Gunship

Gunships are the primary damage dealing fighter role. Gunships have several modules available to them to greatly increase their personal damage output. On the other hand, gunships have few defensive and no stealth abilities.

Modules

Overdrive

Overdrive improves the gunship's rate of fire, speed and maneuverability. It also improves main weapon heat dissipation. Overdrive is a potent cooldown useful in almost any situation, either to give the gunship a damage boost to take out a tough target, or give it the maneuverability to dogfight with interceptors.

Gunship Modules

Aiming Overcharge

The Aiming Overcharge improves the gunship's critical hit chance with its main weapon, improving its damage.

Engine Overcharge

The Engine Overcharge improves the gunship's speed drastically for about 20 seconds. Firing weapons or shooting missiles will cancel the effect.

Combat Reboot

Combat Reboot is the sole gunship specific defensive ability. It removes negative effects and grants 2 seconds of immunity.

Particle Purge

Completely drains your ship's shield to deal a blast of EM damage to all nearby enemies (damage dealt is proportional to shield strength). After activation, shield regeneration is boosted for a few seconds.

This is a good choice for Empire Gunships who do not rely on their shield much, but is not recommended for Federation Gunships since their ships are not as tough as the empire variants, and thus their shield is more valuable.

Factions

The Empire and Federation both produce Gunships. Empire gunships have much tougher hulls but are slow, while Federation gunships are much faster but fragile.

The Empire Legion produces most gunship Mk 3 modules, with the Federation Armada producing the Mk 3 Particle Purge.

Role

Gunships are a versatile ship role. They lack defensive abilities but (Empire gunships in particular) have decent HP so are no pushover, but should avoid getting in to situations where they can be focus fired. They have excellent offensive capability and can kill most frigates with ease. With their Overdrive ability a gunship is more than a match for an interceptor in a dogfight, though if it's on cooldown or they fail to kill the interceptor in the duration they may struggle.

There are very few ships that can stand up to a fully-powered gunship in a one-on-one confrontation, making them excellent dogfighting ships. However, they lack in defensive potential and should be kept out of situations where they will be facing several ships at once.

Player Opinion:

Gunships have one of the best special modules in the game. While not "cool" like the cloaking ability Tacklers have, the ability to drastically boost all of the ships systems and stats for a short time is invaluable. use it to gain a maneuver advantage, RoF advantage, the ability to afterburn endlessly, or even just to get to a capture beacon quicker!