Who is the best?

[EGO_Aut]

In my signature you will find a test of some trade ships (google translate helps) it was pre TER and TOA.

My experience is, that you do not need the best of.
And mixing faction equipment and pimping with mods can change a lot.

I like as player ship my moded
Ares, Dragon Raider, Cormoran, Odysseus E

Standard
Takoba, Demeter Sentinel, Rattlesnake, Colossus

.....and a lot of other ships, Gladius looks great on Destroyers looks like Star Wars.

[XIII8]

"Use more ships" always works. I just enjoy optimizing my economy but it's hardly necessary if you don't care about doing that.

Thats the thing though, it didnt even take many ships to get there.

That will come... the number of ships or how good the pilots are no longer plays a role. Because if you remove more than "grow back" you have always reached the end point. And that is ultimately the only thing that counts. It doesn't matter if I have 30 or 60 miners running.

I could look, but I dont think im even close into my relatively lategame game.

[As25]

As for the Gladius, I don't use it, because it's too slow for a player ship and I don't like the way it looks. But if this game had pvp, Gladius would be meta. 4 guns, 2 shields, Terran weaponry (protons and mesons). Ships like Chimeras would get straight one shotted with mesons (if they land) while terran pulses and protons are harder to dodge than any other weapon in the game except tau/shards in your face (and beams, if you want to count those). Takobas (best interceptor atm) are better for interception, but straight fighting the only fighters who have superior raw stats are the Ares and the Shih (which is just a better Ares lol).

It doesn't matter how good your stats are when you're dead. And the Gladius slow speed makes it a sitting duck to pretty much any anti-fighter weapon, so the accuracy bonus from TER weapons at best evens the field.
Except there is no amount of S shields that will turn an S ship into a tank. If you can't dodge you die even with 4 S shields.

That sounds like you having a problem with fighters, cause if you think Gladious is bad then nothing else is going to be good. As I said only 2 fighters in the whole game beat Gladius in stats and if you have a human vs a human. Both using fighters and both with literally the same skill level, equally good at dodging, same reaction, same tactics, same everything but the ship itself. Then all it goes down to is dps/tank ratio. That automatically discards any fighter with less than 4 guns leaving us with Gladius, Ares, Shih, Eclipse, Chimera, Moreya and Pulsar. Moreya has 4 guns 1 shield, out. Chimera brings an extra gun and more hull but still only one shield, out. Pulsar has the weapons, but really low hull and only 1 shield, out. Eclipse brings the same guns and shields than the Gladius but no Terran weaponry, out. Ares is just a worse Shih, out. We're left with the Gladius and the Shih as the only contenders for the best fighter in the game. Which one is best comes down to whether or not the terran weapons make up for the extra shield the Shih brings.

Then if we make it about AI. Like say Player A vs Player B fleet (both using fighters). We have 2 scenearios: OOS and IS. In OOS, once again nothing matters other than dps/tank ratio. So same results as above. IS we have both equally r******* AI, which loves to do jousting and to fly in straight line. You tell me how glass canon ships like Chimeras, Moreyas and Pulsars are going to perfom when they decide to joust agaisnt a Gladius or Shih.

As for Mesons they're a complete waste in fighter battles. They overkill massively (if they don't miss, which they do often) and then do nothing for 30+ seconds while costing more than an entire fighter wing.
They're good OOS if you ignore the fact that you could've bought 4-5 more fighters instead of one Meson Stream but IS they're just a waste of mats and weapon slots.

I was talking about pvp. Mesons in the hands of humans, not AI. A good player with 1 meson is going to be a huge threat to you, cause unlike AI, they can aim, and if they land the shot, you are dead. And they still have 3 proton barrages which are harder to dodge than whatever you decided to bring.

For these reasons Gladius (and Shih/Ares) would be meta fighter if this game had pvp (which was the entire point of my argument).

[Imperial Good]

It's going to take a lot more ships and pilots than using HOP miners to get the same materials. About 35% more ships in fact so it's not a small number.

Are the Sentinels even better than the new Tides of Avarice miner?

And that's before you factor in that more ships means proportionally less pilot skill until you get the pilot academy. So your mining rates will suffer further.

Or you could just make a hundred million an hour selling workforce wares in TER space. No pilot skill needed as even poor pilots mine ice very fast (unlike ore and silicon). Pilot school is cheap at that stage.

Like I said not optimal, but good enough. You are looking at numbers like "35% more" and not 350% more.

They're good OOS if you ignore the fact that you could've bought 4-5 more fighters instead of one Meson Stream but IS they're just a waste of mats and weapon slots.

On the other hand selling them to NPCs as part of fleet delivery missions means they are super profitable. And TER loves their fleet delivery missions.

They are intended to be bomber weapons, instead of Plasma. Also they should not be that good in low attention otherwise that is a bug (guns now can miss similar to turrets).