Mea Culpa... a bit

In my last post commenter Alasseo is taking me to task on my Scorpion setup. Specifically the Tech II steel plate armour mods, and the four Limos missile launchers.

Being relatively new to armour tanking, I never checked in detail to see the differences between the best named armour plates and the tech II versions. Turns out they both give 4200 hit points but the Tech II steel plates adds 1 million more to my mass, making the ship less agile for turning and slower for acceleration.

The Limos cruise missile launchers he found even more shocking: "[A]nd sure the real power is the ecm, I know people who only have one missile on the scorp, but limos? really?"

Out of the 5 tech I cruise missile launchers, Limos is middle of the pack. The difference is primarily in rate of fire and volume capacity of the launchers, being low in the basic model and getting higher to the best named version. For example, the Limos cruise missile launcher has a capacity of 1.1 m3 and a rate of fire of 19.8 seconds (before skills) while the best named Arbalest launcher has 1.2 m3 and 17.6 seconds, a two second saving. And the larger capacity means that there are fewer reloads so more DPS. The end result with my skills is 95 DPS with four Limos launchers and 107 DPS with four Arbalest launchers, a significant increase.

But the reality of the matter is I didn't care about DPS on the Scorpion. It was built as a support ship, to use its ECM to incapacitate enemy ships from a distance, the missiles were extraneous. I had the Limos launchers in my hanger from missions so used them opposed to buying new ones.

So I'll step up and admit that the tech II plates were not the optimal choice even if I think the damage to my mobility was minimal, but I will not back down on the missiles. Yes, more DPS can be gotten with better launchers but I wasn't going out of my way for them.