What are our thoughts on the Retaliator and where we want it to go? Are we happy with it?
TL;DRJohn Crewe says the Retaliator fills its role and he'd like a bigger, rotary-launcher torpedo loadout, but no pilot-controlled big gun is coming, the shields are fine, and the interior doesn't justify a full rework.
Great ship. Are we happy with it? It fills its role. I personally would like to see it have a bit more of a torpedo loadout. When it was made, six torpedoes was, wow, that's a lot of torpedoes. These days, it's not a lot of torpedoes, but the mechanisms for launching those torpedoes are fairly fixed. In a nice world where I had the time and the artistic skills and power to pull people off doing more important things to change it, I would probably swap them to be rotary launchers, like the Eclipse has and like modern-day B-52s have for launching cruise missiles, just so it can pack more torpedoes in there. Someone was suggesting whacking a size 6 gun on that the pilot controls. I don't think it needs that. That's not going to happen. Again, the turret question we talked about earlier: in the future, you'll be able to slave those turrets or automate them, which will make it a very different experience to how it is now. The other question that people always ask about is the interior layout.
The interior layout, and the shields aren't particularly robust.
I think the shields are okay for what it is. It's pretty armored and tanky, Aegis. The interior layout, I think it's a love or hate thing. I don't particularly mind it. I could see why people don't like the interior in terms of the efficiency of space, but it's not like the Vanguard, where there were some big problems that we had to solve with it. It doesn't justify a full rework at this point.