Idea to reduce shrike weakness to disable

[gnomeRemover]

The shrike is infamous for how its clumped up components are easily destroyed all at once.
Would it be possible to place an explosion blocking hitbox within the middle of the shrike so that Hwachas and Artemis fire cannot disable both sides of the shrike at once?

Here are some creepy 3d examples of what I mean
Red is the proposed hitbox
Green are light guns
Yellow is heavy guns
Purple is engines

[gnomeRemover]

Also back view

[Schwalbe]

...isn't Shrike built like it is by design rather than accident?

It's one of the few trade offs to how fucking ridiculously fast and difficult to hit this ship is if handled correctly.
Also one of the easiest ships to engineer on, safe from the fucking ledge you fall almost every damn time.
Also light + heavy weapon combos, that allow for easy to handle for a pilot kill combos on each side of the ship.
Also it's very easy to handle and position.

Should I really continue?

[Huskarr]

You forget that shrike is bad atm Schwalbe

[Schwalbe]

I have no fucking clue, haven't really played for quite some goddamn time. -  __-
It's like I'm having a shitload of work, or something.

[GurasOguras]

Schwalbe just to keep you updated: Shrike is currently the worst ship in the game. Like much much worse than Spire ever was.

Its problems don't stop at the susceptibility to disable, the greater concern is how terrible vertical movement makes virtually any ship outmanoeuvre it and stay out of arcs 100% of the time. One hydrogen can easily eliminate any threat from Shrike.

Of course, the constant threat of disabling is not exclusive to Shrike - Junker has similar issues but can stand up to most of the ships, Spire has a good matchup or two and Stormbreaker is current meta. All those ships are easily disabled but Shrike is countered by everything. Some people just refuse to use good pilot tools and stick to their beloved tar barrel and don't notice that

That's why since OP already pick up Shrike balance idea I believe we should focus on buffing it with resources we have - just change some numbers in the stats table.

[Naoura]

I'd agree with that, Guras. The vertical speed is the only real problem with Shrike, and just buff it enough to keep up with Stormy if nothing else vert wise.

[gnomeRemover]

I made this suggestion after playing in the DevApp where they DID buff the shrike's vertical.

(Vert top speed 17 m/s like most ships, although the vertical acceleration was at 2 m/s^2 which is lowest out of all ships)

DevApp shrike was very fun and also very powerful against anything that couldn't catch up to it and hwacha slap it.

It was berserkedly fast and could moonshine for days on end... it seemed  too strong against slow ships, but still seemed to show a lot of weakness still when forced into a face on encounter with other agile ships with hwachas (fish, storm).
It feels very polarized....
If a blocker hitbox is added, speed and accel will prolly need to stay at current level in live. (of course we still need a vertical buff.)

[Schwalbe]

If this is the case, I would rather say to go for the verticality buff than blocker. Just not to overdo it.

This way you will make it high risk - high reward glass cannon (at least in terms of getting disabled).