What is good about Terran ships?

[mores314]

For Skrit it's the fast drives, for Argon it's turrets, for Paranid it's small & fast miners & transport, and "oh wow" for the Odysseus. For Teladi it's the strong shields.

Apart from Asgard for which there is nothing to compare, what is good about Terran ships?

I can't seem to work out; why a Syn rather than Odyseus or Rattlesnake or even Phoenix?

Why an Okinawa rather than Helios, or Sonra? Incarcetura still has the largest cargo space by far.

In terms of cargo space and speed, Veles sentinel (529t) seems close to Okinawa (277t) but has a far stronger hull and holds slightly more cargo.

[Sola Di Ryuvia]

Syn beats the oddy and rattlesnake easy tbh. Those main cannons on it are rapid fire and can melt even stations. The Frigate the terran's have and Katana can equip the strongest weapons for their size in entire game as well. The meason beam or something like that (its a slow fire but insanely strong and basically an instant win in OSS combat). I use only terran ships now as escort ships.

[manoeuvring with difficulty]

Engines - Terran Ships have exceptional acceleration and boost speed making them quite manoeuvrable despite not being all that fast over distance (with the exception of the katana which equipped correctly is the fastest ship of its class)
Shields - Terran Shields are pretty good (not sure if they're the best but they're certainly not bad)
Terran Weapons - have incredibly fast projectiles so while on paper ARG L Plasma turrets will dish out a heap of damage, unless against larger ships they won't land a hit, by contrast a Syn fully kitted out with M and L Bolt turrets with shred through any class of ship because of how fast and accurate the turrets are.
Coming back to the Ships chassis themselves the Syn has 8 large turret hard-points, all of which can fire forwards which is a lot of firepower considering the number of large turrets the other destroyers can mount.

As for Terran Traders, I haven't played with them a lot but they don't sound all that great.

TLDR: Terran ships are great at combat

[S.C.]

Syn is slower than other destroyers, and the gun range is 9km (only better than Rattlesnake 's 6km). But it has higher DPS than Rattlesnake, and 3*sheild. It can defeat a K frontally without the risk to take hull damage in player's hand, and duel with a K OOS until other fleets arrived in AI's hand.

Katana has the best travel speed than other corvette, and good shield and firepower. It can get to somewhere faraway from your territory fast and deal with some skirmish.

Okinawa......currently I never use that ship. Only split miner/trader for their speed.

[mores314]

Originally posted by manoeuvring with difficulty:

Engines - Terran Ships have exceptional acceleration and boost speed making them quite manoeuvrable despite not being all that fast over distance (with the exception of the katana which equipped correctly is the fastest ship of its class)

Just looking at the encyclopedia entries, Katana certainly is fast.

I was looking at Syn vs Rattlesnake though and it just makes no sense. The Syn has a mass of 124t, and the Rattlesnake a mass of exactly double that, 248t. And yet, given the same engine (PAR All-round Mk1), the syn has a speed of 89 m/s, while the Rattlesnake sees 178 m/s.

Originally posted by manoeuvring with difficulty:

Shields - Terran Shields are pretty good (not sure if they're the best but they're certainly not bad)

	TER		ARG		PAR		TEL
MK2	Capacity	Recharge	Capacity	Recharge	Capacity	Recharge	Capacity	Recharge
Small	1037	141/11.5s	988	128/12.1s	889	135/10.2s	1087	122/13.9s
Med	6439	45/0.47s	6133	41/0.5	5520	43/0.42s	6746	39/0.57s
Large	48597	247/0	46282	286/0	41654	284/0	50911	257/0

So for all shield types, TEL > TER > ARG > PAR, although for recharge, PAR > TER > ARG > TEL.

I would agree, TER shields are quite nice in general.

Originally posted by manoeuvring with difficulty:

Terran Weapons - have incredibly fast projectiles so while on paper ARG L Plasma turrets will dish out a heap of damage, unless against larger ships they won't land a hit, by contrast a Syn fully kitted out with M and L Bolt turrets with shred through any class of ship because of how fast and accurate the turrets are.

I guess that depends on whether your target is static or moving. Plasma has always been ridiculously slow, and certainly won't hit moving targets often.

