How to Make Small Ships Viable
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Foreword
In the early to mid game, cannons and vulcans are quite excellent: Their heat is MUCH lower than energy weapons, and ignoring early shielding on the latter pretty much means one of the first big defensive upgrades the enemies you face gain doesn’t exist.
Good projectile speed and range, and good dps when crafted.
I play almost only yachts from start to finish, so let’s start with the basics.
The Basics
Defensively your hitbox is a small fraction of a larger ship’s. A SMALL fraction; a Dragonfly is more than 8x the total surface area of a Lacewing.
This matters for yachts since a badly timed roll could ‘connect’ you with a shot that’s not done passing through.
The space between hardpoints and their angles means that up close it can be incredibly difficult to get more than one or two guns trained on you at any given moment. In fact you’ll learn a few dreadnoughts have actual dead-zones in ‘melee’… although what they carry(hint hint) may be quite intent on dislodging you. Meanwhile, ALL your firepower is pointed right at them.
Atop the double-tapped laterals is a neutral roll button you can set. Rolls grant i-frames and projectiles (including missiles) just fly right past as a result. It’s powerful, but given your base hull ISN’T in the thousands like those oversized bosses you’ll be fighting…
Your maneuverability is significant. Depending on crew my endgame yacht usually ends up a bit over 72 turn rate, with (despite going cheap on them) at least 90 strafe speed. Don’t discount being on the move; not being where their top firepower is pointed helps keep you on the alive side of the fireball spectrum. Every shot that doesn’t connect is a shot that you don’t have to try and tank.
In a small ship, you’re looking for efficiency and specificity. As you’ve been experiencing, it’s easy to blow out the hardpoint and not fire a few seconds. But you’re also HIGHLY mobile and so hit&run are definitely a thing.
And so is the weapon stabilizer. Try it out. I prefer it for most of my guns most of the time especially at range. Lets you dance while keeping everything pointed at the cursor, and at worst it can just be toggled off.
My favorite small ship armors are Advanced Titanium < Lithrium < Terran (top)
For Reactors, you’re looking for efficiency too; so Miners when well upgraded are for MOST of your purposes going to be a better choice than the Venghi.
Endgame gearing you’re looking for: Miner reactors, 2 venghi shields, a venghi charger, MAYBE (if you like longer warps) one ardonian small battery, basic sensors, Pirate Impulse and boosters.
With low mass a single purple or orange mk1 gyro may well cap your base turn rate on its own. You want a warp diverter, one accumulator and either an Improved Energy Barrier, or if you don’t use charge guns a Pirate Protector (it cycles much faster and is better but it eats your flux like crazy as a result and +1 equip space, so I usually use the IEB). The Deuterium drive’s probably enough but if you want good sensors, scanner and warp for more general purpose living, consider just a D.O.Sweeper as a combined package.
Railguns and Torpedoes are great against anything bigger than you are. While it’s true that they could just get roll-ignored or miss when fired at a fighter, a V3’s not getting out of the way of these, while cruisers and dreadnoughts can be radar-targeted from offscreen if need be. They don’t care about the heat; their cooldown makes sure of it. Charge 4 will also mean a railgun gets off a second shot on the same flux, which is always nice.
Torpedoes are versatile once you’re used to them, and hit like very large trucks thanks to high crit and good per-shot damage making them very flux-friendly. Even just Charge 1 will give you something that eats Ravagers in a few hits.
A few crew, enhancements and ship roles (gunships like the Dragon) offer -heat. Your Phantom however is a crit machine; built to give crits and make them huge. So if you’re going to make a gatling, remember that the DPS on the tooltip is a bit of a lowball. You WANT crits because a ‘mere’ double damage ain’t what you’ll be dishing out.
As long as you can fire it for at least 5 seconds, that’s probably good enough; you can cloak and run and recover if it’s on such a cycle.
<SV_WeaponPreset:Basic RGLC Critfisher AP4:RLC02HEA01DAB01:RF03AP04CR01> only takes tech level 12, is fairly cheap (though there’s a refined metal in there), and RAW heats you at 32.2/s versus a base 15 cooling. The AP means against 400+ armor you’ll do more damage than if you had no armor pierce, BUT it also reduced the energy and heat requirements, making it easier to handle. Three of these leaves space on your Phantom; but in endgame you may want a third core (you can eventually have 12 gun space on there between Space Pilot, Dogfighter and the combat capstone).
If you like going up close and personal, point defense beams let you clear drones off (both the killing kind and the healers surrounding that dreadnought), while saving heavily on energy+heat. With high tech levels you can make some truly nasty main guns for use in hunting the big ones.
The ravager is a class 2 ship that is not even here, got the achievement with them,
It only has 1 gun hardpoint, but it shoots 4 times and is great for taking down those chonkers.