Are the stats of the new Heron E freighter correct?

[Koizuki]

The new 7.0 Beta has been out for nearly a month now, so I decided to take a look at the stats of some of the new ships over at the QSNA page but while most of the new E-series ships looked like the expected side-grades, the Heron E stood out to me because its stats felt a bit weird.

Can anyone playing in the Beta confirm whether or not the stats listed on that page for it are correct? Because that 62,000 cargo capacity seems...excessive considering the rest of the ship's stats.

Generally, you make a tradeoff between speed and capacity when choosing a freighter, with the speedy end being the low-capacity SPL Buffalo, and the other end being the ARG Incarcatura with a beefy capacity but barely able to move. Everything else sort of sits in between there on a spectrum and you can pick the one that makes the appropriate tradeoff for the job at hand.

However, based on the stats from that site, the new Heron E has a whopping 62,000 capaacity, while still going faster than the Shuyaku Sentinel. It's not blazing fast by any means, but it carries nearly 15% more than the Incarcatura Sentinel, and somehow still moves at over twice its speed. According to that site's efficiency calculator it's over 30% more efficient than the next nearest L freighter no matter which engine I pick, which seems kind of insane. It feels like it was a typo and supposed to be 42,000 capacity instead with that speed being between the two Shuyaku models.

I suppose if it's intended then I have no problem just switching my entire fleet over to Heron E's once 7.0 lands, but it does feel a little odd that this freighter is just so much better than anything around it, at least on paper.

[Zloth2]

Cargo looks right. Here are some comparisons:
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ ... 2B51561FE/

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ ... 7C90086F2/

I did these with medium preset.

[Koizuki]

Ah, thanks for the confirmation about the capacity. I can't seem to be able to access those screenshots though; Just says there was a problem accessing the item.

That said, assuming the numbers line up with what the site lists, then it does seem a bit strange.
I don't really want to look a gift horse in the mouth, but it doesn't seem to align with the balance of all the other freighters, and just straight up makes a whole bunch of them irrelevant outside of roleplay purposes.
Anything faster is basically pointless outside of the Buffalo for sheer speed because their capacities are too small to win out in terms of cargo shifted per hour, and at shorter distances Boas will win out in terms of speed anyway.
Anything slower is also pointless because their capacities are not large enough to offset being slower, and if going for pure capacity, well, this is currently also the one with the highest capacity in the game.

Feels pretty weirdly situated unless we're also going to get a revamp of the entire freighter line too when 7.0 goes live.

[Zloth2]

D'oh! Huh, it set them to hidden. Maybe because I uploaded both at once? <shrug> Edited the post to point right at the link.

Something does look wrong with QA's travel speed. At least with medium preset, the Heron-E is a little bit slower than the Heron Sentinel. The website shows it as being faster than either of the old models.

[Koizuki]

Thanks for the updated links.

Interesting... What engines are those setups using? From the second screenshot comparing all 3 Heron variants, it looks like QSNA's numbers for the TER L Travel Engines line up with the Sentinel and Vanguard variants, but give a wildly different number for the Heron E.
Can you attempt to build out a Heron E at one of the shipyards so you can manually select a specific engine?

It is possible that the devs have since updated the values on that ship some time in Beta2 or 3, if QSNA updated using Beta1 values and is thus out of date right now. However, if I sort the list using TER L Travel Engines, we still see that the Incarcatura Sentinel winds up at 37m/s normal and 1297m/s travel speeds to haul just 54,000 capacity, making it still strictly worse than this Heron E.

Speed-wise, that puts the Heron E in the range of the Pelican Sentinel (51,000) and the Veles Vanguard (36,000) so 62,000 at that speed still feels like an outlier.

[GCU Grey Area]

Here's another comparison, Heron E v Shuyaku S v Helios E (i.e. one from each of the base game factions). Each ship has been equipped with only their own faction's gear:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/wvmnilko ... d55tg&dl=0
On this basis think the Heron E looks OK. Heron E's cargo capacity is certainly it's best feature, however the Argon & Paranid offerings are noticeably quicker if they're using their own engines. Anyway, even if the Teladi do now have a freighter that can haul more than anyone else's, isn't that exactly the sort of thing that might be expected from a species obsessed about trade & profitsss...

