Honestly you can probably go with 6 PAs, I don’t think the thermal vent is necessary as long as you stagger fire them in two groups and and engineer them in a way that doesn’t increase heat.

Gimbals are a hard sell for me at all, frags probably being the only exception because you’ll try to be close and centered before firing.

The only hardpoint that has good FOV is the single top large, so if you felt you had to use a beam, use that slot. But, the top 3 hardpoints have the best convergence, so it’s a tradeoff to do this.

IMO this is basically how society works. As soon as you rally more than a few people together under any singular form of identity (brand, activity, social movement), it turns toxic. So, by the time the label carries any meaning (e.g. MGTOW or even something like Feminist) the “voice” of the group becomes abrasive very quickly, and the internal ranks are filled with crazies that have so little meaning in their life that they actually enjoy forming their whole identity around a specific subject.

So you like cars and go to a car meet. You’ll meet a few cool folks. But the people there are just from the general population, with only one thing in common. If you find that you typically only really like 1/50 people you meet, you’re not going to find a higher ratio just because everyone likes cars, unless you literally value cars over all the other sociocultural aspects of your life. As a group, they’ll push ideals and causes that go overboard to support the thing they like. Maybe anti-biker or anti-evironmentalist sentiments, want more roads instead of better mass transit, etc… all sorts of things the average person who just “likes cars” may not be comfortable getting behind.

Having spent a while in most ships by now, I can say I don’t have a general favourite. There are a few ships I’d never use, but otherwise it really comes down to what you’re trying to accomplish.

It’s way less time consuming to swap out to a specialized ship for a specific purpose than to slog through it using a generalized build.

And so, I have a pretty long list of ships I love equally for their particular roles.

I use dual Virpil Constellation grips (HOSAS) which allow me to map every important control besides copy pasting and typing in the galaxy map search. You can get a similar experience with much less budget if you want to test the waters.

Elite Dangerous has excellent VR support as well (while in ship). I use a Quest 3, but I am excited for the potential to get an OLED headset in a few years because the high contrast will probably make a huge difference.

I also play on my Steam Deck. You can absolutely fully play the game without an issue on a gamepad, the menus are all designed to be optimized for it. However, as MAINLY a combat pilot, there are some relatively big disadvantages going from HOSAS to gamepad. The game is rather complex, so on gamepad you use a lot of mode switches, and some things that would ideally have a direct mapping are a bit less accessible.

For example, I may have Shield Cell Banks on my ship, which can recharge a portion of my shields. With M+KB or with my joysticks, I can map a button to do this. However, with a gamepad, you will quickly find that there are so many more important controls that you don’t want to give up a button for it… So instead, you add the Shield Cell Banks to a firegroup, and you need to cycle through your firegroups to find the right one to activate them.

With practice this is all doable. I am certain there are some competitive PVP players out there that are better than me on their gamepad. But it certainly takes practice.

Re landing and exploration, they really go for a “realistic” sense of emptiness. There are some really cool sights to see, but they are so rare that you could play for hundreds of hours and never happen by anything particularly exciting. This means it’s often pretty boring, but when you do find something and put your name on the discovery, it’s pretty cool.

I think the key to enjoying exploration in general is to approach it with a chill attitude. If you are looking for something to do that is relaxing and calm, where you can put some music on while you complete all the exploration “mini games”, it’s a nice relaxing time. You will occasionally have an emergency to perk things up, but for the most part there’s no particular challenge and it’s just a really chill way to spend some time.

It’s not like no man’s sky, where every place you go is packed with stuff. It’s polar opposite.

…yes?