It must be getting colder. My advertising fliers aren't arriving in my mailbox.
Either they are being nicked so that folks can start their fires as the nights close in, or Kenneth is filching them for extra fuel for that illicit still that he thinks I don't know about. You know, the one he plans to use to supply Patrick's 'habits' at a cut price or while he isn't looking, crawly bum lick that he is.
Now you may wonder why I'm bothered about not getting unsolicited advertising material?
Well, how else am I supposed to keep a track on whats being released?
Love an advertising flier! Not quite as much as I love a free sample (hint, hint) but love and advert!
And how do i know my fliers are going missing? Because so far this month I've noticed two bits of kit hit the shops before they were advertised.
First was the dual Epsilon shields... at least two of them had been on sale for a few days before I saw wide advertising.
The second was this beasty of a new engine that was released for the big boys without so much as a tootle of fanfare, which is just not cricket.... and I'll tell you why.
Love an engine!
Weapons and targeting and shields are all good when the bullets are flying, but if you just want some downtime to go out for a leisurely cruise, you want chassis and engine all the way.
It's an engine. make 'vroom vroom' noises. You know you want to.
The thing that surprised me a tad about this engine was that the release didn't coincide with its target. I'll show you what I mean.
For a cost of 66 Crystal, 1472 Bioptics and 1819 Ferrite, you get an engine that will fit into a chassis from 90 up to 100 tons and gives you a speed rating of 5 and the stability to increase Missile damage
by 5% and Projectile by 2%.
From what I can see, they've stiffened the mounting blocks and flipped it into a transverse configuration so that all of that annoying roll you get from the torque on these big things that would normally slew you sideways is now transferred into a slight forward rolling motion, and its far easier to compensate vertical bracketing on your fire from a solid munition than try to compensate for a lateral jerk.
Unfortunately that lack of jerkiness means that a laser shot gets those few more microseconds to heat the target spot, giving you a 3% increase in Laser vulnerability.
I sort of wandered off there on the technical aspects, but from those stats, we can see this wasn't necessarily designed to go with the latest mech to hit the market. Yes, it's not a bad fit for the Rumbaba, but all the projectile increase is going to do is give it a chance of a secondary weapon.
In fact apart from generalists like the Aspis and the 'Thesis, the only mech that's going to get the full benefits of this engine is our old 'friend', the Potatotron.
Well, might as well fit some and take the thing for a whirl.
Yup, still zips across country in the same way that a graceful swallow in flight doesn't.
At the end of the day, I'd trade one or more kinetic converters on my current builds for these, but that's about the size of it. The trade off in enhanced damage for some vulnerability could well be worth it.
But you still aren't going to win any drag races.
And if you just want to go cruising, for crying out loud go out in something that has more style than your Potatotron.
Submitted by David McCallum #701548