View source for Talk:Asp Explorer/@comment-96.250.114.167-20190919215431

This ship used to be an ideal goal, now it's just a poor "stepping stone" vessel.

Multirole has become a joke unless the ships are literally superior to everything else on the market, because of poor game design balance.  2.1 introduced engineers which made NPCs not only significantly spongier, but also designed to ignore any damage and do nothing but focus fire on the player.  This meant that the asp's bulk, low shielding, poor thrust control, and weak power distributor leaves it a poor ship for combat.  Because engineering only scales up from a ship's baseline, the weakened combat baseline means it's that much more vulnerable even with engineering to compensate.

It still held the role of an ideal explorer because of its general cost and high jump ranges, but has now been utterly superceded by the vastly superior Krait line of ships which are not only extremely fast for their size, but have absurd amounts of firepower, cargo space, and combat capabilities all while carrying more than before with even more room in their hold.

Previous multiroles like the Cobra and Python suffered from several notable weaknesses, either having a lack of speed, maneuverability, jump range, or otherwise, for their class size.  

The kraits have now superceded all of these ships in all but raw trade capacity.  

Very poorly balanced vessels with Elite's current design iteration.  Trading manually for profit is pitiful money with small cargo vessels, while missions always seem to provide missions that require carrying multiple times what's capable of being carried in your vessel.  Even the recent changes to slots mean that most smaller medium ships are now left in the gutter for utility compared to the raw amount of slots some small ships have (+2 1 size slots) for novelty.

Sad to say the Asp isn't that great for combat, nor mission running, nor trading.  There are smaller vessels that are lighter, cheaper, and have more flexible slots.