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I-473 Cossack Medium Fighter

When FWIW began receiving reports from the field about I-472 Claymore ("Thugboat") fighters randomly blowing up or being blown up by friendly ships, it left the company a massive PR nightmare. Sales of the Thugboat plummeted overnight and a tie-in with a kids cartoon show was quickly left on the wayside. Stock options and bonuses began to dry up. Execs at FWIW scrambled, pushing engineers to create new, replacement models for the flagship of their fighter fleet, while another team was locked away in the basement of a frat house on Tau Ceti III and told to fix the problem or be disposed of in kegs.

Over time, the venerable design was torn down to its basics and key components wrapped around an updated hull form. The resulting design was a medium-weight multi-class fighter that weighs less than the original Thugboat, but carries heavier firepower while also reducing the protective shielding somewhat.

The field repair system has been beefed up with additional nanobot systems, but no projection block has been included on this design. In compensation, "flight'n'fight" HUD displays have been added to view shield power and navball without the need to consult in-suit systems. Power systems have been also greatly enhanced in this craft, leveraging highly-prized and reliable Azimuth batteries and reactors.

Though slightly less agile at lower speeds, this has been balanced out by installing a military-grade hovercraft system; with images of the fighter sweeping the plains in their heads, the selection of "Cossack" as the ship name was rather straightforward.

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Meet what's really the Thugboat Redux. Compared to the original, she carries two additional gatling cannons, an additional bombast laser, and in place of the fixed mount cluster autocannon is a tank-mount autocannon. Swapping the autocannons worked ouit well as it allows the Cossack to still do damage without necessarily being head-on towards the enemy.

The design is also now intended to be able to handle planetary entry/egress with the addition of hover engine technology, though pilots are warned that use of these engines should be confined to the planet and not hangars. They are largely unconfigured and left to your preferences in setup, but it should be noted that to engage the landing gears, you will need to have them set to about 1-2m for hover. The hover engines are also useful for "bouncing" the fighter into the air, as it is very hesitant to get off the ground.

Pilots should keep in mind that this design does feature less shield power than the Thugboat and also has not retained the "Battery Shield" concept that its predecessor used; the cockpit on this design is quite susceptible to being taken out far easier from below the fighter.

The Cossack also retains the capability of carrying modular systems onboard; in the case of Uncooperative Survival, to date the only one seen on camera is the "Rider" module, which acts as hydrogen booster system for planetary egress; once detached, it can operate independently of the Cossack on hydrogen or atmospheric thrust and act as a mobile recharge point for power, air, and hydrogen, with limited cargo capabilities. (See also "I-473 Cossack Rider Module" blueprint.)

NOTE: As of 10/6/2018, this design uses a heavily-edited version I made of scad.luncher's excellent "Energy Shields - (Simple) Status on LCD", prior to him posting the simplified version of it at https://pastebin.com/d2QwD6F6 . Unfortunately, it currently is throwing warnings on the programming block, having been working fine all summer, and also suffers from the need to re-run the program on world load or grid c/p, as it seems to glitch out. There's some modifications possible for this script in its comments that I may try out to help clean things up a bit, so for the time being it's still not a bad idea to keep your "/shield ShowOnHud add" commands handy. :)