More cruise speed for Barge

[Prysin]

The barge could have its cruise speed increased by 25ms and impulse/thrust/reverse by 10ms without changing the CSU notably much. But it would feel a lot better to use.

I suspect if we were to buff it, a better buff would be so reduce its cruise charge time. Increasing top speed by that significant a margin makes it better in those areas where it already is really good - regardless of what people in this thread are attempting to "prove" by showing comparisons between transports taking tradelanes and the Barge, or unusually short routes which also just so happen to favor the Barge in comparisons.

If anything, I would be more inclined to let it cruise substantially sooner (after hitting Shift-W) but to slightly tone down its maximum cruise speed to keep it in check in long routes, if required.

The Barge, as of this moment, both in theory and in practice, is good at long cruise-based routes. It is better there than 5ks are. It is also very well suited to any one-way routes and any kind of Earhart-related resource gathering op. Or anything mining related where you're jumping one way to then only have to fly the way back, really.

Yes, the Barge is notably worse in House space where lanes are present, and in very short cruise-based routes. That is correct. It is also unlikely to be changed, even though we can mitigate the second "issue" somewhat by reducing cruise charge time. It's extremely long anyways, and has no real good reason to be that long at this point.

Oh, and can we please stop pretending there weren't any real world tests performed for the pre-patch Barge? I personally ran a few common routes and made anywhere from 1.5 to 2.0 times as much as a 5k could running the same route. And I really wasn't particularly good at flying the Barge. I want whatever people are having that claim a lane-capable wasn't just an enormous upgrade over 5ks.

reducing top speed is an issue of itself. atm, a cruising barge can slowly escape a impulsing battleship. Which is fair.

But if you drop it, even by just 10ms, you cannot ever hope to escape even the slowest ships ingame no matter how hard you try. Which is dumb.

Also i know you have a lot of feelings surrounding the barge, but to be fair man, i don't even imagine you try flying it much if at all. your balance suggestions sounds so insanely theoretical they border on being imaginary. I invite you to try fly one, in-game, on a live server.

Flying things on a test server with NPCs turned down or only your friends to bother you (or not) isn't going to reflect real usage. Nor real travel times. Nor will FL-Companion give you a good reflection of barge operations. You are one missed docking point, one NPC bump, one time getting stuck in asteroids from completely missing the profit margins suggested in FL-Comp. FL-Comp also cannot reproduce the RNG of a average barge run, it can only ever display a perfect barge run. Whereas it takes mere seconds to correct a 5k being bumped/stuck/missing docking point, it takes a minute or 5 to fix that in a barge. For each instance. Thus your calculations done in a perfect run only simulator will never, ever, be realistic.

Yes there are probably some really nerdy routes that can yield insane profits if abused. But if you can abuse it in a barge, you can abuse it in ANY size transport with greater chance of success and repeatability, and as such that is a econ issue, not a barge issue.

---

DHC Discord