WTF are Raptors even for?!

[thorvindr]

I typically leave them somewhere to serve as Dradis buoys, because they have basically zero combat capability. I don't get it. Am I missing something here?

[Khan Boyzitbig of Mercia]

If you send them to board a cylon ship that ship will typically flee from the battle and be much worse at fighting if engaged by anything else. A large enough group can also do some damage especially with a rocket run on a basestar or other large cylon ships.

Later on you can replace them with assault raptors which can paint targets (increasing accuracy of guns against the target) and hit harder plus have SRMs instead of rockets. A group of assault raptors can chase off a cerastes and are far more useful overall.

[Half Phased]

Raptors are good for scouting, with a 4km dradis range compared to the vipers 2km, which makes up for the loss of speed over the mk2 viper. They are still faster than mk1 vipers however.

Their unguided rockets are basically free torpedoes with a 3 turn cooldown (launch, fire, return).

Raptor boarding is also extremely crippling to cylon vessels. The revenant has 75 processing power, which means it can fully power its navigation and fire control, whilst leaving its engineering at half power.

Once boarded, that 75 drops to 55, meaning it can have full power to navigation or fire control and 5/6ths to the other. But it has to power up its armory otherwise it will be permanently crippled in that way, so in reality, the revenant is made a non-threat, before you consider the -15 accuracy penalty on top.

[konzacelt]

Like Half Phased said, they are really good at drastically reducing the effective firepower of a given ship. Revenants in particular are good Raptor boarding targets because those beasts not only tend to beeline right for you, but can chew up Colonial ships fast if not dealt with quickly.

If you're playing the first few campaigns, Raptors are especially good on the Daidalos as you will usually have it in full defensive posture anyway (if only for the superior Dradis range), and that posture will make your Raptor teams very effective at boarding operations.

The firewall bonus is also nice if you have a ship you know the Cylons will try to hack.

[Lack of Stuff]

It's buggy but they can also disable mines.

[Sral93]

They can, that only does not work on maps with pre-deployed minefields.