HMES Jester

Here's the fifth post of the third round of Avem Empire airships! I'll be doubling my fleet size in this update, so make sure to check out all the other designs. Jester is a bit of an odd design. Her cannon armament is quite weak, being just a pair of 94mm simple guns and some weak simple AA guns mounted in the superstructure. Her strength, and in fact her only reason for existence, is her ability to lay mines. Minelaying was quite powerful in real life warfare, but it's kinda hard to do in FtD. I decided that a fun way to do it would be to just drag mines on the water behind her as she does attack runs. By using regulators and harpoons, she can carry multiple salvos of fragmentation mines behind her and deliver them to the enemy in attack runs. Sadly the AI isn't great at this, so she'll often miss moving targets, but it's still a fun idea and a nice proof of concept, if nothing else. By taking manual control you can just about alwas hit the enemy. There is a functional advantage to mine dragging over regular bomb dropping, though. By dragging mines, Jester can deliver as much damage each attack run as if she had three times as many missile launchers, and missile launchers are expensive. I would suggest trading out the fragmentation mines for EMP mines, since the frag just doesn't really do a lot, but it's up to you. It looks great when she just drags a line of mines straight through a wooden target, and that's really the point of her. Just delivering a swath of fragmentary destruction to whatever poor ship she decides to fly over. Let me know how you like her and if you'd like to see more similar designs. I wanted to also try doing a bomb bay that built up mines of the inside, which would've helped with getting a better hit rate, but I ran into a bug where the bombs just fell straight through the spinblocks of my bomb bay doors. Maybe I can get it to work in the future. Until then, enjoy her as she is. I have to give credit to 𝕰 𝖝 𝖎 𝖘 𝖙 𝖊 𝖓 𝖈 𝖊 for taking