Hell yes they would. What, you think once the first strategy stops working you're locked in? Are you one of those people that respawns in the same ship with the same tactic that thinks "next time, next time I'll get em!" after getting torn apart by XYZ? Never mind the fact that plenty of gunship aces have incredible results in other ships.

Ions, of course! A good component, but not really definitive in the way that telemetry, railguns, or mines are.

I get the point about gunships being hard for new players to deal with. I'm taking issue with your flippant dismissal of what the meta does to effective railgun accuracy. It's an old sore on the forums, and usually bundled along with some tripe like "gunships take no skill." It's especially galling when it comes from people that have no experience with it at all. Maybe you've got 1k gunship games under your belt - in that case, you'd still be wrong to imply that railguns are easy to hit with, but I'll take back everything about you not having any experience.

If maneuvering was involved, missile lock breaks all the time at the edges of the acquisition arc. The same problem is acquisition is right at the edge of missile lock range. All of that is due to latency. If they were standing still, then I've got no explanation.

I see this discussion is about as pointless as I anticipated. Oh well. Hopefully you actually get out and play some more ship types, rather than QQing about them in the forums.

Nope, if I wanted to put you down, I'd have done so in the original post. The point is this: if you do not have sufficient personal experience to make claims about balance of certain components or certain ships based on actually playing them, then shut up about balance. You don't get to impute that it takes little skill to get results with something while being unable to demonstrate it. Good accuracy in stock gunships are obtained by people that are damn good, and usually by using their experience to place themselves in optimal situations. Under pressure (even just 1v1 pressure), stock gunships crumple, and mastered gunships need real skill to survive. Sammy's point about missing while dead on would be obvious if you actually understood what playing a gunship against a good opponent was like. A competent scout attacks a gunship by twisting around the axis of approach, while boosting, ideally with a cooldown up (dfield and running interference are both common, so you can keep a very high uptime of +evasion buff). They're still dead on, more or less, but even the best gunship pilots will routinely miss against such a target.

Latency can explain it, especially if they were at the edges of the lock arc. If they were standing still and somehow broke your lock, then it's either dfield (which doesn't always give a buff on the targeting computer - been like this for all effects since launch), or someone else may have activated EMP, which breaks locks on friendlies in its area of effect.

How many gunship matches have you played? What's your accuracy?

The most dangerous build for gunships is actually a T1 scout with telemetry/laser/rockets and shield to engine. This can run anything down and power very evasive approach to target, even without dfield. However, few pilots run that build as their primary ship, as it requires disproportionately more work to produce great results compared to the garden variety battlescout, and is very much limited in its ability to dogfight compared to a cluster-equipped T2 with difeld. Another reason to not run it is that the generalist dogfighting T2 scout can also burst down gunships and chase about as well for the short period of gunship engine endurance. Only the best GS pilots will be able to kill or evade such a scout without assistance or something to distract the scout, and it's only really consistently doable when there is a skill delta. Minor gripe: battlescout can take quick charge. The only unique strike component options are repair probes on the T3, which goes a long way to explain why imperium/clarion is pretty much the only kind of strike worth seriously flying. Strikes are fun, but just not competitive at the high end of play for the same effort - though I would say the class is intrinsically limited in its ability to produce top-flight results in the current meta.

I love you guys

That's about when you're in range, not when you're aimed properly on the lead indicator.

Domination overall and gunship domination: Xi'ao - Mangler - Domination - The Shadowlands - 21 assists

Show us where the big bad railgun touched you.

Domination overall: Xi'ao - Sting/Mangler - Domination - The Shadowlands - 205.77 DPS

Usually - growl in frustration since I've just wasted my time on target before I need to be moving. It does guarantee that the next target I get a good firing window on is going to get a slow death from ion railgun, though. Also, am I the only one that seethes with rage every time a bomber or strike fighter evades my railgun? I guess I expect scouts and gunships to, but the other classes, ***.

Stock T1 strikes are pretty scary, when everything is stock... I do tend to agree that strikes scale poorly.

Made it to the 2nd half of this, and had a blast like the first one, though the participation seemed to be lower. We didn't get many pub matches; mostly warzones. Thanks Drak for organizing!

It's so damn hard being properly in range post br-nerf... New one, strike TDM: Xi'ao - Rycer - Domination - The Shadowlands - 151.74 DPS

Domination and gunship domination: Xi'ao - Mangler - Domination - The Shadowlands - 194 DPS

Records updated. Grats guys! I think I will need to play more gunship in domination...

Will try, but afternoons aren't great for me.

1) Getting sabotage probed - guarantees for whoever did it that we will be BEST BUDDIES FOREVER for the rest of the match. 2) Solo capping a node, asking for a guard, then watching the node get recapped as soon as I'm finished at the next node 3) Watching people smash into gunship/bomber nests when I've told then repeatedly not to go there 4) People who trash talk despite contributing NOTHING 5) Conquest point leechers that do exactly enough to remain in combat, while doing nothing 6) Cluster bukkake 7) Being unable to carry a team in domination because bombers - note I have nothing against people running bombers, people stacking bombers, or members of a ****** team - this is me being frustrated with myself 8) Railgun target evasion RNG - nothing like 4 misses in a row to make your blood boil

Dirty trickster I'll update in a bit.

Updated. What server? Also, I need perf tab or requisition award screenshot to give you the bomber record. However, I updated the overall medals record with your entry.

This sort of stuff would be pretty awesome. I think there is a population of pretty serious GSFers that don't exclusively GSF, such that they would be willing to transfer characters exclusively for it, or would rather not spend their relatively limited play time away from friends just to level up hangars elsewhere. Being able to access their preferred loadouts without going through a massive grind on a new server is a pretty big deal.