Shield type is usually a matter of personal taste. If you often find yourself harassed by scouts, the feedback shield can make for an unpleasant surprise, but I think of it as more a tool for gunships that occasionally dogfight. Fortress are possibly the best 'solid' choice since you can activate it before/while you are in sniping mode. Helps absorb some of the shock of a hit. I tend to switch between the feedback and distortion shields. I find an additional defensive cooldown against ambushers works fine for my personal taste. Not to mention running around with 31% baseline and 101% active evasion really offers nice protection against hunters - not to mention other gunships. Slug and plasma tend to also be matters of personal choice. Plasma does more damage overall, but a lot of the damage is locked up in the dot effect. Could be useful against evasive scouts, but I prefer the more upfront and shield piercing of the slug myself. If you're comfortable with your lasers, keep them on the backburner until you have your railgun and sensors upgraded. You can't really hit the shield/armor piercing tier until you've spent about 18k req, so that's a little expensive for the important upgrades you might not need all that much.

Please for the love of Bob try to part yourself from that mindset. Unless you subbed specifically for GSF your sub money is going to the GAME. Not GSF. Are there parts of the game you like? Good! That's what your sub money goes to, in addition to the parts you don't like. I've yet to set a foot in Ops or ground PvP, but I don't mind that my sub money helps pay for development of those things. Because my sub money also pays for new flashpoints, ground pve content, and starfighter. So I'm a happy camper. More kinds of content, whether you like them or not, keep the game running by attracting different kinds of people.

That would be nice... though not sure I'd hold my breath on that getting tweaked. The proton torpedo in the rail shooter has the same aggravating problem and has never been fixed to be more intuitive about when you actually have a lock.

And the rest of us take notes so we can be everything that is wrong with gunships. Though admittedly I love messing with opponents. They usually learn very quickly to kill me when I appear on the battlefield. Then I come back and throw them through a loop by sticking a few cluster missiles up their tailpipe. Many of them are obviously confused how a gunship pilot just put missile locks on them. They try to chase me for a little while until they realize I switched ships. I make excellent bait. While clusters are my favorite missile because I suck at maintaining locks, I've been using rocket pods more often. I'm a crappy shot with them, but they're superb turret killers because of their armor piercing.

No, we know perfectly well what we're talking about. Someone with 15 medals may not get as much req as someone with 8 medals might have gotten. Why? The guy with 15 probably got a lot of combat medals for damage and kills while ignoring objectives. The guy with 8 might have spent the whole match capturing nodes and blowing up turrets. Capturing a satellite node gives a pretty hefty requisition bonus. Sure, someone with a lot of medals may very well have a lot of requisition earned for the battle, but we're saying that the number of medals does not directly translate into the amount of requisition you earn. It's the quality of your actions, not just the quantity that determine your awards. I'd be much happier if they just hosed the entire medal subsection of the board to make room for more descriptive objective areas, such as 'assault', 'defense' and 'combat' As I said before, you're asking for the wrong thing. Bonus medals for a quick game doesn't mean anything. You should be asking for bonus requisition for a quick game.

The scoreboard/medal system really does need to be cleaned up a bit to be a bit more reflective on contributions and requisition earned from those contributions.

Yes, but it isn't classified as armor for the purposes of armor penetration. If it really worked that way, anything with armor piercing would automatically reduce evasion by 4-10% of anything using lightweight. And how would that even work? "You have 1200 health against all weapons... oh but you only have 1000 health against railguns" Yeah... no. Armor pen is just effective against damage resistance - not evasion or increased health pool.

If you are a dedicated gunship hunter rocket pods will probably be more valuable than the probe. After all you are usually sneaking up on what is usually an immobile target. If the probe had a much lower lock time perhaps. Not to mention with the power of barrel roll, a weapon made for quick bursts is probably the best choice. I'm torn on sensor beacons. My opinion is it is probably a much more useful item for premade groups - basically a utility but only useful when you can trust people will use them. If the beacon would always transmit its information to you no matter where you were on the map it could be more useful in your role. It still has its place if you drop them on the perimeter of a satellite to get early warning of a ship entering the area. A second set of eyes against ships that are normally fairly stealthy, as it were. Though not sure how close you have to be to the probe to get its benefit, and booster recharge might be more useful for the actual hunting tasks.

