The Hammer is now a little bit less clean cut, her machine guns are now located below her hull (hidden mounts) and she is kitted out with three packs of annihilators.
She has heavymg x2 on the front, these are actually more effective than the annihilators in the field. It's very difficult to hit with the annihilators, even though they spread quite wide in the 5-shot salvo (or fifteen in the hammers case). And then, when they do hit, they don't actually seem to do much damage. My thought is to bump the damage up ever so slightly, and also bump the speed / acceleration.
It just feels less like an Apache satisfactorily unloading its hydras and more like someone scattering some sausages, or something.
I'll test it and report back my feelings.
EDIT:
The annihilators at 300 damage, 400 max speed and 150 starting speed feel a bit more like I think they should, and they can relatively easily disable a frigate (if they can get through the shields). It helps as well if the three packs are on 'alternating'. having three linked annihilators, whilst bags of fun, does not make for good warfare control.
Oh by the way (because I know you are interested) ... two sickles and two hammers can easily mop up on 'Turning the tables' with no help, tactics or whatever. Strikes me that the pulse laser on the sickle is making it 'overpowered'. Might need to think about how I balance that so I can fit this in with the general concept for the ship suite I am bodging together. The general thought has always been some kind of cyber-gypsies, stealing high-tech from wherever and whacking together a space-ship from whatever bits of metal they can get (I know this is a bit outside the Starfarer lore, but that's the beauty of modding, eh?
. So they shouldn't be quite so tough as the sickle is. Perhaps she needs less
energy flux reserves to draw on.
EDIT:
The sickle variant still had 10 flux capacitors and vents (as a holdover from copying the hyperion). If she loses them she more quickly becomes an overloaded sitting duck, which is nice, and maybe she feels alright now. We'll see when she is in her own mission though, I guess.