This is the long and short of it.

They are really fun though. EMP actually disabled turrets too, and if you launch it at a mine located close to the center of the satellite you can hit all three. (I did this once and it was glorious.)

It's not possible for bombers to be the best counter to bombers if gunships are the best counter to gunships.

Thisthisthis. Additionally TDM Mesas is probably the map that's friendliest to this kind of evasive flying. I also agree with Verain above. (Getting to be a habit.)

We already have ships that can easily sneak up on us and burst us down in less than two seconds: they're called battlescouts. Why would we have anything extra to fear from a stealth ship?

Hm, I might sign on... just have to decide whether to kill you with pods or railguns...

On JM, my Republic battlescout takes barrel roll while my Imp takes power dive, because (at least historically) Pubs are stronger than Imps so if I'm running solo impside I need the additional defense while on repside I can afford the offense.

Sure, but there is a much simpler point here. The spherical cow of GSF is a dead-center motionless target with no evasion and no cooldowns, AKA damage per shot times rate of fire times (1 + crit / 2), times accuracy if you want to get fancy. In this model, LLC has the highest DPS. But most refinements you make to this model are going to hit LLC harder than its competitors. Small firing windows? Massive reduction in LLC's modeled DPS, little or none to BLC. And so on.

Highest theoretical dps, with every single real-world correction going against them.

Come on. Wingman is available on every single ship.

T3 GS is a different animal and clearly less powerful qua gunship than the T1. Please show me the extra missile or offensive cooldown on the T1 that I've been missing.

Agree with this, obviously. In close range fights gunships only have 1 button to click, vs the 2 of a strike or the 3 of a scout. That 1 button deserves to be pretty damn good.

I don't really have much to add to this thread, because I agree pretty much entirely with everything Verain has posted.

LLC has higher DPS up close but quads also pack high sustain and their characteristics are almost ideal for fighting bombers (except the lack of native armor pen, which LLC also lacks): The range difference is a really big deal in picking off mines. Bombers are the slowest and least maneuverable targets, which minimizes quads' issue with tracking penalties. Quads love fat stationary targets. The longer engagement range also translates into a higher effective DPS because you can start firing sooner (and also have more flexibility in where to attack from). There's a reason that battlescouts usually pick quads or BLC over LLC.

Why not prefer quads on a bomber-hunter?

Hell, I don't actually fly gunships anymore. If I need to play serious I'll hop on my T2 scout, else I'm only going to be in my T1/3 strike.

This is not a thing. First, "argumentum ad absurdum" would translate roughly as "argument to absurdity", which doesn't really make sense and of which none of the plausible interpretations represent a fallacy. Second, the phrase you are going for is "reductio ad absurdum", which is not a fallacy but rather a proof technique, whereby the user shows the falsehood of his interlocutor's argument by extending that argument to the most extreme possible case and showing that it reaches an absurd result. It is essentially just an extended modus tollens.

No, I saw those, but I misunderstood and thought the only reversion was the 12s->6s on the slow. Also during that time I wasn't playing much and I didn't get hit with any ions. And on JM I barely ever fly gunships anymore anyway, because it's not really necessary.

I think for now I'm going to stick with slow because against the current JM population I don't *need* the lockout and it just seems sort of cruel...

As I said in OP, I discovered it through actually getting hit by an ion railgun (I know, I know, not something I should allow to happen but other than Tsuki there aren't any gunships worth being afraid of on JM (for the record I got away fine)). And I'll come back when I have a bit more time I'm just doing the daily on my JM imp toon to finally complete all the ships. At no regen the lockout is just straight up better than slow, even vs scouts with pods.

I just got hit with an ion railgun with the energy lockout and it didn't look like my engine power was regenerating at all until the debuff fell off. The experiment was not repeated so I don't want to trust just a single observation that could've been mistaken.

I mean, I don't have trouble with it, but observably we get way, way more remarks about power dive self-destructs than with the other maneuvers.

It bears repeating that power dive deserves to be powerful because of the skill requirements.

I actually played GSF for once! I had been planning on coming back with 3.0, but didn't bother when I heard about the bugs.

I will confess that the angle of a disto nerf actually helping gunships because it hurts their predators even more than it hurts their own defenses against same is not something I had thought of from previous discussions of removing the disto lock break, and it's an intriguing one.