Initial impressions are me really liking the concept, but I've had some frustrations in the gameplay department
I like mods that go down the Diaspora route. Cockpits, ballistics, high velocity, high manoeuvrability. Love it.
I'd recommend setting a glide cap to something below afterburner velocity, it's perhaps a bit too easy to give yourself indefinite afterburners by just burning a little bit and then pressing w.
The high lethality is not all that engaging to me. Either you're fragging all you have targetted really quickly, or, in the slim chance that a fighter gets the drop on you before you get the drop on it, are fragged really quickly. This makes a lot of the combat either feel trivial or painfully hard. As such I am gravitating entirely towards heavy fighters and heavy weaponry. Wasting them before they start orientating on you is essential.
I was able to breeze through the combat on the highest difficulty untill fall of angels, where a single fighter spawn wasted me several times simply because the AI fighter's superiour aim bested me in a second without giving me chance to evade. Said is made harder by the wingman being more eager to shoot debris then actual enemies on said mission 0_o. The guard command in debris fields in the Open engine doesn't always work rather neatly, if raptor is given an engage command the player's chances to survive improve considerably. If both fighters decide to engage the player instantly they have no chance of surviving. Spawning stealth fighters in firing range of players is cruel and causes massive difficulty spikes.
Like, seriously, I can handle all the games engagements on the highest difficulty, except those darned stealth fighters which all target me instantly and waste me in the second they appear on sensors. I dropped down the difficulty to easy which makes them survivable, but makes the rest of the engagements even more trivial.
The crosshair is hard to see and often obscured by targeting HUD elements, which makes precision sniping of turrets significantly harder then it needs to be on the non-autoaiming difficulties.
The visual novel news broadcast segments really need portraits or some other way to differentiate between the news broadcaster talking and other people talking. This transition is not very clear. Otherwise put: The visual novel segments are not very visual, and I don't really see the advantage of using them here over the regular command briefings, briefings and extra stuff that Blue Planet and Between the Ashes use. It's also nice to hear Freelancer's New York music again, but using it for every single briefing is perhaps a bit much.
Are those X3 UI sounds?
The cloak bound to alt+Z often doesn't seem to engage properly.