No, they probably flew a scout or strike fighter and got tired of getting killed by gunships. I cannot recall at any time Bioware said "This is a dogfighting sim!" No, they said space combat. And honestly it's still a fun dogfighting game. You just have to realize dogfighters aren't the only players and adapt your dogfighting tactics around that. If they can't do that... well they can go play plenty of other dogfighting sims.

My thought is that... medals are irrelevant to requisition rewards. Yes, giving some bonus requisition for ending a match more quickly would be nice since most of your requisition comes out of longer matches because you spend more time attacking/defending/killing. So you are basically asking for the wrong thing. Medals are merely there to give some notice on what you were actually doing during the match. The number of medals is meaningless. A person with a boatload of medals for hunting down a bunch of people very possibly will earn less requisition than someone with less medals who spent the time capturing and guarding nodes. So bonus medals, no. Bonus requisition for a quick game would be nice to actually feel like a victory means anything. Either that or overhaul the medal system a bit so it is more reflective of rewards than of e-peen.

On a strike fighter, there's not a lot of reason to take evasion armor unless you like the RNG aspect of it. Even using the evasion crewmember, it is only about a 11% increase in effective health - and that is going to be dependent on how lucky you are. On an evasion maxed scout, on the other hand it would be about a 17% increase in effective health. (Going from being hit by 69% of shots to 59% of shots is about a 17% decrease in blaster/rail shots that connect). While the health armor technically still comes out ahead mathematically speaking, a scout is mostly in danger from rail gun shots. Since even extra health may not help against a lucky crit, most scouts probably prefer to hedge their bets in not being hit in the first place.

The Flashfire is evidently supposed to be intended as a straight up dog fighter, while the Novadive is more of a utility/objective scout. Novadive has access to better sensors and a sensor beacon (though the beacon is probably only useful in a premade). At the very minimum Novadive is probably the better gunship hunter of the two, and in a lot of ways because of its sensors, more worthy of the 'scout' designation. In a normal match, probably not much reason to use a Novadive unless you prefer to load out two scouts - one with a sabotage probe and one without.

Alright, from the perspective of another gunship pilot... 1) Ion Rail: I couldn't agree more here. That's just kind of messed up. 2) Barrel Roll: I would consider it more a problem with barrel roll itself. It's too powerful for even a scout or strike. Only my most dedicated dogfighters even consider taking retro thusters or snap turn. And even then I usually opt for a barrel roll since it gets me out of a dogfight so I can turn around and reengage on my terms. I would only get behind taking it away if it were tweaked down in the first place. 3) I'm in the 'bypass is the problem' camp. So your suggestion to have it only work on primary weapons is good - though in another thread someone figured out all you would have to do is lower bypass by 1% to make a gunship incapable of one shotting a defensive based scout. So taking bypass down to 30% might be all it needs. 4) Burst lasers I'm a little more torn on. They're actually less dps than most standard lasers - it's just they play well to gunship weakness in that you don't need to track your target for long periods of time to land solid hits. While a gunship should be at a severe disadvantage in a dogfight, they shouldn't be helpless either. This sounds more like a skill imbalance issue between pilots. Much the same we get more rail gun kills on targets that aren't moving around much, we get more close range kills off of people who don't try to outmaneuver us in close quarters. If you've popped them once or twice then manage to kill them after sneaking up on someone, it's their own fault for not getting out of a way to a ship that is far less agile.

