timeline ships underwhelming :(

[DrwHem]

i do say that i like the look of all the ships in timelines...which is rare because a lot of the X4 vanilla ships look stupid and much worse than their X3 version.
the only issue im having with them is that they are all already obsolete. You cant equip them with current weaponry and they are all worse than their vanilla counterparts.
has anyone found a use for any of these to at least be on par with vanilla ships?

[Captain Canard]

Can't speak for mission reward ships, but I was underwhelmed with the performance of the Xenon F, despite it looking amazingly cool (I especially like the virtual cockpit). I think ships like these are fun to collect and just fly around on occasion. I love the idea one fellow had, where he built a "museum" (a station specifically designed to showcase ships) for his exotic collection. I'm going to do this myself someday!

[Ruiner]

They should have brought back the Albion Skunk. At least then we'd have a strong ship to play with. They could even have that horrendously creepy copilot.

[Captain Canard]

Originally posted by Ruiner:

They should have brought back the Albion Skunk. At least then we'd have a strong ship to play with. They could even have that horrendously creepy copilot.

Are there any mods for this? I own X-Rebirth (never played though), so I technically "own" the AS. It would be nice if there was a mod to import it into X4.

[Wraith]

Which ship?

I found the 3 reward ship pretty good actually

Cutless, Odachi(once it gets fixed up),and Sapporo

The Xenon ship are the underwhelming ones though

[DrwHem]

the cutlass is just too weak. only 2 guns, its slower than the eclipse and has far fewer shields.
same with the odachi and i dont even know what the sapporo is supposed to do. no main battery, no large turrets and it can only use the old terran tech. its outclassed by all the other "destroyers"

[Darklordnj]

Originally posted by DrwHem:

the cutlass is just too weak. only 2 guns, its slower than the eclipse and has far fewer shields.
same with the odachi and i dont even know what the sapporo is supposed to do. no main battery, no large turrets and it can only use the old terran tech. its outclassed by all the other "destroyers"

Odachi will get "buffed" once the fact that its two turrets are upside down is fixed and EgoSoft is planning on buffing the Sapporo. But yeah.

[Wraith]

People are sleeping on the Sapporo
I do wonder how that buff is going to be might just accidentally make it the best one lol


It can do quite a bit of damage to the normal faction destroyer by just disarming them

[NoDMoD]

Question to all....
(personally I haven't played timelines, so, no idea what the ships are like)

Which ship should be improved, how?
All of these can be modded to be better. Give me some suggestions. I might do it.

[Xautos]

The Odachi is already beast even without the turrets on it, it's quickly becoming my most favoured personal ship in the game, before that it was the Katana. The amount of destruction can level against other targets like fighters, bombers, corvettes and frigates is most impressive, it can take out turrets, shield and engine hardpoints without much trouble on larger ship and can slowly take out weaker destroyers most others in the same class would struggle to manage without missiles and torpedoes.

If the front landing legs stop glitching and and the turrets worked it would obviously be even better to have around. It may not be as speedy as a Katana with mk3 travel engines, but it makes up for it with those EMPC's and manoeuvrability .

If i can get a fully armed Sapporo, i can test the capabilities of that ship out on targets, but at best its usefulness in a serious fire fight is limited, best used for low security sector defence with a fleet of its own. It won't stand up in a fight against even a Barbarossa as it lacks any heavy weapons. So at best it's only useful for an anti-fighter role in a fleet protecting a bigger ship in the fleet and not much more.

I haven't played around with the Cutlass yet but from the missions in timelines it has been a focus, it's a quite a reasonable fighter.

The Xperimental Shuttle is a beast of a fighter, it's bloody fast, it has 6 weapons (which need to be lined up properly to work effectively) and it's shielding is pretty good. when you can fly it around properly it can take on everything to a frigate and take out hardpoints on destroyers, it's unlikely to be able to destroy those types of ships without assistance as the weapons overheat quickly, but so do destroyer shields generally.

I haven't used the racing ships yet in any meaningful way.

i haven't piloted anything Xenon beyond just taking control of an H for a moment for the achievement. so i don't know how they work out yet.

