The trick with SO I think is that it's exceedingly useful early game to pick the enemy ships one by one and blast them away. But once you start facing bigger ships and fleets, the battles last longer and the Peak time reduction start to take it's toll real hard. It could certainly use a nerf, (I like the idea of decreasing effect over time as suggested above) but not a big one IMO.
I think the same. SO is extremely good early game as you can rush your battles before the CR start dropping. However, Hardened subsystems rapidly become indispensable against larger fleets, and even then it gives the Wolf less than 2 minutes before CR degradation. SO can become a death sentence when you get ganked by several fleets.
SO isn't the ultimate hullmod either. Instead on spending the available OPs for SO and HS, you can just use them on vent points and get slightly better results. Plus the ability to actually vent, longer CR timer and longer weapons range. You still lose the speed boost though.
Personally, i currently have reached a point in the campaign where i removed SO from all my ships. The battles just take too long and the CR degradation start to hurt my fleet economy.
Also, it's possible that joekungfu fully skilled the combat skill tree in his campaign. While it's not a bad thing by itself, the combat skills tends to skew the view we can have on balance. It's by far the most powerful skills in the game, even more since the "nerf" of the leadership skills. It's not surprising that a fully skilled ship can steam-roll pretty much everything immediately, thus finishing the battle in before the CR toll.
So... I'm not sure. Perhaps it needs a nerf, but really a minor nerf then. I actually like Sy's idea of increased damage taken by engines and weapons, similar to Unstable injector. The other listed penalties seems a tad too harsh.
Other than that, i have a few observations concerning the campaign.
The first one, would be to allow the player to be able to see an officer's abilities even if we reach the 10 officers limit. Currently, i have to save, dismiss an officer, open the comm link and look at the mercenary's abilities to see whether or not he seems more interesting. And if not, re-load the game to not lose the other dismissed officier. That's quite a few steps.
The second, would be to see the detection/sensor range of the ships i'd like the buy. Currently, i don't know if the ship i'll buy will be reasonably stealthy or will shine like a Christmas tree to pirate's sensors. Same thing for their detectors. I know that Civilian hulls will be easier to detect, but i'd like to know the numbers before i buy. It seems that this number is set depending on the ship class and its hullmod, but i don't know how much until i get the ship.
Also for some reasons, not all my ships appears on those lists.
Maybe everything what i'm asking for is actually already there, but so far the whole thing is nebulous enough for me to not find it.
The third thing, is the 25 ships limit. It's a very arbitrary number and a huge nerf to small ships. It doesn't change anything early game, but mid/late game suffer from this limit. I don't see carrier fleets being interesting in the long run, nor frigates fleets. After all, an Enforcer and a Talon take the same slot in a fleet. Yes, obviously the supply cost won't be the same and fielding 25 Paragons is probably not economically sound. But if you take the middle road, destroyer spam plus a few cruisers seems to be the winning combination.
The previous logistic system that regulated the number of ships was unnecessary complex. Even after playing so many campaigns, it still felt quite nebulous to me. What i propose would be a middle ground and use the fleet points instead. They are still listed in the ship_data.csv as i "think" the AI still take them in account during fleet engagements.
The advantage of fleet points is that it remove the slot systems that any ships can take. With this new system, you would be able to take 10 Talons for 30 FP or a single Paragon for the same price in your fleet. It feel more balanced, even smaller crafts will have their use for late game. Like in the previous version, the maximum size of the fleet could also be increased through the leadership skills. I also liked in 0.65 when you could go over the logistic limit at the cost of a CR penalty for all your ships.
Hmm, i think i'll try to expand more on this last one in the suggestion topic and keep this one for direct 0.7 feedback.