View source for Talk:Federal Dropship/@comment-90.3.38.51-20160125024035

I've flown this ship for long hours (PVE only) and eventually sold it.

Positive points : Extremely tanky, very good DPM. Good power management as well. I've spent hours in hazardous RES, making millions of credits in bounty hunting and never coming back to a station with less 85% hull - was B rated at best. You will only get in trouble when facing wings, but you can 1V1 any ship with ease.

Negative points : it is slow, hard to manoeuvre and extremely drifty, not that impressive in terms of cargo capacity, has terrible jump range and jump capacity (fuel tank).

What it's good at :

-RES/CZ farming if you like big tanky ships that handles like locomotive.

-Mining (Never tested, but it should be perfect for that)

And.... Well this is it.

Trading ? Too short on carghold and jumprange.

Smuggling ? Way to slow and bulky for the task.

Exploration ? This is all about jumprange, any other ship has more.

Missions ? Short range trade missions, yes (providing your cargohold is sufficient). But I would not use it for smuggling/interception/assassination/any long range stuff

Yet, this ship is supposed to be the multipurpose variant of the Federal Ships.

Caught between the Asp Explorer that has -for half the price- only a slightly inferior cargo capacity, a fantastic jumprange, decent speed and manoeuvrabilty, and its bigger brother, the Federal Assault ship, which is much more mobile and thus efficient in combat -for only 5 millions more-, the FDS eventually stands as a pretty useless piece of metal.

It remains a fun ship to fly (drifts like hell), gets rid of smaller ships in the blink of an eye, with a beautiful cockpit and arguably a nice military look. But without, at least, a substantial increase in jumprange, even as an entry ship to the Federal line there are no rational justification to trade any other multi purpose ship for the FDS.