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Blue Dragon Mk VII

The mark seven is the seventh of my space warships in this series. So far, this is the most advanced and powerful in the series. It has brand new engines, limited shields, and substantially more firepower than any of the previous models. As with the prior versions, it is not really AI pilot friendly. It has plenty of ACBs, breadboards, and even LUA modules open on the command deck in case anyone wants to customize behaviours or tweak some of its capabilities.

Below 1500m altitude, the engine legs will grant some vectored thrust to increase maneuverability. Above 1500m, thrust vectoring turns off as it offers much less benefit. It becomes all about the ion engines. In my experience, at 1700m or so, I turn off the main engines and switch to pure ion propulsion via secondary engines (O/L) and use slower and more careful adjustments. It still moves at 150+ m/s at this altitude, so killing the jet engines actually reduces fuel usage without reducing performance all that much. Its top speed is around 224 m/s with the jet engines at full at around 450m altitude.

In order to take off, start by hovering until you are sufficiently out of the water to engage the main engines. Start a bit slow, say 30%. Once you have some altitude and speed (which takes maybe 5 seconds), crank the mains up to 100% and climb to around 1700 m. Then activate the secondary engines (the O key) and turn off the jet engines (T+G). As the secondary ion engines also resond to main throttle commands, you'll only notice the mains turning off. Climb to around 2000-2200m and fight from that altitude while maintaining a speed of at least 100 m/s in order to evade missiles and cannon rounds. Evading laser and PAC shots requires some fancy flying as you have to stay out of range and fly unpredictably to give enemy turrets trouble following you.

Your shields are really only useful when facing an enemy head-on. That's how they were designed. They are there to protect you when making attack runs directly at an opponent.

While the ship has passive sonar and limited torpedo counter-measures, I don't recommend fighting while in the water. The ship is actually quite fragile and relies on speed, range, and altitude, plus active defences to keep it alive. Against opponents that are able to reach and attack you, your best option is to stay out of their range and fly defensively until you can get into position to hit them with the main particle cannons. Allow the laser cannons, rail cannons, and missiles to do their work while you focus on evading the enemy.

Be warned: You are very much able to catch up to your missiles and cause a situation where you will become damaged by your own missiles.

The ship is very expensive; too expensive for campaign use, I think. It costs over 3.6 million materials and exceeds 250m in length (the game only counts the main hull). It is fast, powerful, and responsive. In naval terms, it would likely be considered a battlecruiser. Being an aerospace ship, naval classifications don't really apply.