Aopoa Khartu-al UpdatePinned
Discussion
Yesterday at 14:49
Hello everyone,
As part of the ongoing Alien Week celebrations, we are excited to reveal an upcoming buff to the Aopoa Khartu-al.
The Khartu-al, as the light attack craft of the Xi’an military, was always intended to be a highly maneuverable ship. As such, it forgoes a traditional main thruster for an array of maneuvering thrusters on articulated rigs.The flight changes coming in Alpha 3.10 (we’ll publish a comm-link with more information tomorrow) led to a few modifications for the ship.
Ship Handling
We've applied unique handling characteristics to the Khartu-al that are especially apparent when flying in-atmosphere. The pitch behavior has been almost doubled and now utilizes the alien ship design to re-balance the rotations in all directions. While normal ships tend to have a drastically different “pitch acceleration” vs. “roll” vs. “yaw”, we've balanced the Khartu-al to excel in all three.
Defense
We identified some weaker areas of the ship that resulted in parts breaking off more easily, which crippled the handling. The hitpoints for the four joint pieces holding the ship's wings have now been buffed. The default shield was originally a stealth-type component that didn't allow a lot of damage to be absorbed before shield faces were compromised. This has been changed to a higher-grade industrial item to improve resistance.
Offense
Weapons-wise, the Khartu-al was at a disadvantage for a large "light" ship which, in conjunction with the above-mentioned issues, meant it would receive more damage than it was able to handle and return effectively. To compensate for this, the hardpoint size has been increased from S3 to S4, and the default loadout changed to a gimballed S3 item. This allows players to make use of gimbal and auto-gimbal modes to increase hit chance and, for those who want to, swap to fixed S4s.
