Beautifully detailed, very militaristic looking ship with no unnecessary "rule of cool" spaceship stuff that a lot of builders add (and would realistically only add structural weak points to a warship). However, kinda feels like a glass cannon, with devastating firepower but lacking on the defensive side. Even with the Ion, this much shielding for this size of ship just won't cut it.
What I would do to improve on the design:
- To allow use for fleet operations, switch the swarmer secondary weapon to a damage beam computer with 1 beam block, and increase number of outputs to compensate number of missiles launched. You get same reload time, same overall damage, but higher missile speed and a chance to select your target.
- Use the freed up blocks to throw in extra Ion modules to boost the shield efficiency.
- Switch the ion beams to cannon/beam, long-range beam hit detection is still questionable (if not fired by AI, don't hope on hitting anything not in your sector)
- Alternatively, scrap the ions altogether for more defensive Ion/shield blocks. It already has more than enough weapons anyway. There is such a thing as too many guns.
- Missile/pulse tac nukes, while they do sound great, will never hit anything that moves with a decent speed and has any kind of point defense. They are essentially station busters (provided the station has no missile defence either)
Otherwise, very nice ship, and I'd definitely use it in a fleet as fire support (but definitely not as a frontline vessel, too squishy for that)
My objective when I was working on the ship was to really push myself to detail well, and build some decent looking turrets. I wanted enough interior to play around with, but I also wanted her to have enough firepower and support systems to be viable in a PVE environment.
I got the looks down, but on the server she's underperforming a bit going after custom pirate stations. I have some ideas, but I think I'll send you a private message with some questions about pushing up the Winter's combat potential. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!