The Imperial Cutter: A whisper in the night.

This is a pretty unorthodox Cutter build. Rather than strapping enough shields and armour on her to make an Orbital station blush, thus making her as agile as a Mammoth in a tar pit, this build is instead focused on minimising the amount you get hit in the first place.

It's a cold running stealth type build as you'll see, with your standard Thermal Vent Efficient Beams, and an Efficient Corrosive Multicannon, tied with two Short Range Dispersal Field Cannons up top, to further minimise damage taken by scrambling your target's Gimballed and Turreted weapons (and blow large holes in your target's Power Plant).

The most important part of the build is the SLF. You absolutely NEED a high ranked AI pilot so they don't get splattered while keeping your targets busy (and lined up in front of your weapons). Dangerous should work, but ideally Deadly or Elite are your best bets. They are going to be taking most of the aggro so they need to be able to survive. I have found the Imperial SLF, the GU-97 Gelid F, to be the best for this job.

The shields and armour aren't heavy in terms of absolute health, but they're more resistant than a kid asked to clean their room on a Saturday morning. Giving them very high Effective health, for a low power and weight cost. The result of this is twofold:

1) The Class 8 Bi-Weave, being the fastest recharging shield in the game, will recharge the shields from 50% to full in just over two minutes provided you keep charge in the Distributor. The Lo-Draw experimental helps with that, reducing the amount of strain this ferocious recharge rate puts on it.

2) The low power use to make the shields as resistant as they are, allows for the fitting of a monstrous Class 8 Shield Cell Bank, while still being able to utilise a Grade 5 Low Emissions Power Plant. Due to the relatively low absolute health of the shields, each use of this will restore roughly 80% of your entire shield health. And with the cold nature of the build, Heatsinks aren't necessary.

This gives you two options in combat. Allow the shields to recharge extremely quickly during any downtime. Or give yourself a shot in the arm with a Shield Cell if things get hairy and, if your shields are any higher than 20% at time of use, recover all of them over 17 seconds.

Overall the ship is relatively light (and cheap) for a combat fitted Cutter, allowing you a certain freedom of movement. And works well when you don't want to sit there twiddling your thumbs while Turrets shoot stuff you can't see, very slowly. She also makes rather good iced tea. :D

Ship build: https://s.orbis.zone/csey