If I'm right, the concept of gunboats is for fast insertion. During an assault, fighters may tend to get too distracted by the defending forces to actually hit the target much(say a large solar). The gunboats were designed to overcome this. While the assault fighters break up and dwindle into personal one-on-one dogfights, the gunboat would ideally break through the defences with its speed, and its improved armor and additional hitpoints meant that it had just long enough to hit the target well before it(the G got destroyed. After all, they are support craft and seem to be expendable.

Beware pirates bearing gifts!

accually, the purpose of gunboats is to destroy fighters. In swarms, fighters can destroy even a battleship. Gunboats are small enough to dodge forward guns from cruisers, while haveing enough armor to hit the fighters to stop them, then use a forward gun to hit the capital ships to assist the friendly ships to destroy the targets.

a little something to add here, after playing the 88 flak mod, i think that gunboats are support for capships ment for long range artillary type fire with their forward guns. this would let the cruisers and battleships go out to the fight while the gunboats hang back. (sniping) this would be the normal configuration for rhineland, kusari, and bretonia fleets. but as for liberty, they took another route and designed the liberty cruiser, witch i belive to be a hybrid between a cruiser and gunboat, that is why it has a huge forward gun.

But if the Gunboat were supposed to be a sniper, why does it go so fast? If I recall, battleships and cruisers can only go 45 kph, while all the Gunboats can do 119 kph. They don't have that speed for nothing.

Beware pirates bearing gifts!

The liberty cruiser was a gun with a ship built on it, in which case it's solely anti-capship, while the liberty dreagnought with it's sleak design offers a very nice fire range which is anti-fighter, unlike the other battleship spreads...

But anyway, with gunboats, they're meant to get where battleships and destroyer's can't, such as astroid fields and such, so they need a good amount of hull for collisions, and a good maneuverability and speed to get in fast and basicly police raids on pirate bases, or meat shields while the battleships, cruisers, and destroyers stay back and launch fire in, at least thats how I always figured it?

And the forward gun is usually ment to take out weapon platforms or other large targets that the other ships shouldn't have to deal with when assulting a base...

So, Destroyer, Cruiser, and Battleship = base killers, and fighter killers
Gunboats = quick raiders, meat shields, fast movement and maneuverability to evade fire while dishing it out, and the forward gun they have, while no where near as powerful as the liberty cruiser forward gun, is used to destroy large stationary targets.

Again, that's how i see the role system set up?
But maybe I'm wrong?

..... i see this topic pop up again and wonder (again) what purpose this should be.

If you want a BS, not available to others (an admin ship?), create a new faction with no "relation" to other factions, give that rep to a base and put that ship on this base.
Set starting rep of all players "red" and change the rep of the players,
who should be able to fly that ship.

The ship is in the game visible to all ......


On the other hand - making non admin ships to ÜBER - ships will cause problems like
- all players flying this
- players, who can´t get, crying
- pvp against these ship beeing sensless.

Maybe make the ship a little less "realistic".
We got about 40 gunboats (Click here) and
a very skilled pilot will be able to kill these vs a not so skilled one in fighter maybe 2 out of 3 fights. (This will end up different, if the gunboat pilot is the same lvl.)


Edited by - F!R on 7/11/2007 12:03:05 AM