a few gunboat turret mounts would be fair, but upping their thrust speed to battle-transport level is more important.

Didn't realize the thrust speed has been changed, though the thing is that with a lot of armor, lots of guns and quite a lot of cargo space - they could be good piracy platforms.

@Zayne, Gunboat and liner are a whole different thing in terms of piracy (at least cargo piracy, which is mainly what piracy transports are about). It's like saying that a Stork is better than a Liberty carrier for transporting - of course it is because it's not in the same category.

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