Federal Assault Ship:
- Weapons: 2xM, 2xL
- Utility: 4x
- Bulkhead: 8 (with Military Grade Composite MGC - 1050 armour)
- Reactor: 6 (easy energy distribution management))
- Thrusters: 6 (with MGC 238 m/s, thrust 396 m/s)
- FSD: 5 (fully A kitted and armoured up to 2050! max jump: 14.7 ly ... very nice jump-range for such combat ship.)
- Power Distributor: 6
- Sensors: 4
- Fuel tank: 4 (enough for mid-range travels)
- Internals: 2x5, 1x4, 1x3, 2x2 (it is true combat ship, but you still can configure it also for delivery or surface missions.)
- Full price A kitted (combat): 90M (without discounts!)
- Requirement: Federal rank "Chief Petty Officer"! (do not be confused with the rank "Petty Officer" which is one rank lower like is the needed rank.)
- Insurance: "A" combat kitted its 4,5 M.
Ship build(s): Pure combat (heavily armoured), Travel & Light explore (fun for fly and look around included landing on planets), Stealth (lol, crazy variant )
Ship review: For a longer time I wanted to try this ship and concentrated my effort on federal missions. As a new owner of this ship I need to say that it was more as only worth all this effort. For those of you which want to imagine how this ship behave in fight - go and buy cheap Diamondback Scout (review) and arm it for fight. FAS is like a big brother of DBS and if you fight, you will really like it ... I can say that there is practically 100% guarantee that you will be satisfied. FAS is crazy agile and this also if heavily armoured ... ramming in this ship is a new level of experience and you can seriously think also about build the "stealth" build (without shield) and go for ramming into your opponent (with such agile ship its not so hard).
FAS weapons placement: on bottom in centre large and on his sides two medium, and one separate large above canopy. I have read ppls reviews telling that medium hardpoints are too much from centre and is better use gimballed weapons variants on them ... well, its a big ship, but from my testing these three weapons are close enough so you can easily go with three fixed lasers on them and have very good hitting percentage and this also on long distances (where gimballed fails). Use PA on top hardpoint works pretty well for me, could be due my flying style, but I had no issue deplete whole ammo with hit ratio around 70% (and this was only starting experience with FAS) and take more as 1M from compromised beacon ... and I tried hitting also small agile ships just for fun.
Flying (SC, Boost speed, etc.): This ship handles very good (is agile) also in Super-Cruise (SC). I need to say that after spent longer time in Federal Dropship it was real relief and travelling is very smooth. Regarding boosting speed, with 4 pips on engines you can keep your speed around 380 all the time and it will make this ship very dangerous when is chase done for longer time (mass lock, FDS cooling period) or when you need to flee. Where you for sure will enjoy such speed is in low altitude flights in canyons on planets.
Cons: From all what was written above it looks, like no cons are present on this ship . Well, its almost true (almost) ... the weakness for this ship is the shield capacity, which is rather poor compared with some other ships used for combat. On other side this can be seen as "they (FDev) needed to give at least one weakness" and you may learn quickly, that you can "live" with such weakness easily.
Note: Not had such experience yet, but this ship have a very good capabilities to be very good used in PvP.