This was the niche I thought gunships were going to fall into when I first heard about them. Something with armor high enough to resist the clouds of rapid fire weapons that fighters are generally going to be using, like the utterly fantastic pulse laser.
Almost every gunship is 5 slot, 2 weapons. A minimum of 2-3 plates to get above 4.0 armor, which is enough to resist the common pulse laser and light pulse laser available to fighters. One slot is immediately lost to the fuel tank. This is a tight fit. No, you aren’t going to get a targeting computer in there.
The rest depends on your wrangling of the modules and which weapons, but you’re generally going to sub ~1.7 speeds with two weapons, and maybe ~2.4 at best with one if you can find some good hull stats and go extremely light on fuel. There are some unique Yootani engines but we will ignore that for now.
In theory, there could be a sweet spot to be found right around here. Once you fall below 1.6 speeds or so, you’re going to start getting swatted by frigate and cruiser weapons. Fighters and gunships have a rarely used anti-armor beam that tracks at 1.9 that would be neat to encourage.
These four weapons, though, will wreck your day first:
Dogfight missile launcher: 3.0 tracking, 8.0 penetration
Yootani Scimitar Beam: 2.8 tracking, 8.0 penetration
Zyrtari Pulse laser: 2.7 tracking, 5.6 penetration
Sniper Laser: 2.6 tracking, 8.0 penetration
I use a lot of these weapons in support roles (some have other excellent traits) and as an accident I realize I’ve never had problems with a gunship. You just can’t resist a 8.0 penetration shot.
Other problems:
Slow gunship movement is funny (they “bump” into cruisers and get stuck behind if they’re moving slow enough)
They’ll spend most of their time refueling
Armor degrades entirely after a hit or lucky hit
what i get from it is your are forced to trade speed for armour in a way in which it doesn’t help the craft it just makes it a target for bigger guns
i think what yurch wants is the gunships to be resistant from fighters and aa while still being well armed, and has a speed of or above 1.5?
also (sorry its kinda off topic but i felt that a new topic for this little thing would be exorbitant)
do the base fighters / gunship have firing arcs?
how do they act when they have firing arcs
Hitpoints wouldn’t make a lot of sense. Craft lower than 2.0 speeds can get hit several times a second against a squad of pulse or light pulse, and they need to lucky hit the opposing fighter engines if they’re interested in fighting back. In some cases it can come down to lucky hits on the enemy speed, vs lucky hits on the armor.
Let me be clear: You can make some unarmored faster gunships using fighter engines if you’re careful with the weapons, so this isn’t strictly a gunships being underpowered thing. They are just two-weapon fighters at that point, though. You can also make high-armored single weapon gunships that are generally high quality but very expensive per weapon.
All the selective pressure is towards fast, the alternatives to which I wanted to explore. I think it’s too hard to make slow craft useful. Realistically these types of craft can only survive using a degree of armor resistance. We have to be really careful not to make something that won’t get combined with fast setups to invite abuse.
Gunships now have the same problem that torpedo-bombers did in GSB1. They theoretically have the firepower to lay the hurt out on something much larger than themselves. However, their lack of speed and lack of armor mean that they never get a chance to use it. They’re too easy to hit and their high armor (relative to fighters) is ultimately not enough to keep them going once they are.