[Koizuki]

Thanks for the additional comparisons. It looks like the ship probably did receive a nerf to its speed at some point, or QSNA had the wrong values up from the beginning, but either way it seems like the current iteration of the Heron E actually sits around the Pelican Sentinel and Veles Vanguard in terms of speed.

Don't get me wrong, I agree that it makes sense for the Teladi to have ships designed around trade and profits, and they can generally be expected to have slightly higher cargo holds at various points compared to their competitors, but my initial reaction was that having that much capacity at the higher Shuyaku-level speed range felt a bit insane. I think with the slower speed it still ends up being the most "efficient" freigher for bulk transport, beating the Shuyaku Sentinel by about 10% or so, which is much more reasonable than the staggering 34% or so with QSNA's higher listed speed.

The Paranid freighters do offer reasonable alternatives for speedy L freighters for those who lack any DLC, though if you do have them, I'd go with the Buffalo or the Barbarossa for that role (the latter being preferred since it's even faster and has a larger cargo hold, plus more turrets, more eHP, and I believe it's technically classed as a Destroyer so SCA/FAF should never try to jump it.)

Unfortunately, the poor Incarcatura really needs a buff now because it's still straight up worse than the Heron E; It's now slower, less maneuverable, holds less cargo, has less eHP, and is more expensive, all for the bonus of one more turret than the Heron E (and more S ship storage, I guess.) Seems pretty pointless to use outside of Argon-only roleplay runs.

[sh1pman]

It looks OK. Very fitting for Teladi, considering that they also have L miners (Crane?) with a ridiculously high cargo capacity.

[Koizuki]

Oh, I'm not disputing that they shouldn't have larger cargo capacities; My initial observation was that it was a little too much if the higher speed was correct. The Crane does have really high storage for a miner, but it's fairly appropriately configured to be a slower ship in the lineup to offset that. With the stats currently listed on QSNA for the Heron E, it'd be like having the Crane fly at the speed of the Chthonios or Rorqual, or something. Having both high speed and high cargo capacity together makes it so good that there's no reason to use anything else for efficiency, relegating everything else to just roleplay.

The slower speed makes it more reasonable now in my opinion, so it's mostly fine, it's just the Incarcatura that appears to really lose now because its main thing was "maximum cargo capacity at all cost" but that's no longer true. To an extent, I guess it also displaces the Pelican Sentinel, being so close in speed but with nearly 22% more cargo capacity.

[Zloth2]

The medium level is giving me Terran Travel Mk1 engines and Mk2 thrusters, just as you surmised.

Here's Heron-E vs. Incarcatura Vanguard, vs. Helios E. This time all with Mk3 thrusters and Argon travel drives.
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ ... 2AD20F8B2/

Incarcatura is looking really out-classed, unless you're using it to do boarding operations. The Heron E seems to have the huge transport job locked in, assuming you're not going to assign the Erlking to freighter duty. The Helios E does great with the smaller loads.

Route can still make a big difference, of course. Top travel speed doesn't matter if you get to the next gate before you can accelerate to that speed. I'm pretty sure acceleration is mostly proportional to the top speed, but the math starts to get harder to predict by just imagining what happens. (Especially if acceleration goes down according to how much mass the ship is hauling.)

[Koizuki]

Thanks for another data point to reference; it definitely looks like its speed is between the Pelican Sentinel and Veles Vanguard now.

Incarcatura is looking really out-classed, unless you're using it to do boarding operations. The Heron E seems to have the huge transport job locked in, assuming you're not going to assign the Erlking to freighter duty. The Helios E does great with the smaller loads.

The Incarcatura isn't going to be the best at boarding either; The Shuyaku Vanguard usually has that job locked in with the greater crew count and faster speed, and even a bit more hull to boot. They're both Argon too, so it's not a case of "You must use Argon-only ships" that ends up locking you to the Incarcatura. With this Heron E, I'm thinking this ship no longer has any niche to play in. Highest Capacity = Heron E, Highest Crew Count = Shuyaku Vanguard, Highest Speed = Buffalo (Setting aside the Barbarossa as it's not technically an L Freighter.)