ARG medium bolt turret has a rotation speed of 180 degrees/s, while TER has 95 degrees/s. ARG bolt speed is 1074 m/s while TER is the same speed. So for medium bolt turrets, ARG > TER.

Originally posted by manoeuvring with difficulty:

Coming back to the Ships chassis themselves the Syn has 8 large turret hard-points, all of which can fire forwards which is a lot of firepower considering the number of large turrets the other destroyers can mount.

As for Terran Traders, I haven't played with them a lot but they don't sound all that great.

TLDR: Terran ships are great at combat

That may be true in terms of sheer fire power, but L turrets are slow and ineffective vs small fighters.

The Odysseus has 4 large turrets and 12 medium, which is half the number of L turrets. but 3 times the number of medium turrets. It can also carry up to 50 ships, 10 of which may be medium class, and still manages to move almost twice as fast as the Syn.

The Syn has better shields than the Odysseus (3xL, 25G vs 2xL, 17G) and has the same hull integrity as the Odysseus Sentinel. What is worse is speed, including max speed, boost speed, travel speed and acceleration all of which suck big time for the Syn.

Which is strange, since the Syn mass is 124t vs Odysseus Sentinel 251t.

[Astasia]

Ship speed is misleading. Watch a ship piloted by a captain fly through a mining system, watch them exit and leave travel mode constantly, Terran engines enter travel mode and get back up to speed much faster, this isn't represented in their stats. In a long distance sprint across an open system they will lose, but during practical use, docking and undocking, exploring, moving around objects, they compete very well.

Originally posted by mores314:

MK2
So for all shield types, TEL > TER > ARG > PAR, although for recharge, PAR > TER > ARG > TEL.

Now compare mk3 shields.

[[Vilu]]

Originally posted by mores314:

I was looking at Syn vs Rattlesnake though and it just makes no sense. The Syn has a mass of 124t, and the Rattlesnake a mass of exactly double that, 248t. And yet, given the same engine (PAR All-round Mk1), the syn has a speed of 89 m/s, while the Rattlesnake sees 178 m/s.

There's also ship drag that affects its speed (there's a chassis mod that reduces drag and ends up increasing speed)

Originally posted by mores314:

So for all shield types, TEL > TER > ARG > PAR, although for recharge, PAR > TER > ARG > TEL.

Terrans have extra mk on shields where other factions don't. For example for L shields TER have mk3, other faction's stop at mk2. Other factions have XL shield mk1, while terrans have mk2.

[mores314]

Originally posted by Vilu:

Originally posted by mores314:

I was looking at Syn vs Rattlesnake though and it just makes no sense. The Syn has a mass of 124t, and the Rattlesnake a mass of exactly double that, 248t. And yet, given the same engine (PAR All-round Mk1), the syn has a speed of 89 m/s, while the Rattlesnake sees 178 m/s.

There's also ship drag that affects its speed (there's a chassis mod that reduces drag and increases speed)

Drag? In space?

Originally posted by Vilu:

Originally posted by mores314:

Originally posted by mores314:

So for all shield types, TEL > TER > ARG > PAR, although for recharge, PAR > TER > ARG > TEL.

Terrans have extra mk on shields where other factions don't. For example for L shields TER have mk3, other faction's stop at mk2. Other factions have XL shield mk1, while terrans have mk2.

BIG plus on this comment. You know, I had not noticed that until I tried doing what another poster said, and compare mk3 shields? But quite right, where SPL has a MK4 engine, TER has MK3 large shields!

[[Vilu]]

Originally posted by mores314:

Drag? In space?

For some reason, yeah :D

For engine comparison:
S mk3's: https://i.imgur.com/YaU0HKA.png
M mk3's: https://imgur.com/0mnRa2J.png
L mk1's: https://imgur.com/bP8OgdZ.png
XL mk1's: https://imgur.com/3GdD0ZF.png

As you can see, Terran speciality in engines is boost/travel and namely their acceleration and efficiency. Terran S/M combat engines can boost almost double the time over other engines, before shields are depleted from full. L and XL engines accelerate travel mode to full speed in ~1/5th of the time other factions take.

