Pilot Archive

---

MonsofoLexius wrote:

/21borstelSalute

---

Missing man formation would be more traditional.

Good luck in your future endeavours Tomo. Thanks for a job well done.

I never got the chance to meet or to talk with you.I don't usually post on these forums but from what I've seen your posts You are the best corr there is. /salute Tomo

I need not elaborate on how much I valued your dedication and obvious talents as a pilot correpondent, a shipwright and a pilot. I did it a lot of times and all I can say again is thank you. I miss you for quite awhile as a shipwright, most of the time as a pilot and it seems you made a decision to make me miss you as a correspondent. (Yes, I even purchased imperial ship parts ).

I hope you will stay in the game for a long time, even if you will be less in the game. We all have periods life posing more challenging and demanding burdens. I hope the community will not loose an important member because of that. (And the community is asked not to treat it as a fact.)

It was a pleasure to read you Tomo, best luck to you in whatever you are doing now

And... hmm, I'm just curious... now that you are retiring... how about showing off your actual loadout? You know... the one too crazy for public knowledge ^^

Cheers!

/salue TomoRainer

cheers for all your hard work, you'll be missed and hard to replace

Sorry to see you go Tomo. I may not have frequented the pilot boards for that long, but from what I have seen, you have been level headed, but passionate, unbiased, but partizan. You have fought the corner of Pilots with as much passion as anyone could possibly muster, and have always been there to advise the fledgelings as the rise through the profession of Pilot.

I'm sorry to see you go, best of luck with you RL stuff, you deserve it.

---

JaekeW wrote:

Heh, I still remember the time Tomo chastized me for bumping 2 dozen threads about the RGI, Heavy-X, Vaksai loop-bug to the top of the forums. I was hoping maybe SOMEONE might see them.

---

Hope you didn't take it personally. One of my biggest frustrations is the bugs and problems that've gone unresolved for months, particularly the numerous ones that came along with RotW.

---

A few pilots wrote:

I never got to fight you.

---

I'm going to try to make it back for another event or two, or at least cruise around Deep Space a bit. Keep in mind I'm gonna be real damn rusty (though in my experience it's mainly a loss in accuracy and not evasive skills when you haven't been flying much, so I may have some gas left in the old bird), and I still fly an Eta-2, but I do want to get missiled to oblivion another time or two before I call it quits.

---

Imaridril wrote:

Can I have your stuff?

---

No way, the Mr. Burns of shipwrights didn't get where he is today by giving stuff away. Besides, I do like the idea of that whole Viking funeral thing.

But I am gonna miss you too, buddy.

---

Joint_Maker wrote:

And... hmm, I'm just curious... now that you are retiring... how about showing off your actual loadout? You know... the one too crazy for public knowledge ^^

---

Well, I don't have the exact stats handy, but basically I designed my Eta-2 (the Black Star 501) to be as vicious a killer as possible. I figured one of the biggest advantages you can give yourself or your squad is to reduce your opponents' numbers as quickly as possible, so my ship looked roughly like this:

Level 1 RE'd reactor, 12.5K energy, 1K mass
Level 2 RE'd cap, 1080 energy, 41 recharge, 1.5K mass
Level 1 crafted booster, 29ish speed, 10 seconds burn time, 1K mass
Level 6 RE'd engine, 95.9 speed, 7.7K mass, 72.5/71.5/71.4 PYR
Level 8 RE'd shields, 2550 HP, 26Kish mass
Level 10 RE'd gun, .800 shields/armor, 3000-4600 damage, 39K mass
Mk III proton launcher, 5.4K mass (mostly damage, a few points into refire rate for quicker lock)
Chaff launcher, 850 mass
And a couple plates of armor. Think I was able to move up to a level 2 and 3 RE'd set by the end. Ran RO4/EO4/CO4/WO3, o' course.

Even against level 8 RE'd engines in other Eta-2s and B-22s, this ship could stand up very well--turn fights could get hairy, but particularly in big dogfights with plenty of targets, it did a great job in taking down the opposition before they could knock me out, or at least in reducing their numbers and helping the team. Two hits from the gun would generally disable anyone--I noticed the first shot took out their armor without fail, so the next one could drop a reactor even if they'd got their shields back to 100%--and if I launched a missile right after landing one hit, that tended to be enough, too.

Also, by the time I'd put this ship together I was kind of a marked man, and drew an awful lot of missiles, so I liked being able to deal a lot of damage in a hurry before I got reduced to my component atoms. There were a couple times I was really in the zone, too, and was able to take down a superior force one by one without the disadvantage of my PYR coming back to haunt me.

I dunno though, it really felt like great firepower and a decent engine could beat decent firepower with a great engine more often than not. This loadout and my flying strategies were designed to deal with the fact I'd have missile lock on me from the first enemy contact, but even without that kind of lifespan limitation on you, I kind of think firepower is sometimes neglected in the conventional wisdom that it's over in 2-4 hits anyway, thus gun damage isn't terribly important.

I often wanted to know what people thought of such a strategy, but I didn't exactly want to encourage the other side to use it against us, so.

/tar Tomo

/offer beer and pie

Are you just stepping down or quitting completely?

Do not waaaaaant!

I'm retiring now and probably quitting in December.

I'll stay long enough to write a couple treatises for the new correspondent--like I'd pass up the chance to pontificate one last time --and while I would like to stick around, at least in the forums, my budget's tightening up to where I can't really afford a lot of extraneous expenses right now, even the $15/month ones. So unless I suddenly sell a novel or something, I'm afraid I'll be leaving completely.

I can't say I'll quit permanently; stuff changes too fast to know that. But I don't see any way I'd be back any time soon, either.

Which is making me surprisingly sad. I'm gonna miss you guys.

/salute

Thanks for all the hard work. You'll be missed.

Thanks for your passion, commitment, kindness and incisiveness.

We'll miss you, both here and in the Smuggler forums.

Stay on target