The Erlking is also a great transporter, but you only have one of them, so it's helpful to have some more mass-produced alternatives for efficient bulk hauling which is what brought my attention to the new Heron E and its whopping 62,000 capacity.

Route can still make a big difference, of course. Top travel speed doesn't matter if you get to the next gate before you can accelerate to that speed. I'm pretty sure acceleration is mostly proportional to the top speed, but the math starts to get harder to predict by just imagining what happens. (Especially if acceleration goes down according to how much mass the ship is hauling.)

This is mostly the reason I run all my L freighters (and most L ships in general) with the TER L All-Around engines. They have slower absolute top speed, but they reach it in 1/5th the amount of time (15 seconds) compared to most everyone else, so they end up getting full use out of its theoretical limit quite often. The L Travel variant takes 2 seconds longer (still the same 1/5th time of other Travel Engines, though) but doesn't provide all that much more top speed, so I tend not to use them.

This is also the main reason I haven't played with (but am somewhat curious about) the BOR ships, since they do instantly enter travel drive, but their acceleration is excruciatingly slow and most of the time they will probably never hit their top speed before they have to drop out. I have no idea if that instant travel drive makes it faster or not compared to other drives taking 20 seconds to charge giving BOR that 20s head-start, but then they average much slower speeds compared to TER drives that end up at top speed 15 seconds after that and catch up rapidly.

[v_make]

...I have no problem just switching my entire fleet over to Heron E's once 7.0 lands...

I do have a problem with that. For efficiency, all my traders have modifications. 22% drag reduce and 44% travel speed means 75% efficiency boost, which is quite necessary. It feels a lot of trouble, considering I will have to manually uninstall those modifications ONE BY ONE and then reinstall them ONE BY ONE WITH REROLLS!
Then exchange captains and crews ONE BY ONE.
And the Crane E Gas also has better stats than Crane Sentinel Gas.

Then I need to consider if I am going to do that again, if devs are to make another change in future. I can't even blame them, since they are literally giving free updates and new features, just a little bit whimsical.

It feels like the devs don't really encourage a minmax play style, which is an essential part of my fun. It might be my problem, but very discouraging nonetheless.

[Koizuki]

I do have a problem with that. For efficiency, all my traders have modifications. 22% drag reduce and 44% travel speed means 75% efficiency boost, which is quite necessary. It feels a lot of trouble, considering I will have to manually uninstall those modifications ONE BY ONE and then reinstall them ONE BY ONE WITH REROLLS!
Then exchange captains and crews ONE BY ONE.
And the Crane E Gas also has better stats than Crane Sentinel Gas.

Admittedly, I will have the same issue, but it might not be as "necessary" to switch over if the current state of the Heron E is "only" about 10% better than the next best thing. Most sales to NPC stations wouldn't typically be full loads anyway, I believe, so it's more useful for internal distribution.

It was more a problem when, at the beginning of this thread, I thought it was over 34% better than the next best thing, which is dramatic enough to potentially be worth that headache of swapping all those mods over. That said, at least it's only really one chassis and one engine mod, and of those two the engine mod will probably take more rerolls (I'm a bit more lenient with my Reaver rolls, as 43%+ is acceptable to me,) as opposed to ships where you also want to add slasher mods to all their turrets. I've set up a couple Xenon gate farms so I've got thousands of parts available for chassis/engine/shield mods. Weapon mods are a bottleneck since Destroyers have so many turrets to mod for, and slasher does take many rerolls to get decent stats oftentimes.

The Crane E Gas variant is also a bit of an outlier, since the Mineral Crane E variant has less capacity than its Sentinel variant, and actually sits in between the Sentinel and Vanguard variants in terms of Capacity and Speed. On the other hand, the numbers are still close enough that I wouldn't bother switching Crane Gas Sentinels over to their E-variants even if they are strictly better, as swapping mods for ~5% better gains is kind of annoying. I do understand if you're truly minmaxing for every single percentage, though.