Tables not done by me, all credit to Alkeena in egosoft forums, assuming he's the one who made them ;)

edit: the "attack" stat in boost and travel is the time it takes to accelerate to full speed. "release" is for how fast it comes to full stop from when you hit the brakes.

[Lapo]

Originally posted by mores314:

Drag? In space?

Yeah, and it is a pretty influential stat. Hull mods that alter it will dramatically increase a ship's mobility.
Of course it makes no sense but neither does having a non relativistic top speed, so...

[Belteguesian]

Originally posted by mores314:

Originally posted by Vilu:

There's also ship drag that affects its speed (there's a chassis mod that reduces drag and increases speed)

Drag? In space?

Strange as it may seem the game does not computes space as empty (therefore no drag) instead they use the "liquid void" for gameplay reasons (so that things will stop and flying will be more like flying an airplane than a "spacewalk" which it is in reality).

[mores314]

Originally posted by Vilu:

Originally posted by mores314:

Drag? In space?

For some reason, yeah :D

For engine comparison:
S mk3's: https://i.imgur.com/YaU0HKA.png
M mk3's: https://imgur.com/0mnRa2J.png
L mk1's: https://imgur.com/bP8OgdZ.png
XL mk1's: https://imgur.com/3GdD0ZF.png

As you can see, Terran speciality in engines is boost/travel and namely their acceleration and efficiency. Terran S/M combat engines can boost almost double the time over other engines, before shields are depleted from full. L and XL engines accelerate travel mode to full speed in ~1/5th of the time other factions take.

Tables not done by me, all credit to Alkeena in egosoft forums, assuming he's the one who made them ;)

edit: the "attack" stat in boost and travel is the time it takes to accelerate to full speed. "release" is for how fast it comes to full stop.

Thanks for that, excellent information.

[[Vilu]]

Just word of warning about those mk3 S/M engines. The acceleration is so fast that autopilot kinda breaks with them, especially if you add mods to your ship that increase their speed.

My Moreya (small ship) goes from 0 to 7.7k m/s in about 2.5 seconds and the auto pilot does some really weird stuff. I've seen it side-drift through whole sectors and crash into stations more often when it activates travel mode for the last 20-30km distance.

[mores314]

Originally posted by Belteguesian:

Originally posted by mores314:

Drag? In space?

Strange as it may seem the game does not computes space as empty (therefore no drag) instead they use the "liquid void" for gameplay reasons (so that things will stop and flying will be more like flying an airplane than a "spacewalk" which it is in reality).

Come to think of it, they _do_ put all of those rocks in the way. I guess empty space would make for a rather boring game, so one might welcome a bit of creative license if it means we get to see volumetric fog & rocks to mine.

Assuming friction then, one would expect a lighter ship to be more maneuverable at low speeds, so I would want to see double turning rate, pitch rate & responsiveness. Also acceleration should be better, since at lower speeds all those sharpy edges of that ugly looking Syn should not cause too much drag.

Happy if the top speed, esp. travel speeds are not attainable.

While Syn does have some better stats, they are not as good as the mass differential might suggest:

	SYN	Osaka	Odysseus
mass	124t	202t	251t
turning rate	11 deg/s	10 deg/s	9 deg/s
pitch rate	8 deg/s	7 deg/s	6 deg/s
responsiveness	0.854	1.07	1.031

Are these numbers just cooked up, or actually based on real physics?

Syn might look like a dogs breakfast and warrant all of that drag, but Osaka is smooth as silk.

[mores314]

Originally posted by Vilu:

Just word of warning about those mk3 S/M engines. The acceleration is so fast that autopilot kinda breaks with them, especially if you add mods to your ship that increase their speed.

My Moreya (small ship) goes from 0 to 7.7k m/s in about 2.5 seconds and the auto pilot does some really weird stuff. I've seen it side-drift through whole sectors and crash into stations more often when it activates travel mode for the last 20-30km distance.

Yeah, Moreya is a giggle a minute. Loving mine.

Not strictly speaking a TER ship though.

[Jumphunter]

Which is strange, since the Syn mass is 124t vs Odysseus Sentinel 251t. [/quote]


Syn has 1L engine, rattlesnake has 3L. This is why it is so slow.