Ships & Modules

Because “best” doesn't equate to “an order of magnitude better”, which is what you want if you want to deal with small ships effectively with large weapons.

You can kind of make them passable, but you have to sacrifice so much in doing so that you end up with a ship that's horribly inferior to pretty much all available alternatives.

This isn't a game where bigger is better. The best matched is better. The best match for small and medium targets is light drones and medium guns. The Tornado has neither. The best match for missions is a decent sustained tank. The Tornado doesn't have that either. Being able to fly a Tornado means you're already able to fly a vastly more suitable ship with vastly more suitable equipment. The R3 BCs are not suitable for L3s (or L4s for that matter); the R2 BCs are. You can fly an R3 because think it's fun, but it will never be good at it.

Yes, but to make those battleship weapons work against much smaller targets, you have to sacrifice that tank to speed up the weapons (or slow down the enemies), so you start out on the wrong foot by bringing the wrong tools for the job.

…not to mention that the cruisers in question will either have tanking bonuses or will have some other nifty trick up their sleeve that lets them project a bigger tank without sacrificing damage output.

You have so much to learn.

Bigger does NOT equal better, and in fact by doing level 3's the only thing large turrets will do is slow you down to a grinding halt.

L3's = close spawns
Small ships
fast ships
Enough damage to break a small tank

Guess what large guns fail with?
Guess what ship has a small tank?

Large guns will be able to deal with smaller ships, especially projectiles, but not at close range.

My maelstrom is over 1000 DPS, yet I wouldn't take it to a level 3 (sure, would tank it more than fine) I'd take, yup, you guessed it, a hurricane.

I haven't used a Tornado for Level 3's, but I do regularly use a Talos for them, and rarely use the drones (Duo of Death is the only one where they are needed because of the spider drones) using the fit below:

Magnetic Field Stabilizer II
Magnetic Field Stabilizer II
Nanofiber Internal Structure II
Tracking Enhancer II
Tracking Enhancer II

Experimental 10MN MicroWarpdrive I
Large Shield Extender II
Large Shield Extender II
Sensor Booster II, Targeting Range Script

425mm Prototype Gauss Gun, Lead Charge L
425mm Prototype Gauss Gun, Lead Charge L
425mm Prototype Gauss Gun, Lead Charge L
425mm Prototype Gauss Gun, Lead Charge L
425mm Prototype Gauss Gun, Lead Charge L
425mm Prototype Gauss Gun, Lead Charge L
425mm Prototype Gauss Gun, Lead Charge L
425mm Prototype Gauss Gun, Lead Charge L

Medium Hybrid Locus Coordinator I
Medium Polycarbon Engine Housing I
Medium Polycarbon Engine Housing I

Hobgoblin II x5

You should be able to do basically the same thing on a Tornado with Artillery and some Tracking computers in the Mids (and possibly an ACR or implant for the grid). You basically have enough speed and agility to get away from anything in a 3 except for spider drones, even if you come it at less than your ideal range. Nothing can hit you once you get to 100km, and you will 1 shot everything as it all comes straight at you. Never orbit as you will start missing, just use keep at range, pay attention to where spawns are coming from, and manually change directions of you get surrounded (fly up if you need to for example). There are a few missions with web towers with a stupid long range, but if you kill those quickly, you should be fine.

*sigh*

At least read my opening post before responding. I'm not inclined to use Large Turrets because they are "better" but because I am training for a Battleship. So instead of just rolling my thumbs I thought I might as do some Lv3 missions until I can comfortably fly a Battleship and do Lv4s. A Tornado would take advantage of all the skills I plan to train, mainly Gunnery and Engineering (Shield-based skills).

This is a really stupid idea.

One thing that hasn't been brought up here yet (not sure why; this isn't that arcane) is that there's a difference between the pure tracking number attached to a turret (.04968 for dual 650s and .0432 for 800s as compared to .1056 for 425s) and their effective tracking. Effective tracking has to take in to account not just the tracking speed but also the signature of the gun (400 for both large ACs and 125 for the medium). The ratio between target sig and gun sig effectively modifies tracking for target sigs under gun sig (but not target sigs larger than gun sig). So for most purposes, you actually have to divide large turret tracking by 400/125 = 3.2 to compare it effectively to medium turret tracking.

So that .04968 for the dual 650s? Now we're looking at .0155 if we normalize for comparison to 425s, or ~15% of the effective tracking of 425s. And that's why oversized turrets are a bad idea when you know you're fighting smaller targets.

you know what?

GO AHEAD, use your super duper tornado, you apparently know better than every single person here, go on, run along into your L3's, after, take them into the L4's too, I'm sure you can think of all these great arguments on how it's going to be so great, I mean after all, no one obviously has never tried it before, no no. Please, do take it in there, I really think it would be a great idea.

Give it a shot and let us know how it went.

Fun thread, reminds me of the time I tried to run lvl 4's in a railgun Rokh. It took me about an hour to figure out not to use L guns on missions. Hopefully the OP will figure it out sooner, since a Tornado's tank won't last nearly as long as a Rokh's.