How do you envision the AR cockpit on the Vanguard Sentinel working and affecting the Sentinel in combat? How will it work compared to the Battle Bridge on the 890 Jump?
TL;DRThe Sentinel won't have the AR cockpit, e-war pod or decoy missiles at launch, since those await supporting mechanics; the answer also covers its current EMP, distortion loadout, and the Vanguard variants' nose guns.
So I wanted to use this question to talk a bit about the Vanguard variants in general for 3.7, more so the Sentinel. So it is not at release coming with a few of the things that it was announced with, one of them being the AR cockpit, the others being the decoy missiles and the e-war pod. And the e-war pod and the AR cockpit are tied together, in that we didn't want to spend time building these things from an art side without really fully knowing and having something demonstrable in game for those mechanics. So at launch, it doesn't have that cockpit. And when the mechanics are there, we will go back and adjust the cockpit. Same for the e-war pod. Decoy missiles aren't something we have in game, so it just has a regular missile loadout. And it does have an EMP device on it. So it was pitched as having, I think, EMP chargers. So it has an EMP generator pretty much identical to the Warlock at the moment, but again, we'll change and tune that as we go. And it has a very heavy, currently as I speak, all-distortion loadout, but we're going to look at that when it hits Evocati and PTU and see whether we need to adjust that. The Harbinger is pretty much as it was specced. It only has three size 5 torpedoes in the torpedo bay inside. We tried to fit more in, but really there wasn't enough space without doing even more work. It's got more armor. It's slightly slower and less maneuverable to make up for it. The Sentinel is slightly lighter and slightly weaker than the base Warden and Hoplite. And the nose guns, because people keep asking me about that: each of the variants now comes with different nose cannons. So the Warden comes with the laser cannons that have always been on it, the Hoplite comes with some ballistic repeaters, the Sentinel comes with some distortion repeaters, and the Harbinger has ballistic cannons on there. And then also in the shops there are distortion cannons and laser repeaters, so there are ballistic, laser and distortion cannons and repeaters available for all the Vanguard owners to play with.