Vulture: Difference between revisions

In combat, the Vulture is a powerful small-sized ship. It is capable of easily staying out of the firing range of tougher ships like [[Anaconda]]s or [[Python]]s and its two large hardpoints are capable of dishing out fairly heavy damage. Moreover, since class 3 weapons don't suffer damage reduction against large sized ships, unlike classes 1 and 2, the Vulture can be seen as an anti-large-ship specialist, while smaller ships can be utterly dominated in seconds even without engineering. However, the low number of hardpoints means weapons such as [[Missile Rack|Missiles]], [[Mine Launcher|Mines]], [[Torpedo Pylon|Torpedoes]] or [[Railgun]]s are not viable as they have limited ammo capacities and are not all available in Class 3. This limits the Vulture to only conventional weaponry. As for weapon mount types, both fixed and gimballed mounts are viable, but turreted mounts are inadvisable due to their higher power consumption, lower damage and that they don't take advantage of the Vulture's agility.

Defensively, the Vulture has impressive statistics on paper. It possesses the highest base shield and armour strengths out of all small sized ships, it has very good internal compartments, and it has four utility mounts, the same as larger ships such as [[Python]] and [[Federal Gunship]]. The Vulture's biggest defensive drawback is its limited power capacity, however, and this greatly limits viable loadout choices and requires smart [[module priority control]].

Another disadvantage of the Vulture is its speed, which is lower than most other small sized ships and even some medium sized ships. This makes it a struggle to catch up to targets and keep under fire. The Vulture's deficient speed is mitigated by formidable manoeuvrability, which is second only to the [[Eagle MkII]].

The Vulture suffers from overspecialization and is very poor in any job besides combat. Unlike the [[Fer-de-Lance]] it does very poorly as an anti-[[Thargoid]] ship, as its low number of hardpoints limits its use of AX weaponry, leaving it without many options to deal with Interceptors. Against Scouts it also suffers as it will struggle to keep a sightline on the quick moving ships; since it cannot make much use of turreted mounts and they will quickly tear the ship to pieces. Its cargo capacity is much lower than other ships near its price range, so it will do very poorly in any form of trading, mining or pirating. However, its agility makes collecting cargo easier, meaning collector limpets are not needed. It has awful jump range at a woeful maximum of 22.36 ly without engineering, the second lowest of any small sized ship making it not only useless as an explorer, it cannot easily get to [[Interstellar Factors]] to clear any bounties.

The Vulture's two large hardpoints are located above and behind the cockpit, about halfway down the hull of the ship. Due to the spacing between the hardpoints, a loadout of two fixed weapons may have slight issues with converging on smaller targets.

 

The Vulture has two manned stations. The pilot's station is on the centerline of the ship. The auxiliary station is offset to the port side above and behind the pilot's station. Since turreted mounts are a very bad idea on a Vulture and it has no fighter bay, it is one of the least useful ships for [[Multicrew]].