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« on: February 24, 2019, 05:18:13 PM »
To follow up on fish's Bulldog thoughts I'd like to share some of my own from using the Bulldog as a support capital ship against the Dickersons.
Essentially the Bulldog is in the position of being a larger Mastiff, able to endure or deal punishment but not really both. In most contexts this leaves the Bulldog somewhat underwhelming as a battleship, with performance more comparable to that of a battlecruiser, but that includes thoroughly adequate agility. An extremely large selection of energy turrets gives the Bulldog an extremely distinct niche as a capital ship, being able to project overlapping banks of energy weapons to control fighter and missile swarms with relative efficiency that is sorely needed for PACK fleets.
For my purposes of using the Bulldog as a flotilla leader for light cruisers designed to break the back of lighter vessels, I fitted it with an exhaustive array of point defense weapons, anti-fighter weapons on the outer weapon nacelles, and standoff weapons in the medium energy hardpoints. This was intended to allow it to reliably zone out fighters and frigates, ensure breathing room for the rest of the fleet and while the battle didn't quite go as planned this wasn't due to any failings on the Bulldog's part. For the main guns I used a pair of Mark 9s backed up by some HE guns, a build again intended more to provide breathing room to the fleet than for breaking ships on its own. Finally the fighter bays were filled with support fighters of irrelevant type, largely an afterthought to be honest.
Now it wouldn't be fair of me to blast the Bulldog's lack of exemplary performance given the nature of the build I used, however I did feel there was a distinct issue that even with predominantly beam weapons and Mark 9s the Bulldog struggled very hard to sustain any level of fire. It also occupied a position where the entropy amplifier simply was of no use to the Bulldog itself due to the lack of sustained and raw damage, which is why I built it as a support ship of course. Essentially it had a simply stunning ability to respond to harassment via its grid of energy weapons, but solely two large ballistics felt insufficient to pressure any target slow enough to be a valid target. More importantly even the most flux-efficient build reasonably possible for the ship boasted...mediocre staying power. (Though I will say that flux endurance is a complaint I think I've leveraged against every capital ship at least once, so while I'm confident in the criticism in this case take it with a grain of salt)