Opening this reply with an "
I'm sorry it took 4 days" and the "
I was busy driving two of these around the sector, dabbing on [Redacted]" excuse. But I am ready now!
Pebble's system id has been changed to reserve deployment
I believe this is a logical, balance change if you want to keep the ship at 40 Deployment Points, but I'm under the impression the ship is in the same boat as the Infernus Battlewagon From Underworld: It's too big to stay at 40FP and it would just get its signature features
butchered if it tried. 50DP would give it a lot more room to be its own ship while not sacrificing any aspect of what makes it unique, so here's my argument for the Pebble to become 50DP:
StatsFirst things first, here's the stats of the Pebble Battlecarrier
and the Paragon Battleship, for comparison, since it supposedly has the same shield and the same ship system (maybe, eventually)
The shield, the ship system and the flux statsI fully support the idea of degrading the shield to damage ratio of it from 0.6 to 0.8, but everything else somehow varies from the original ship for some reason:
1)The Paragon has a 360 Omni shield with horrid raise rate, while the Pebble for some reason has a 360 front shield that's inherently faster raising
2)The Paragon (the one that's 60DP) has a shield that generates 750 flux per second just to stay up while the Pebble (that's supposedly a Pirate conversion and is currently worth 40FP) has a shield that only generates 450 flux per second.
Making the assumption the Pebble is raised from 40 to 50DP, it would be a neat balancing factor to
give it the exact same shield and ship ability as the paragon but with a 0.8 ratio instead, which would mean having the player invest in quite the amount of Ordinance Points (which would be lower than the Paragon's) to get the shield in shape for battle, if he/she decides to even
think about installing flux hungry weaponry.
As an example, Hardened Shields, Shield Conversion: Front and Stabilized shields cost a whopping
63 Ordinance Points to install and only one of those hullmods is eligible for Integration with a Story Point.
Both flux dissipation and flux capacity feel absolutely fine the way the are. I don't think any change is warranted even if the ship is buffed up to 50DP.
Ordnance PointsThe current iteration of the ship has 300 Ordinance Points and believe me when I say it's barely enough to give it everything you want it to have, considering it has
-3 Fighter bays
-17 small Ballistic, 4 small Composite and 5 Small missile mounts (not even considering those two small hardpoints)
-2 medium ballistic, 2 medium composite mounts
-1 large hardpoint
The weapon setup (that uses all weapon mounts as a prerequisite) that's been working best for me is the following:
Spoiler
3 Khopesh Rocket Bombers
17 Light Machineguns
9 Salamanders, 2 Salamander MRMs
2 Hypervelocity Drivers
1 Gauss Cannon
Light Machineguns are both cheap and effective, but they also provide quite the good kinetic power to drive off the enemy with, especially good if you also have Elite Point Defence raising their range even further.
Triple Khopesh Wings deal amazing damage to slow moving or otherwise immobilized targets, for which I needed...
13 Salamanders all firing off at the same time, ensuring the ship is immobilizing enemies left and right
The Two HVDs and the One Gauss both provide long range kinetic firepower and combine very well with the Fortress shield, allowing them to keep most of their damage potential as the ship keeps activating the Fortress Shield.
This setup can beat the Simulation Paragon almost undamaged
Considering this ship is basically an amalgamation of a Mora's fighter bays, a degraded Paragon's shield and the kinetic/missile/composite weapons of a few cruisers fues togheder, being
bumped to 50DP and have the
Ordinance Point pool slightly increased to something like 340-350 would make a lot of sense and still be inferior to not only the
Paragon (which
has 370) or the
Onslaught (which
has 360, the
XIV variant
has 370).
The Weapon MountsThis is the one nitpick I have with the ship's design as a whole. Some mount positions don't make sense, some others overlap with one another despite the ship being
absolutely massive and there also are strangely empty spots that could fit turrets a lot better than current positions, in order and assuming it would even be worth pursuing:
1)-The small ballistic turret in the top left could be moved further right to not be almost over the small missile hardpoints.
-the spot in the top-center is very crowded. I would personally remove the small ballistic turret right in front of the large hardpoint and move that one small ballistic turret a tad down and left to not touch the missile hardpoint and be abit more inside the hull.
2)-The center-left spot seems absolutely perfect for a 360° medium ballistic turret
-There's quite the massive empty spot just below the main bridge, I could perfectly see a backward facing, 180 degree arc, medium ballistic turret there too
-Those two small ballistic hardpoints in the bottom right corner have no functional purpose to be there, I would remove them for a medium ballistic hardpoint in their stead and also remove the middle small ballistic turret in front of where it would be placed to not overlap.
I could see the
1) changes applied regardless of the shiip being moved to 50DP or not, while the
2) changes would nicely accompany the ship's higher Deployment Cost and slightly improved OP pool if it was moved to 50DP.
Durability, Top Speed and HandlingDarting off to aspects of the ship I have not yet covered:
The
Durability of the ship beyond the shield is both incredible and fitting of a ship this size and made out of Asteroids. I would not change it regardless of the ship staying 40DP or being moved up to 50.
The
35 Top Speed of the ship
is really, really impressive (keeping the theme of asteroid ships going) for something this size and I feel it's
perfectly adequate, the
handling on the other ship is, on the other hand, a bit too much, to the point when it becomes absolutely mental with the presence of an Officer with Helsmanship, Auxiliary Thrusters or even both, I would personally cut it down a notch.
Maintenance, fuel economy and CRI had not looked at these numbers all that much before, but they have some strange connotations to them:
-
Maintenance is fine, all asteroid ship roughly have a Supply/Month maintenance cost that's around 6o-65% of their DP. It would also mean bumping the current 25 Supply/Month of the pebble to 30-35 if it was moved to 50DP tough.
-
Maximum Crew and Skeleton Crew values
are quite strange. This ship is basically double the size of a Legion with a lot more weapon mounts and only one less fighter bay, but are you telling me the ship can only house 700 crew at most (Legion can hold 1500) and only needs 540 to properly run legion requires 700)?
-
Cargo and Fuel capacity are in line with the ship's size, but the
Fuel/Light Year, Jump Cost value is really, really low at just 12 while, by comparison, both
Onslaught and Legion have 15 despite litterally being half the Pebble is. Assuming the ship uses double the thursters (to move double the volume, if not more) and has the same 0.65 efficiency of the Monthly Maintenance, a
more sensible fuel ecomomy would be around 20, 22.
This about covers everything that was on my mind after playing a whole campaign with two pebble Battlecarriers tagging along, assume
I'm perfectly fine with all the stats of the pebble I did not mention.
One last piece of feedback I'm going to give is about the Reserve Deployment you gave it instead of Fortress shield. It is a nice system to keep the fighter bays functional a bit longer, but it
hamfists the ship setup to use fighters instead of bombers quite a bit, while a system like Targeting Feed (from the Heron) would keep the ship open to using both bomber and fighter LPCs, not to mention actually justifying that
giant radar dish in the back of the ship.
Anyway, have a good one liam556, I'll love this mod regardless of where you decide to take it
![Smiley :)](https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/Smileys/default/smiley.gif)
Oh and by the way, this mod is arguably the best one for WH40K Orc Roleplay campaigns, along with Junker Ships from HMI: