Who should read it: Those who like the variety in life / different perspectives to things. If you only consider Springblossom/Vidar/Hyperion and bigger to be of only interest then go ahead and skip this.
Introduction
There is a saying among the seafaring people that 'a captain should always go down with his ship'. Well if you are captain of a Osprey in the X3:Reunion or X3:Terran Conflict series then you probably know this pretty well and have become quite acquainted with the constant 'Game Over' -screen whereas X2:Threat players remember the Osprey being a real killer ship that could take on almost anything. For the beginners and other non-veteran pilots out there the Osprey can be summed up like this:A ship with a glorious past but nowadays a rust bucket that is only good for dying in.
But whats this? Lo and Behold! The old school Teladi who only care about profits are finaly realizing that war and pirates bite on their profits so they have started to seriously research new guns and weapons. The Gauss Cannon has been a real hoot for players who like Big Guns that go boom. Shrike is a well known M7 ship at this point, a ship 'not to be trifled with' indeed. The Gannet is not the worst of the M7M either and now the Teladi has upgraded the most useless ship of them all: The Osprey. M6 Heavy Osprey now reflect more the modern Teladi way of thinking: More firepower, more shields! -> Dont mess with out business! more profitsss,
Getting started
Heavy Osprey can be bought only at the Teladi Shipyard at Ceo's Sprite so i headed there and bought myself one. I then proceeded to equip it with all the standard goodies: jumpdrive, triplex scanner, docking computer etc. Cant live without em can you?
Next step is to arm the Heavy Osprey and this is where things get tricky. The Heavy Osprey seems to support a wide variety of weapons yet it doesnt pack any real punch for bigger targets. After fidgeting around i ended up with double chainguns in all turrets (3 turrets -> 6xchainguns) and 3xPlasma Burst Generators(PBG), 3xConcussion Impulse Generators(CIG) and finaly 2xIon Pulse Generators(IPG) up front to do the real killing work. This seemed a decent setup. Ions to strip shields, CIG for generic use and PBG for close up work.
Optimizing
Without furter ado i proceeded on with the whopping 92ms speed towards stations and picked up some patrol and station defense missions. Great, Yakis and pirates attacking. Lets take em out! ...Unfortunately now after some tough (but victorious) battles it became clear that the setup i had
was not very effective so some tweaking needed to be done. I tried with Ion Shard Railguns front but didnt like the way they attempt to take out both shields and hull with a large energy cost so i had to get rid of them quickly.
It was evident i needed to diversify the weapons into atleast two distinct groups: one group to strip shields and other to break down the hull. Also the chain guns in the turrets had the 'Terran EMP effect'. i.e. they keep firing and they keep hitting their targets but they needed a lot of time to actualy kill their targets and unfortunately time is a luxury when flying a slow ship!. I quickly discarded basic HEPT guns as time seems to have passed theese guns and they no longer are very effective basic M6 turret gun. Lots of green fireworks and no hits could possibly best describe the HEPT. and lots of energy drain. Phased Repeater Gun was also out of the question quickly. PRG is good for fast M4 and deadly to M5 but those targets come down with the basic chain gun too. and that gun doesnt drain any energy and has got long range.
So back to the drawing board then... It was time to do some 'thinking outside the box' again to get more kick out of this ship: next up on the tryout list was 4xIon Pulse Generators front. Hot Tip: installed them to slots 3,4,5 and 8. This will install the guns so they are visible to the pilot sitting right between them so they fire in a X like vector with the pilot sitting in the middle. Now when you fire theese guns you get some really nice fireworks. (gave me a Tie-Fighter Gunboat ion cannon dejavuu from the 90s). I then added Plasma Burst Generators to the rest of the 4x slots and installed Plasma Burst Generators to ALL turrets. this now totals 6+4 plasma burst generators on the ship!
Field testing
Proceeded on to do some combat missions and did quite well and proceeded on to fooling around near Gaian Star and Maelstrom to pick on some of the bigger pirate M1/M2/M7 ships. Now at this point the performance of the M6 Heavy Osprey was pretty much at it's peak i think. I had loaded the ship with a variety of missiles (silkworms against M4 targets, Thunderbolts and Tempests for M3, Typhoons against any target and generaly being a 'panic button' missile for tough situations). I was able to take on a large cloud of fighters alone and did pretty well. If i got scared i could use missiles to good effect but generaly the Plasma Burst Generators worked as they should (note: turrets set to Protect ship gave enemies more time hit you so i generally had turrets to attack enemies to maximize turret aggressivness and set mosquito missile defence into use in the custom ships commands instead ).