Some people might care because they don't know if the original shot would have even hit. At point blank range or if you are leading a target, it is near impossible to tell if the shot even connects. Not to mention there are a number of annoying server issues in what you see on the screen and where the server believes the target is. It would be nice to get an indication that 'Yes you would have hit the ship if it weren't evading' or 'No you didn't hit it, adjust your aim'. Doesn't have to be anything big. A blue '0' would probably be enough really. Small not to be distracting, but enough to give an indicator. This is equally valuable to a dogfighter or sniper. There are a lot of times I could swear there was no way my rail shot just connected, and a lot of times I wonder if I missed a shot because I was just a wee bit off center or if it buzzed past due to evasion.

Probably aren't many crew member guides yet because either answers can be obvious, or it would have to be incredibly exhaustive. Because your crew members are going to change completely depending on what you set as your ship's purpose. Which strike fighter? If you use the missile boat, reduction on cooldowns and increased ammunition are your top passives to aim for. Dogfighter? You'll probably want increased turning speed - and perhaps increased accuracy and tracking. Choose your crew members based on what strengths you want. Or go more rounded and use them to shore up weaknesses. The main fault I see here is you are selecting your crew entirely based on your character roster. If you want to be as effective as you can possibly be, check ALL crew bonuses out, then plan to build up fleet requisition to purchase those crew members if you don't get them in the ground game. And don't immediately sideline your GSF crew. Their bonuses can be as good or better than the ground game crew depending on the situation.

"Quickly turn' is a relative term in my opinion... the problem I find with rotational thrusters is your opponent is often trying to circle around you. So even if you turn toward your opponent... they often aren't even there any more.

At which point nobody uses it anymore and it is wasted space. Sort of like charged armor, the negatives really don't make it worth the inventory slot when you could use something almost as good.

Looks like a suggestion for... a battle type? Where the goal is to destroy the enemy's flagship. I think. Also some kind of suggestion where you could pilot a destroyer. Or something. My French is a wee bit rusty, and Babelfish isn't giving me any more details than I can already discern.

That's... very odd. I don't think I've ever seen the fleet req not be 10% of your earned total during the battle. Make sure to submit a bug report on that. Hard to say how it happened, though perhaps you could run a test of mastered ships vs. unmastered ships to see if that is the bug source or if it just randomly happened.

So you're asking them to almost completely wipe out all advancement players have made on their ships? Yeah, that would make for a number of unhappy campers. Especially since I would bet a number of people have sunk a fair amount of CC into upgrading their favored ship. No, they aren't going to reset anything. And the advantage a leveled ship will bring to the field is going to dwarf the effect that practice and skill does. So resetting upgrades will make no real change. Wait I take that back. It will mean the newbies will be getting even more butchered since lack of upgrades will pair experienced players with them more often.

To be a bit more specific, all subscribers (and probably preferred players) will get access to a gunship on January 14th.

Ok, now that would make charged plating actually worth consideration for me. The unavoidable damage is just what makes it a deal killer for me, and this coupled with the damage reduction cooldown would make it very useful.

Well unless you're running voice chat, it's hard to communicate in the middle of a fight. You have to let your controls go long enough to type something out. And the combat is fast enough that's sometimes enough time to either come close to giving an asteroid a decoration or having two people come up behind you to say hello with their missiles.

You're pretty much already pointed out the biggest flaw. This ship would be Gunship fodder. I have yet to see a person give a good review on tests of charged armor. Mostly because it really doesn't give any advantages over a quick charge shield would in instant restore, or a directional shield would in raw defensive power. I think we often underestimate how much damage we really take to our shields. 40% of damage taken going to your hull adds up awfully quick. You would probably be wiser to get Hydro spanner instead of Nullify since once you take that damage it isn't coming off. This ship would also be pretty much uniquely unsuited to taking out turrets, sort of in the same way that a strike with directional shields is very suited to it.

Yes. Anytime you die you go back to the 'select your ship' readiness screen. You can change your ship there. I often start as a scout to help capture objectives, then fall back to my gunship to lay down supporting fire. You'll earn requisition for each ship depending on the actions that ship performed during the battle.