I think both NGTM-1R and Battuta could stand to take a bit of a breather here, and everyone else could tone back on fueling the flames. I've re-named the title to something a little less directly inflammatory, since I don't see anything productive about that. We're all adults (or close enough) here, and we should be able to discuss topics like this in a civil fashion.
As for the main topic at-hand, I'd like to interject my own limited perspective into the mix. I said in the original thread that I personally find Harpoons far more useful than Tempests, and I should probably elaborate on that statement. Whether due to my current joystick setup, or my innate lack of skill, or some combination of the two, I generally perform very poorly at fine-aiming tasks. My usual tactic for taking on enemy fighters involves pegging my primary trigger and struggling to keep the target in my sights as much as possible, and if one in ten shots lands, I consider that successful. (It's probably more like one in twenty when fighting something like a Dragon.) For this reason, I've generally never played above Easy difficulty, so I can still have a decent chance at hitting things. Given that most ships you can fly seem to have secondary bank positions that are less conducive to direct aiming than the primaries, I could easily see myself expending the better part of a bank of Tempests and landing only a few on my target. With Harpoons, I'm reasonably guaranteed that the majority of my secondary shots will hit my target (at least now that the countermeasures bug is fixed, anyway). DPS is all well and good, but only if you're able to exploit the full amount of damage, and I feel I have a much better chance of doing that with a Harpoon or Tornado than a Tempest.
(Plus, there's just something
cool about using aspect-lock missiles.
)
As a side note, I do think that NGTM-1R had somewhat of a point about both Insane difficulty and Fury's AI. While the former may apply artificial restrictions to the enemy AI, I'd wager that the majority of the members on this forum have never even attempted playing at that difficulty level, and I doubt that
expected most of the game's players to use it either. As for the latter, while Fury's hard work on it is certainly extremely commendable, the fact remains that enabling it takes the gameplay out of the realm of
pure FreeSpace to a third-party mod. When discussing a topic in purely retail-game terms, I'm not quite sure what purpose citing it serves.