Did the setup work? PBG turrets fired quite seldom but when they did they tended to connect and either kill or badly maim targets so they worked as they should even though their range is less than 800 meters.
Ion Pulse Generators are surprisingly hard to hit targets with. firing away on a Nova at medium weapon range usualy ends up with 95-100% miss rate even with autoaim:on -setting so in the end i setup one lone ion front gun to work as a 'provocator gun' i.e. i snipe with it from long range towards pirates that are flying past me when i tag along with the whopping 92ms the ship can fly.
PBG guns up front are real killers but there are only a few moments you actualy get a clear enough range/view of a target. Note: FPS on your computer here also play a role. it seems my rig is getting old as PBG slows things down making aiming harder.
Tweaking weapons didnt stop here. I later scrapped the front battery PBG guns and re-introduced the 4xIon Shard railguns and coupled them together with 4xIon Pulse Generators. PBG in front weapon slots was just horrible against those M6 ships that spawn during protect station missions. The front turrets are already armed with PBG and they kill fighters just like that, but they bite way too slow on bigger targets. PBG in the turrets seems by the way the best setup in the long run. Just as long as i kept my targets either front, up or down under me (Heavy Osprey turrets are Front-Up-Rear) so as long as i was near enough someone was always dying near me.
Talking about kills: I also noticed during combat that enemies rarely weer away from you when flying straight at them so sometimes i could rack the actual kills with flying into the pirate novas i was trying to kill. Perhaps the pirates got scared of the odd looking ship and couldnt quite decide where to weer off. Not that surprising actualy because when you take a space walk outside the Heavy Osprey it looks like someone snatched a spectator stand from the soccer field and crammed it by force on top of your uncles corn tresher machine while Pablo Picasso was laughing in the background. It even costs millions so go figure.
Fleet usage
M6 Heavy Osprey tuned like above to fight at max efficiency against fighters coupled with low speed make it a very good M6 ship to bring into Patrol missions where there are smaller pockets of fighting taking place in a sector. I usualy use a Zephyr TM + escorts as help or an M7 ship. The TM gets overwhelmed if im not carefull whereas the M7 is ineffective due to speed+slow evasion. And when it gets to the target it overkills it. The Heavy Osprey on the other hand coupled together with other slow/medium speed+heavily shielded M4/M3 ships was quite effective at taking out targets. If it got hammered it was able to take care of itself. If it accidentaly fired the PBG on its own wingmen then their shields could take it. It is not too fast for an M6 so its not hystericaly bolting around. Instead it gives you time to take care of the more dangerous foes and then it mops up the rest or takes care of some more remote enemies you dont bother yourself. It seems the Heavy Osprey has filled a small defensive tactical niche in my fleet actions.
End Notes
During X3:R i made a review about the X3 Osprey (http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=162037) that was at that time nothing more than a rust bucket, even much worse than it is today in X3:TC where atleast it can carry newer weapons. At the time i had to admit failure and just conclude that the X3:R Osprey has zero survivability. It didnt matter it had one extra 125mj shield because it was so slow that you couldnt evade fire by strafing. Now the case is almost the same with Heavy Osprey, you need to know how to work those strafe keys and you better have some kind of basic logic to it or else you will suck in a lot of enemy fire. The shields are made up of 5x200mj shields which add up to 1GJ worth of shielding which is a lot or atleast so you think. Nevertheless your inability to escape makes it so that any fight you get into has to be fought to the finish, or ended with typhoons or jumping out if you get into too much trouble. Fear against larger aggressors is there too which is a pretty unknown element if flying the more chea...um. 'special' M6 ships. I found Incendiary Bomb Launcers on larger ships especialy threatening....must...try...to....evade...argh! Got destroyed a couple of time by pirate M7 ships so they pretty well convinced me that the M6 Heavy Osprey is NOT a good ship at all against capital ships.
Verdict
I like this ship. it's hardcore compared to terran/aldrin based ships that sport way over the top firepower and speed. You can bring in the heat to many battles with this ship but when flying around you better be a supporter of 'slow life' movement. Weapons tweaking should also give you something to ponder over as you simply cant fill up the slots with some uber cannon that destroys all.
However satisfaction is guaranteed when you start to learn the ropes and start to dish out damage with this ship.
) turret to attack my target and have it loaded with EBC. IMHO, that ships biggest drawback is its lack of a rear turret, but then it still fast enough to do the RSLG tactic if things go poorly.