although there might be blind spots, we shouldn't expect MA to fix them. Much like tanks in war, they too have powerful but limited abilities. Therefore, you should have support around your MS/privateer much like a tank does with infantry and other units. That's my opinion at least. What chance did (although annoying as hell and served no real purpose this time except to piss you off) is quite smart if you ask me. He found a way to stall you from warping where he could have summoned an attack group to shoot you down all while being able to dodge your attacks by leveraging the weaknesses of your ship.
Not taking sides here just stating my views to contribute to the thread
I agree, i think a whole fleet of support craft would make space amazing but unless you guys are willing to spend 250 peds for a single one-way warp flight (instead of 30ish) then there is no way any of thats going to happen. All of those support people, the quads flying support, the gunners, the repair crew, they all need to be paid. Where is that going to come from? The passengers of course.
On top of that, a Quad can not warp, thus the Privateer will leave that group of support Quads as soon as it enters warp. That means you will need a 2nd set of support craft waiting for you at your destination planet. How many planets are there? Thats a lot of people to pay just to sit there and wait for you to have a paying warp flight. Which all means that none of it is practical.
Privateer and Mothership pilots who do VIP warps for individual customers, which accounts for the bulk of space travel, do these runs solo with just them and their paying customer(s) and thats because everyone wants cheap space travel.
Thats how space has evolved and thats the reality of the situation. As a result, the individual pilot needs to have a possible way to shoot at attackers. The pilot seat doesnt have any guns.
As it stands now, a Privateer that has not had Structural Integrity upgrades costs about 40Kish PED and has ZERO chance of staying alive vs a 100 PED Quad (L).. it doesnt matter how many gunners you have. The same is true for a mothership that has not been upgraded.
To upgrade SI it requires Gold Ingots... and 1 PED TT value of Gold gives you 2 SI points. The Privateer that I'm selling has 42,974 SI points... thats ~21,487 PED TT value of Gold. Those upgrades were done when Gold was at about 120%... currently Gold is at 200%.
The SI costs easily justify the 65K price that I have set but the point is, in that scenario with all those peds invested in the privateer, does it make sense for it to be defenseless against a 100 PED (L) Quad? It should (at least up to a point) have defensive capabilities without requiring a crew.
A Quad easily runs circles (literally) around a privateer or mothership in close quarters. You can turn and maneuver all you want and it doesn't make a lot of difference because the quad can move faster than a privateer. Imagine riding bareback on an elephant while underwater and trying to steer the thing around in different directions. Sure it can be done but its going to happen very slowly