[Captain Canard]

Originally posted by NoDMoD:

All of these can be modded to be better. Give me some suggestions. I might do it.

So, are you a modder? I plan to get into this myself, but I suspect I'll have some questions (retired programmer, so just need some X4 specific tips).

[DrwHem]

im not sure how youre coming up with the "beast" status on the Odachi. Heres a snapshot comparison against the M ships i use in my fleet:
Shields : 10810 Burst Damage: 1800 Turret damage: 73 Speed: 464
Peregrine Vanguard: (can use ANY weapon and shield ect) Shields 28k Burst 1300 Turrets 91 Speed 336
Kurokami (the KING basically) Shields 18k Burst: 2900 Turrets 41 Speed 530

Its like the Odachi dosnt know where it belongs. Its not fastest or tankiest or the most burse or turret damage. Its just meh all across the board. If its going to be slow, make it tanky...if its going to be fast...make it FAST, if its going to focus on daamge...then bump it up.
I have no place for this in my fleet as it stands...which sucks because its a cool looking ship.

[NoDMoD]

Originally posted by Captain Canard:

Originally posted by NoDMoD:

All of these can be modded to be better. Give me some suggestions. I might do it.

So, are you a modder? I plan to get into this myself, but I suspect I'll have some questions (retired programmer, so just need some X4 specific tips).

I have spent a few weeks getting into it and even as a pogrammer it was not easy, because the structure and scripting with XML is (was) foreign to me. The documentation is bad.

You have to figure out a lot by yourself or keep asking questions in discord, where there are some helpful moders.

You might be better at picking it up. But this XML structure is nothing like any other programming language. You basically write code structure with "HTML like" XML tags. But you can't write your own functions etc.

[Captain Canard]

Originally posted by NoDMoD:

You might be better at picking it up. But this XML structure is nothing like any other programming language. You basically write code structure with "HTML like" XML tags. But you can't write your own functions etc.

Yeah I've seen some snippets and it does look arcane. My first dive into modding will be changing variables / constants (things like bullet velocity, damage, ship acceleration, etc).

I used to do a lot of work with XML, and for something like this, if I were to do real programming in X4, I would probably write a sort of compiler to convert a basic X4 "pseudo-language" into XML. Python has excellent XML parsers that would making it fairly easy to prototype a basic compiler / decompiler for this purpose. Just removing all the XML tag clutter would help greatly.

Do you have link for this modding community's Discord channel?

* Sorry to go off-topic, but more modders are better, especially when people want buffed ships :D

[NoDMoD]

Originally posted by Captain Canard:

Originally posted by NoDMoD:

You might be better at picking it up. But this XML structure is nothing like any other programming language. You basically write code structure with "HTML like" XML tags. But you can't write your own functions etc.

Yeah I've seen some snippets and it does look arcane. My first dive into modding will be changing variables / constants (things like bullet velocity, damage, ship acceleration, etc).

I used to do a lot of work with XML, and for something like this, if I were to do real programming in X4, I would probably write a sort of compiler to convert a basic X4 "pseudo-language" into XML. Python has excellent XML parsers that would making it fairly easy to prototype a basic compiler / decompiler for this purpose. Just removing all the XML tag clutter would help greatly.

Do you have link for this modding community's Discord channel?

* Sorry to go off-topic, but more modders are better, especially when people want buffed ships :D

Yea, actually I have been thinking about writing custom python scripts to change valuesi n my mods all at once, instead of changing each reference individually.... it would have saved me a couple of hours by now.

So go for it. You will probably pick it up much, much quicker than me.
If you have any question, drop me a message. (ifI know the answer, I will gladly help)

I needed 4 days to start to understand it, whereas, when learning Flutter and Dart, it took me 3 hours to understand the basics XD

And you have to get used to the naming conventions, that part was most confusing at first.

[dmansail]

Since i installed timelines ,many bugs have been found, one of them is that S-M class ships do not bail out , so is impossible to capture them. I uninstall timelines since is a very bad DLC and try to see from there if these bugs have been fixed. Any way the timeline ships can be found in many mods, so is pointless someone to buy it.(Only if you like stories)