MCI Hornet F7A (SC)

MCI Shipyards presents our latest: Hornet F7A Medium Assault Fighter!

If you ever wanted to fly the famous military Hornet in Star Citizen – this your opportunity to fly a ship inspired by it. Made for REFORGED EDEN only!

PLEASE NOTE: due to the problem with colliders and seat ejection in v1.10.5 Build 4257 (possibly new Unity issue) getting out of the cockpit is currently very difficult. It requires crouching to get under the hatch. Jumping out of the hatch is now more difficult too: to make it easier - try jet-packing/jumping out in 3rd person and/or rotating the shutter 180 degrees, and further removing the piece of glass in front of the hatch and putting the second shutter to make a longer double-space opening.

General Use:

Hornet F7A is a Core 9 SV platform made for mobile engagement and capable of carrying 8 fixed mount weapons and one turret. She is warp-capable, however is rather limited on ammo storage, so she is carrier-based fighter made to assist in system missions – more so in space than in atmo, but she can do that too. She handles well, sports good weaponry and comes with the MCI’s signature Reactive Pilot Display and programmed functionality.

Piloting and Defences:

She is well protected shield fighter, sporting a Heavy Shield Generator with additional parts to augment shield capacity and recharge. Her armour is a further carefully placed mix of Combat, Hardened and Standard Steel and her internal bulkheads will prevent cascading if hit – however, if unshielded, a capital missile volley will likely cripple her like any other small SV without volumetric armour.

Hornet is fairly mobile in both pitch and yaw, however, like most MCI combat craft, she is not designed with raw strafe acceleration in mind and relies on yaw and frontal accel to maintain flat orbits around targets in space: turn autobreak off, pilot mode on (optional), point slightly past the target and hit full throttle, then start yawing towards the target while maintaining the acceleration – you will find your momentum carrying you around in circles in a flat orbit around the enemy ship with your guns constantly pointing at it and good to shoot. It’s a free-fall flight, takes practice but works wonders.

It is further important to understand that Hornet is propelled by a single Drive cluster at the back – a Jet Thruster and a bunch of supporting Advanced Large and Medium Thrusters. If the jet blows, the cluster will cascade and all or most of the frontal propulsion will fail. You may still be able to escape on lift or strafe thrusters, but survivability beyond that point is questionable.

Weapons:

The stock model comes with 6 Heavy Gatling Cannons and 1 Heavy Minigun Turret. A flavour weapons for a Hornet, Heavy Gatlings are however fairly decent against shields and are 4th highest DPS weapon against both armour (behind Railguns, Infrareds and Torpedoes) and devices (behind Infrareds, Heavy Plasma Turret and Heavy Laser Cannons) and Gatling Hornet has been tested and proved successful against multiple low and mid-level OPVs, including Al-Sunat, Periat and multiple bandit and pirate targets. In RE she makes for a fun craft to engage in SV-only combat sites.

However, weapon loadout can be adjusted as needed: stock, Hornet comes with 9k CPU to spare, so she can be easily equipped with additional 2 Bomb Launchers, or a Torpedo launcher to augment the gatlings. Alternatively, 6-8 Plasma Cannons, or 6 Heavy Laser Cannons will fit instead of the gatlings within stock CPU limits. Note that, while all weapons can be toggled via the standard control panel switch, that will also toggle the Long Range Radar, so you won’t be able to fly and scan with your weapons off. Instead all weapons are bound to the “Weapons” Custom signal – activatable via the control panel or the Ctrl+Alt+2 key combination. When upgrading or changing weapons, make sure you slave all of the added mounts to the same signal in the Signal Logic Tab.

Upgrades:

Hornet has a small 2x2x3 internal space behind the cockpit that can be accessed by removing the armour locker. In stock model it is filled with container extensions marked with hazard striping. These can be removed as needed to reveal as many as 12 block-spaces to install additional parts, like Auxiliary or Quantum Cores, extra Shield Parts and an additional Advanced Generator. Note that this will reduce ammo storage somewhat – so, think about the upgrades needed and ammo that they require.

An example of a heavy capital-ship buster loadout could include 4-6 Modulated Gamma Lasers and up to 2 Torpedo Launchers and would require an extra generator and 3 A-cores as well as 3-6 additional RCS modules to help offset the increase in mass.

Creature Comforts:

Hornet has a small internal cockpit that is accessible via a tiny hatch at the back of the canopy. Inside you will find a pilot seat – can’t fly without it – and an armour locker (can be substituted with a cargo box for personal possession if preferable).

Like the MCI Polaris M CV missile carrier and the MCI Galaxy SLV, Hornet comes also with a smart Reactive Pilot Display in the cockpit. Key combinations now allow to toggle the custom signals: so Ctrl+Alt+1 with toggle Thrusters, Ctrl+Alt+2 will toggle Weapons, Ctrl+Alt+3 will toggle the Long Range Radar (it eats quite a bit of fuel) – respective indicators will update on the display. Additionally, Ctrl+Alt+4 will toggle the cockpit lights and Ctrl+Alt+5 will toggle the cockpit hatch.

Feature Summary:

- Made for REFORDED EDEN carrier-based Medium Fighter, Shield-tanked

- Core 9, with 9k spare CPU, upgradeable – remove the yellow-stipe-marked container extensions behind the armour locker, place the cores/other parts as needed (generator, RCS, shield parts)

- Heavy Shield Generator + parts to a total 4430 shield capacity with 175 recharge rate