While you're not exactly going to be able to stand toe-to-toe with an atlas, this can become a serious annoyance (especially to LRM boats who think they're safe*), if one keeps one's distance and uses cover effectively. The standard engine on the Dragon also makes it feasible to quickly move to a new location after a few shots, prolonging life expectancy. One could probably swap out the AMS for another heatsink and more armour. One can get away with no upgrades at the cost of severely reduced armour and heat capacity. *an ER PPC has a max range of 810m, but I have been able to deal a small amount of damage up to 1150m. This is just enough to make LRM boats get scared and take shelter.
in 40 games I've only had my arm blown off twice, and that was before I added upgrades. One can mitigate the risk by turning your left side away from any incoming missiles.
Just FYi, it seems Energy weapons have double the effective range that is listed in game. ER PPCs can deal damage at 1620m. Ballistics seems to have nearly 3 times the stated range, though I think they tier down in damage more than energy. source can be found HERE. Ohm knows his stuff.
I was unaware that the dmg actually dropped so much. Kinda makes sniping pointless, doesn't it? I've had my center torso dropped to red in about 3-4 shots, maybe they had more than one gun on me, idk.
Most people are trained to target the right arm of a Dragon. This build is much like a Hunchback putting weapons somewhere other than the 'hump'. Losing an arm isn't common and for those that target it, they're going mostly for your right side.
As to sniping, 810m is a pretty good effective range compared to most weapons in the game. At 1100m, you're probably still doing 6 damage on a hit, and it drops off after that. Basically, it's a linear regression where from 0-810m you do 10 damage, and 810-1620 it drops slowly to 0. Considering most ballistic weapons have a smaller effective range, as well as every other energy weapon, the ER PPC is a great sniper weapon. My issue playing Sniper with weapons mounted in a Dragon's arm is that you need to expose a lot of your chassis to fire over a hill, and your entire chassis to fire around a corner to the right. A CPLT-K2, for example, can do a 2x ER PPC build with the same engine, lose a tiny bit of speed, but be a lot harder to hit while peeking to fire and have a few more DHS to balance the heat issues. The nice thing about this build is it will work on any Dragon, it's not exclusive to the 5N. That's true about most 5N builds that don't use 3 ballistic slots, though.
