Component:raider

In Game Description

A highly modified drive commonly found on scouting or quick response warships. This drive is designed to channel all of its generated output into the thruster nozzles to provide high acceleration and maneuverability. However, this additional thrust increases wear on the thrusters significantly while travelling at flank speed. Due to the small size of this drive, and the diversion of all generated power to maneuvering, this drive does not provide any grid power output.

Gameplay usage

(Referring to FM280 and FM580) Frontline warships that bow tank such as the Axford and Ocello greatly desire the Linear thrust improvement, as it effectively increases how aggressively the ships orbit-dodge and thus, reduces the effective safe range they can be at against a given target, as well as how effective more imperfect maneuvers to dodge while changing position can be, giving a large advantage in a gun duel. Less spoken about however is that the radar and wake signature penalties do have an impact on these large ships even if they don't intend to hide from detection or in jamming, as the wake penalty increases the amount of time a ship must stop using mains to avoid WAKE/THERM seekers/validators (although not by much, approximately 3 seconds in most cases), and the signature penalty impacts the seduction ratio between the ship and chaff (where double raider Ocellos and Axfords can easily exceed EA12 chaff's signature if accounting for degradation time or any other radar signature bonuses such as illuminators). When placed on a Keystone, a Raider also makes a breakpoint against THERM validators, where a non-raider key would require rear aspect to validate so long as it is not at FLANK, a raider Keystone will validate from all aspects. These downsides can be mitigated with techniques such as self-illum and better spotting/quicker EMCON/deploying more chaff however, unlike artillery shelling.

Stats

FM280 'Raider' Drive
Faction	ANS
Cost	20 pts
Dimensions	5x3x5
Hitpoints	250
Hitpoints to Function	50
Damage Threshold	40
Mass	35 Tonnes
Catastrophic Event Prob. (Drive)	5%
DC Priority	Critical
Crew	10
Modifier: Flank Damage Probability	-+50%
Modifier: Linear Thrust	+30%
Modifier: Radar Signature	+20%
Modifier: Wake Signature Strength	+20%

Notes

Multiple drives do not inherently affect the mobility of a ship, only provide redundancy, however, the modifiers to a ship's mobility are a combination of all installed drives' modifiers, so installing drives with multiple of the same effect can further affect it's capability (two whiplash drives will provide more speed than one, but a whiplash and standard drive will provide no different speed than a single whiplash). If some drives are disabled, only those drives' modifiers will be removed, which may even result in the ship's mobility improving in some cases (such as a prowled drive being disabled). If all drives on a ship are knocked out, it will not be able to move altogether.

Most drives have a small and large counterpart. Asides their sizes, small variants of drives tend to have weaker negative modifiers, but are more fragile, produce less power and may or may not have better or worse positive modifiers.

The FM280's Large counterpart is the FM580, which provides some power and more durability, as well as a larger increase to radar and wake signature.

Lore

Engineers nicknamed these 'Raider' drives since you'd usually find these on pirate corvettes with a worrying number of questionable modifications by the crew. I've only worked on a few of these in my career, but it's not uncommon to find even the military variants lined with jury-rigged repairs, something the Brass warns (but is powerless to stop) as a 'very dangerous practice'.

Doesn't stop the maintenance crews, though. Hell, it didn't stop me either. When you start running out of parts, the idea of a little DIY repair becomes pretty tempting.

- I. Parker, CMC