Datasheet for Interstice

This description is an extended version of the ship description posted in the Excelsior Discord Server.

Design: Very hard — Interstice is the culmination of a months-long journey to continually push the absolute limits of the Avoider archetype, which began with its immediate predecessor, Aionia. Finding ways to shave weight while conserving or even improving the uptime of Aionia’s shields and weapons proved an incredibly difficult task at the time, considering how little PvP shipbuilding experience I had. LS uptime was a long-standing issue until I implemented pretasking, which ended up both saving credits and massively improving the ship’s shields.

Building its predecessor, Aionia, bore most of the difficulty in building this ship, but the new optimizations did require some tinkering to get working properly. By trading walkways for corridors in the front modules and replacing the LS-adjacent EB with HL, the ship trades some weapon uptime for more powerful shields and boost thrusters for immediate extra torque. After countless rounds of brain-rotting optimization, this ship feels much closer to the limit of its design than anything else I’ve ever built.

Piloting: Master — Using Interstice to its full potential requires strong intuitions for the limits of every one of its subsystems, a skill only learned with time and rigorous practice. As with any Avoider, careful damage spreading is a must, even more so than with normal Avoiders due to its thin side armor. The likelihood of crew leaving ERs and weapons is somewhat higher than on a normal Avoider due to its detachable operator quarters, thus it's critically important to avoid taking damage if at all preventable. With the addition of boost thrusters, the slight loss of weapon uptime, and measurably less side armor, it is not as beginner-friendly as Aionia.

Interstice, "a narrow, open space between multiple things", is a wordplay off of the Avoider's nature, fitting through gaps in oncoming fire no other ship can. Designed as a direct upgrade to Aionia, Interstice shares the same slim profile and incredible torque, now further augmented by boost thrusters. Its LS are pretasked with HL rather than EB, allowing more crew to remain nearby to the shields. 

Because of its robust pretasking setup and incredibly light weight, it can win some matchups that a traditional LS avoider has little hope of winning, most notably against Ion Rammers and SS Avoiders. However, 1 less SS and a near total lack of armor hurts when facing rails. The high EB count means that it struggles somewhat more against heavily armored opponents as well, though its speed means that such fights simply last longer than normal rather than becoming unwinnable. Fighting morbiters is difficult as always, and while the boost and extra speed offers some extra insurance that is sorely needed in that matchup, it still takes an immense amount of skill and luck to win. Orbital walls are often soft or even hard counters as they can break through the shields and ramlock it with ease, even when boost is active. Unlike SS Avoiders, this ship is unlikely to win in a ram because of its weaker armament and SS setup.

This thing is fun as hell to fly, even more so than Aionia. It easily breaks 100 m/s in every direction, and even breaks 110 m/s when going forwards. The extra torque from the boost allows for terrifyingly quick direction changes even if its thrust is not properly ramped up and a top speed nearing 120 m/s. It also helps with rolling off the fronts of Ion Rammers and occasionally orbital walls if they don't properly maintain a ram. Unlike Aionia, Interstice has doubled hooks to make them more resistant in general, but is especially useful against ions.

A hotkey guide and some piloting tips can be found in the ship's description.