User:Fyzixfighter/Sandbox/Scout
The Scout is a small, speedy ship, whose outwardly weak appearance masks a weapon of great and devastating power.
This ship is the workhorse of the Shofixti, though designed with Yehat technologies. They possess a fearsome explosive weapon, the Glory Device, a kamikaze charge with a wide and powerful explosion blast.
The Scout is a small, fast, and maneuverable ship with excellent acceleration. Gravity wells do not affect it much, but collisions with asteroids can knock it wildly off-course. It is especially susceptible to the Chmmr Avatar's tractor beam, though using such a device on a Scout is comparable to pulling a timed bomb towards your chest.
Armament
Primary
The Scout is equipped with the Mendokusai Energy Dart, a weak, forward-firing projectile with a short-to-medium range and a fast firing rate. This is held in check by the puny combat batteries aboard the vessel.
Mendokusai (the correct spelling is "Mendoukusai"), rather appropriately, translates to 'annoying' in Japanese.
Secondary
When faced with defeat, each Scout vessel can use its ultimate weapon, the Glory device: a powerful bomb capable of inflicting massive damage to an enemy vessel at close range. Unfortunately, detonating the Glory device is fatal to everyone aboard the Scout vessel when the device is activated. To prevent accidental activation, the secondary weapon must be pressed three times. A series of switches is visible in the melee screen so that pilots may see if the bomb is ready to detonate or not.
Tactical Overview
Against a VUX Intruder, this vessel is all but unstoppable. It can outrun the Intruder and its limpets, and the Scout's Energy Dart has a greater range than the Intruder's laser. Circle the enemy, raining fire upon it, until victory is yours.
The Glory device is effective against the Chmmr Avatar because it can destroy two, or sometimes even three zap-sats if activated at short range.
Against the Dreadnought, the best that the Scout can hope for is to destroy the Ur-Quan Kzer-Za's fighters to the point where the crew is low enough to be destroyed by the glory device. Although both ships are destroyed, a ship with the value of 5 was sacrificed to destroy a ship with the value of 30!
Against many other ships, the Scout is weak, but proper use of the Energy Dart and Glory device can sap the strength of the enemy ship so that others may have an easier time destroying it. Ships with a small crew complement (either from battle damage or with a normally small crew complement) can instantly be killed with the Glory device. Strategically, this means that the cheaper Scout can kill a more expensive ship simply by activating the Glory device. Slow ships with a small crew complement are particularly vulnerable to this tactic because they cannot escape a Scout that wishes to activate the Glory device.
Undamaged ships that the Glory device can instantly destroy at short range include the following:
- Arilou Lalee'lay Skiff
- Pkunk Fury
- Thraddash Torch
- Umgah Drone
- Zoq-Fot-Pik Stinger
- Slylandro Probe
- Another Shofixti Scout
Some pilots prefer to simply use the Scout as a simple bomb, ignoring the Energy Dart, and only carrying the ship with them to weaken a particularly hard enemy.
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notes to self
Other values to consider including:
- weapon damage
- primary only? - not all secondaries do damage
- how to handle variable damage (Mycon) or multiple "warhead" (Utwig, Pkunk)?
- weapon range
- battery regeneration
- express as fraction: units/frames (explicitly handle dynamo vs. furnace type differences)
- (ENERGY_REGENERATION)/(1+ENERGY_WAIT)??
To do's:
- translate thrust increment and thrust delay into actual thrust/acceleration
- (THRUST_INCREMENT)/(1+THRUST_WAIT)??
- better to express it as ##/##?
- translate turn delay into turn rate
- (16)/(1+TURN_WAIT)??
- express it as a decimal since turn increments are same for all ships
- if can't use 3DO images (copyright?), maybe use ship icons