Do player owned ships still use lasertowers?

[GCU Grey Area]

I have only lost 1 L trader so far, and that was due to incompetent Terran police not stopping a FAF Rattlesnake that made it into Sol. L traders cannot replace M traders as far as distribution to NPCs go due to NPC stations often having small demands or being faster to access by taking the highway ring. Having a M trader deliver 200 missile components is fine, but having a L trader do the same is kind of a waste as not only does it take longer it is even less loaded doing so.

Guess M's are fine for the less bulky commodities such as missile components, albeit quite vulnerable if attacked. However many of my most profitable trades are in products that I consider a bit too bulky to be effectively shipped in an M (Adv Electronics, Turret Components, Hull Parts, etc). A substantial amount of my business is with shipyards & station construction sites, which often need such stuff in quite large quantities. Also fewer, bigger ships means less exposure overall to pirate attacks, so I get hassled a whole lot less by anxious freighter captains.

[dtpsprt]

What sort of freighters do you use & how are they equipped? Maybe that's the difference.

Baldrics (TER) with mk3 TER shields, mk3 TER travel engines.

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I think the problem lies mostly on the TER (in general) of your engines, especially the Travel ones. Also them being Terran ships does not help.

In general Terran ships are notoriously slow, their engines the same and any Travel engine takes a long time to enter Travel Drive. You also loose the "advantage" (if it can be called one) of faster entering Travel Drive which is way more prominent in Normal and Combat engines...

I always use the ARG ones (2nd faster speed after SPL with the 1st faster Travel speed), because of their traveldrive speed advantage and decent load and attack time... Never resort to "Comply", no need to...

Of course, in any case, if they are caught on docking/undocking they are dead meat

[Imperial Good]

Also fewer, bigger ships means less exposure overall to pirate attacks, so I get hassled a whole lot less by anxious freighter captains.

You can disable the notification in the personal tab where you set the default responses. Once you reach a certain stage it is kind of required since otherwise you would be alerted about a pirate every few seconds.

I always use the ARG ones (2nd faster speed after SPL with the 1st faster Travel speed), because of their traveldrive speed advantage and decent load and attack time... Never resort to "Comply", no need to...

Argon engines have the third fastest/slowest flight speed (below SPL and PAR). TER engines have the fastest travel attack time so despite having the slowest travel speed they can win out in shorter journeys without highways.

I cannot really justify full combat engines on all the traders as the slower travel speed would mean having to field significantly more M sized traders. Considering I likely field thousands of M sized traders this would be a huge increase in the order of hundreds in total.

[dtpsprt]

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I always use the ARG ones (2nd faster speed after SPL with the 1st faster Travel speed), because of their traveldrive speed advantage and decent load and attack time... Never resort to "Comply", no need to...

Argon engines have the third fastest/slowest flight speed (below SPL and PAR). TER engines have the fastest travel attack time so despite having the slowest travel speed they can win out in shorter journeys without highways.

I cannot really justify full combat engines on all the traders as the slower travel speed would mean having to field significantly more M sized traders. Considering I likely field thousands of M sized traders this would be a huge increase in the order of hundreds in total.

I stand corrected in the ARG engine flight speed, of course.

The slower travel speed of TER engines is what causes the frighters to be "caught" especially since no ship uses highways when "Fleeing" (as far as I know, they use Superhighways and Gates), the slower spooling time of Travel Engines does not help either. This is why I prefer Combat Engines. It's about the time it will take the freighter to spool up Travel Drive after it's been asked from the Pirate to give up the cargo. Of course, disabling the warning in the options menu is a must, as the ship will do nothing for the crucial 30 sec waiting for the player's "guidance".

[Imperial Good]

The slower travel speed of TER engines is what causes the frighters to be "caught" especially since no ship uses highways when "Fleeing" (as far as I know, they use Superhighways and Gates), the slower spooling time of Travel Engines does not help either. This is why I prefer Combat Engines. It's about the time it will take the freighter to spool up Travel Drive after it's been asked from the Pirate to give up the cargo. Of course, disabling the warning in the options menu is a must, as the ship will do nothing for the crucial 30 sec waiting for the player's "guidance".

Pirates are not an issue near highways or in open space as your ships can give them their cargo to leave them alone. I lose significantly more M traders to KHK or XEN (before they seemly broke) in open space than to pirates. Most of the pirate kills are around stations, and of those a significant fraction are near SCA stations.

Early game (first few traders) combat engines are probably a good idea as you cannot afford to swallow the lost cargo. But when you are dealing with hundreds of thousands of hull parts being made and consumed per hour, the odd 500 or so that pirate take is trival.

[GCU Grey Area]

Also fewer, bigger ships means less exposure overall to pirate attacks, so I get hassled a whole lot less by anxious freighter captains.

You can disable the notification in the personal tab where you set the default responses. Once you reach a certain stage it is kind of required since otherwise you would be alerted about a pirate every few seconds.

I know, however even late game have never needed to disable them. Those notifications occur at an entirely different rate when using L's predominantly. It's nowhere near 'every few seconds'. There just aren't that many pirate destroyers in the universe at any one time & they're the only things looking to steal from my trade fleet. Indeed those notifications can be really quite useful at times, indicating the location of a ship I might want to add to my fleet - Behemoth & Phoenix in particular are my favourite destroyers for demolition work (long range guns with a good rate of fire).