There are a few things I dislike.
Having to strip down the wife's cockpit after she poured vodka and lemonade all over it is one of them.
OH behave you lot... just because I used words like strip and... look, no, its not a double entendre... or a single one either. Genuine drinks wastage (a crime in itself), controls, targeting, A.I., the whole lot needed to be yanked and replaced.
And while I'm waiting for the new out of the box A.I. to do its fifty squillion updates, I had time to flick back through some of our archived articles.
That was where I found another thing I dislike.
I agree with Pat on something.
Yes, I know, he's slightly up the evolutionary chain from chimpanzee with a bourbon bottle (he still flings his poo though...) but given an infinite number of monkeys with typewriters you eventually get something sensible.
And Patrick has done a fair few articles in his time, so I guess the chimp had to get lucky on occasion.
In this case it was with regard to the Novum Mech.
Now Pat's original review and spotlight went on about how you can only get them as a rare Novum mission and how he kept his and he was slowly leveling it and blah blah blah its good.
Yes it is, but unlike Pat's theoretical conjecture, I actually earn a living in the murky depths of the lighter tonnage mech specialists and I can quite categorically tell you that pound for pound this is perhaps the strongest mech you will come across.
Now the Novum is 25 tonner, and as a general rule of thumb I would tend to class a Niode mech as roughly equivalent to a crystal mech ten tons heavier.
The fact that I have seen these beasties in 70 ton lineups and they are certainly welcome in a 55 line just goes to show how much these little boogers can punch above their weight. I have seen a single Novum go berserk and munch through twelve enemy 40 tonners like Pac Man after a ganja session.
The crux of it essentially comes down to their defensive doctrine. Shielding is minimal, a 25 ton mech is never going to have huge armour to take a hit, they rely on simply not being there.
Mine are over level 100 and have built in dodge of 24 and that is before you fill any of the 3 chassis slots.
Rate of fire is excellent. With the throw weight inherent to a niode mech, a built in speed of 50 and three additional engine slots, it can out shoot most things in its weight bracket and an awful lot of them that are heavier. The built in damage boost for lasers is almost negligible so you can load it with whatever fast weaponry you have available.
I know of some pilots who load up on FOF Targeting and Forking Missiles to get big collateral damage, but one of my favorite builds is using a full load of venerable Galaxy Eyes. If you can couple that with Immersive Neural Rigs (4 of them in the cockpit) then almost a quarter of what you hit with will be a kill shot. Use Targeting Reticles and that drops to 1 in 5 but you also get 1 in 4 chance of Freeze, leaving them open for another pass.
The point is with 4 cockpit slots, you can realy tune your build to be a right royal pain in the posterior.
So any of you new pilots who happen to visit Novum and see something whizz past at high speed, check your hanger and offer a silent prayer to whomever in case something has landed in there... and for crying out loud, don't sell it!
Submitted by David McCallum : #701548