I'm a sucker for the synchronization to detail and bought all these lovely orange Kites, and now have 8 of them. I hadn't known what to do with them from the start but I've got a good theory going that they'll make excellent pirate interceptors. Since most pirate ships have shields with very narrow arcs or none at all, I've loaded all 8 of my kites with assault guns and harpoon launchers. They come with militarized subsystems built in and I've given them reinforced bulkheads so as to retrieve the poor fellows when they inevitably get crushed between two larger allied ships, an ECCM package for better performance out of those harpoons, and an ECM package on each of them which really adds up to scrambling the enemy sensors and allows the kites to close distance better. Unfortunately, I'm just not seeing them go in for the kill as they should and often pirates will wander steadily to the top of the screen and flee without a single kite firing a harpoon at unshielded shuttles and freighters. Maybe it's the difference in behavior between engage and eliminate that makes them act weird. Doing simulations with harry against larger ships, my kites will fire harpoons seemingly as distractions and while "engaged," appear to use harpoons as finishers or to whittle at shields, but elimination sees them firing harpoons not at all and they rather get doggedly close and just fire off the assault gun though the harpoon would finish much sooner. I believe the potential for Hegemony Kites is massive to weed out more than half of all pirate encounters, but the performance of un-officered kites seems too timid, and the decision to use harpoons on poorer pirate ships should be more obvious but rarely is played.
