Well, once you start cutting down fighter replacement time through high CR and character skills, it'll be consistently lower than 20 seconds. Anyhow, I'm not saying that you should be firing these things off as soon as they leave the hangar - they are, of course, very good at shooting things - but their functionality (and, to a certain extent, their purpose) is very similar to that of the AM SRM - send one or both off to their doom at the right moment, which is obviously the intent, as you said, to use it in another way.
Ah, it's a really good point about skills, in particular Carrier Group, factoring in here! I wasn't thinking about that. And, yeah, you're right on about them being similar to the AM SRM in function, though, right, the cost-benefit analysis is considerably more involved.
One thing I noticed about some of the movement enhancing ship systems like plasma burn is that they usually disable the 0 flux boost by generating miniscule levels of flux. This makes the movement "choppy" and unnatural because after you use plasma burn the ship slows down to the base speed and then immediately speeds up as the 0 flux boost activates. It's nothing serious but it would make it visually more pleasing (at least to me) if the 0 flux boost stayed on during the burn.
I see what you're saying, but I don't see it the same way, I guess? To me it looks natural - one mode of engine use cools down, there's a switch-over, and it picks back up. Makes it feel like a real thing working behind the scenes. It's also a bit easier to balance if there's something modifying the zero-flux bonus; I think in particular for these systems being able to predict how far it'll go is important. Well, for Plasma Burn it still is, for Burn Drive it's less so, now that it can be cancelled.
Good changes, but I think you should go even further. Shields will ALWAYS be superiror to armor, so problem with LT vs HT is still there, esp in lategame. IMO there is not enough difference between HT and LT where it is considered a decision, you always go for HT ships for lategame.
Suggestions:
1) Remove shields from LT ships, raplce with DF, balace around charges/duration/cooldown/damage reduction/flux generation for every ship separately. When DF is active you cant use weapons/DF generates alot of flux, but its not affected by amount of damage taken.
2) Nerf shields of HT ships to the point when 1 SF/D is considered good shield. Values like 0.6 SF/D is not achievable without combination of dedicated ships (shield tanks)+hullmods+officers and you cant go past 0.6 (unless you have fortress shield) coz its just silly at this point with 0.4 SF/D. Now HT will need to make a choice between vents for damage or caps for HP.
After that you will have a choice between "decisive battle" of LT or hit-and-run duels of HT.
You have a unique opportunity to implement extreme changes without alienating fanbase, coz everyone can just mod the game to their hearts content, game is still in development, so more bold changes are welcome. Changes in this blogpost are good, but not enough to really affect lategme of HT vs LT balance. As of now LT ships are for early game and target practice, every lategame encounter is HT ships vs HT ships if you ok with that then sure, good patch inc, if you tried to make LT viable and force players to chooes between equal (in terms of viability and efficiency) playstyles, then it will change nothing.
Hmm - if you look back over my previous replies, you can see why I think replacing shields with Damper Field on a large number of ships is not a good idea.
I also think that how much better high tech is quite exaggerated. It's definitely better right now, but I think it would be easy to overbalance and have low-tech be better - and, due to how it works, possibly even more dominating. For example, by turning up ballistic weapon range, adjusting the ballistic weapon flux stats, or, as you say, adjusting high tech shields. There are ample balance levers here (that could already be turned to flip the comparative strength of LT and HT around) and I think that doing something drastic - that makes a whole ship lineup not interact with key game mechanics - would be a big mistake.
Faster ships generally have worse armour, but shields can stay the same.
I wonder how the game would play, if moving or just accelerating increased the damage you take to shields. You could tank damage only if you stood still.
I think it'd get super fiddly, honestly. And it'd really mess up the high tech idea of hit and run. That's... kind of how high tech ships work, generally, right? Fundamentally messing that up seems like not a good idea. We're not *just* trying to balance high tech vs low tech here. We're trying to make both of their unique approaches works. High-tech's approach already works, since it's the simpler one to make work with just baseline ship stats. Low-tech's approach is more complicated to get to come out right, both stats and game-design wise.
What if Damper field actually allow shooting weapons?
So you essentially you trade flux from using it for reduced damage but still can blow your guns? Yes it would be strong but whole idea of it to make Low Tech ships to shoot a lot of dakka.
I'm not sure it's actually necessary, at least not in the case of the Vanguard! The uptime for Damper Field isn't particularly high, and the Vanguard's flux stats are pretty poor. So generally what happens - well, at least in my testing - is that good loadouts are over-fluxed, but since there are no shields and little breaks from Damper Field, it works out ok. What I'm getting at is I don't think DF ends up reducing the ship's effective firepower, there's just more of an ebb and flow to it, which is nice.
I think small weapons should really get some range increase. Heck maybe even all weapons especially this on lower range end. But it would really help smaller ships especially with their Aim at the centre of the target issue.
(Not sure if you saw, but both Light ACs and the Light AG are going up to 700 range.)
Some thoughts about skills
>what if combat/personal skills have no Tiers(pick and choose) but you still follow tier progression for Industry/Leadership and Tech?
I feel that this way combat picks would be actually somewhat attractive to pick at any moment instead of going either full spec or ignoring them.
(I'd love to talk more about skill changes! Just, need to get further along with it; been working on it quite a bit, actually.)
However, in an attempt to repel the pressure you exert on the 'burn-drive' being a tactical success, I suggest a 'tractor beam' would perform the same function inversely applied as the burn drive, but I would presume to consider it a high tech weapon more likely applied in an energy weapon mount. However, a low-tech ship system that could be deployed in a 'tractor-like' manner in the combat simulations may possibly be a magnetised hull?
Yeah, a tractor beam would probably feel kind of high-tech, though I suppose the visual and sound FX could sell it either way. But in general mobility-interfering systems would be really frustrating to play *against*. This is largely why there aren't any! I did mess around with the idea of an "Interdictor Array" on a phase ship (since they're allowed to be unfair, basically) but that didn't go anywhere too useful. It'd also require an unreasonable amount of cooperation from the AI, more than likely.
A Large Ballistic on a destroyer is going to make the ship specialized because under most circumstances (barring the Mjolnir), you'll only have access to a Kinetic or HE weapon. I'd imagine the secondary armaments will all be Small Ballistics (or 1-2 Small Missiles thrown in) and mostly PD coverage at that, so what you choose for the Large Mount will essentially determine its role. The ship system for such a thing is what I'm most intrigued about.
Yeah, very much agreed on that. Heck, this is why the Eradicator didn't get a large slot - I think it'd determine far too much even for a bigger ship like it! I have some ideas for this... kind of excited about it, actually, the more I talk about it - I think it could end up being a great support ship, but, importantly, one that's fun for the player to pilot, because you'd get some high-impact toys to play with.
Point taken on Damper Field vs. Shields. I hadn't thought about Beams basically being a hard-counter, and they would be, especially something like the HIL or Tachyon Lance. If there was an opportunity to try something like this on a larger ship, an XIV Onslaught or Dominator might be the place. You already know you're getting a variant and kind of like the Legion XIV, it operates a little different than standard. Sort of a "relic of a bygone era" -feel. But I'm done promoting the idea at this point. 
Yep, similar thoughts.
(And, interestingly: Damper Field on the Vanguard is good enough that it doesn't quite melt to the HIL the way it does without it. It's still highly effective but they don't just get deleted and have a reasonable chance to survive an engagement unless they're the sole focus. I'd imagine quad Tachyon Lances or some such are much less forgiving, though.)
