Pirate, Luddic Path, Hegemony, Tri Tachyon, etc. Which new ship variants, or rebalances of existing variants would you like to see?
I would like to see faction-specific variants of every ship that a faction has in its fleet doctrine, with their own buffs/debuffs and reskins. But I remember reading a post from Alex a while back saying he doesn't have plans for that. It would also raise the question of which Luddic Path ships would receive built-in Safety Overrides or not, and what the generic faction buffs/debuffs would be. In the case of factions that use lots of improvised tech such as Pirates/Luddic Path/Luddic Church, I don't think it would fit the lore for them to have a standardized buff/debuff scheme that is constant for every ship class.
As for specific ships, I'd like to see a Pirate Lasher variant, Hegemony and/or XIV Mora variant, and some kind of rebalance for the Pirate Falcon. The Lasher is one of the cheapest and most common ships in the sector with high firepower for its size and cost. This makes it a natural pick for Pirates, although I'm not sure what kind of stat changes it should receive. At the very least it should get a Pirate reskin.
Regarding the Pirate Falcon, people have known for a while that it's overpowered. Built-in Augmented Field Drive and Unstable Injector and 4x medium missile slots. Technically 2 of them are composites but nobody uses those for ballistics. It costs 20 DP vs the vanilla Falcon's 14 DP but even with that nerf it's still overpowered. It needs to be nerfed but not in a way that detracts from its role. I think the Pirate Falcon should suffer a penalty to its flux stats in exchange for all of its buffs. It will still be fast and lethal, but it shouldn't be able to fit a powerful shield tank in addition to its speed and 4x medium missiles.
The Mora's in-game description said it was designed as an escort for the Onslaught so it's puzzling why it doesn't already have a Hegemony and/or XIV variant. Not much else to say about that one.
What do you guys think? What other ships need a variant or variants? Which existing variants need rebalancing? If there was going to be a faction-specific variant of every ship in a faction's fleet doctrine, with a generic buff/debuff scheme, what would that look like for the different factions?