Looking for fundamentals and knowledge on how these loadouts are determined? Be sure to check out our guide: Star Citizen Ship Meta: A Tactical Breakdown
Changes since 4.1
Star Citizen 4.2.1 brought about a bit of a shake up with which components are most ideal:
- Stealth is still important but no longer king. You should still be mindful of trying to keep your ship’s IR and EM signatures low but it isn’t as important as we saw in 4.1 and 4.0.
- Military and Industrial components, especially for shields, are now viable:
- Industrial offers a higher shield hitpoint pool and shorter overall time to completely recharge. (18.68s in size 1 with full power to shields)
- Military offers a shorter time to start regenerating after taking damage or being downed (2.92 seconds and 5.83 seconds respectively)
- Some of the larger fighters such as the Super Hornet now require two stealth coolers or a non-stealth cooler with 2+ pips of power to prevent the IR signature from building up.
- Flight Blades are in and allow you to choose to either:
- Add turn rate at the cost of maximum speed
- Increase maximum speed at the cost of turn rate
- Keep it stock
- NOTE: The difference in very small and will likely not determine the outcome of 99% of real-world engagements. On paper, yes, it might make a difference.
- Missiles and Torpedoes now have minimum arming ranges:
- This distance is calculated by the distance from YOUR ship when they impact the target not from the distance they travelled. This means if you travel alongside the torpedo or missile after firing it and your ship is under the minimum arming distance from the target when the torpedo or missile hits the missile or torpedo will bounce off the target instead of exploding.
- This change renders close range torpedo and missile runs effectively useless and makes ships with PDCs incredibly hard to kill with torpedoes.
Loadouts
Fighters
- Aegis Gladius Optimized Combat Build
- Anvil F7A Hornet MkII Optimized Combat Build
- Anvil F7C Hornet MkII Optimized Combat Build