More cruise speed for Barge

[Haste]

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.

That's a lot of assumptions. Testing doesn't have to be done in some sort of sterile environment. You can just do it on live. Which is where back then you would've made a steady 200 million credits an hour on average if you weren't either the unluckiest person alive or incredibly incompetent at lining up a Barge with lanes.

In all likelihood that Battleship example will cease to be relevant in 5.1 anyways, so it really isn't going to age well. A Battleship going 150 is going to eat a Barge alive, much like a Battlecruiser already can. The unfortunate fate of a ship that is an extreme outlier.

Reducing charge time helps the ship be more useful on shorter routes. Increasing top speed makes it better at long routes, where the charge time is already less of a factor, and both theoretical and practical "tests" will show that the Barge can already outperform a 5k. Is it a huge deal? No. It's intentionally balanced that way. What people seem to be missing is that the Barge isn't ever going to be balanced for a lot of different situations. It will always underperform compared to 5ks if a ton of asteroids are involved - though I've found that avoiding them isn't too terrible depending on the route and field density. It being so slow kind of helps in that regard. It will always underperform if lanes are (significantly) involved. Duh, it cannot take them. The scenario it is balanced around is cruise-based routes. This is where, objectively, the ship starts edging out an advantage compared to 5ks. It just does. You can either accept that fact or deny it, it doesn't matter as it remains a fact.

Buffing it incorrectly - such as by increasing top cruise speed - will make it outperform 5ks by simply too large a factor. So instead, we should consider buffing it correctly: with reduced cruise charge time. Again, if it's considered necessary. I personally don't think it'd hurt much. The only concern is making it too good in those areas it's already solid, hence why I wrote that we could also consider pairing such a buff with a reduced top speed.

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