Recently, I’ve become rather attached to flying a fully loaded Tycho, consisting of Push the Limit, Daredevil, Experimental Interface, and of course Chaardan Refit and A Wing Test Pilot. This comes in at 33 points, which is a ridiculous amount for a 2 attack ship, so I would never think that it could pull its own weight, and while I’m still not certain it does, it at least deserves a closer look.
With PTL, Tycho maintains the ability to turtle up with focus and evade, which can be essential to the survivability of an A wing. Furthermore, he can boost and daredevil, which everyone has talked about on paper, but today I’m going to explore it in a practical application. First, the order that the Boost/DD occur, drastically changes the potential final position. Below is a map of the starting position (well, after the maneuver is complete) indicated as a Prototype A wing, and all of the final positions the two maneuvers can create. The DD -> Boost are marked with a Yellow dot, while the Boost -> DD are unmarked.
As you can see, the combination of the two moves can drastically affect his final position, as well as his bearing. This is good and everything, but Soontir can move around to several different places as well, costs 30 points, gets the same 2 actions plus a focus, is more defense because he can take 2 focuses and an evade. Oh yeah, and he has 3 attack, and PS9. So why would anyone take Tycho over Fel? To properly answer that, let’s take a look at where Fel can end up. Soontir can BR and boost, but does not use DD. His final positions are shown below. The BR -> Boost are marked with a yellow dot, and the Boost -> BR are unmarked.
Technically, Fel has more final positions, as each direction of Barrel Roll can be taken forwards or backwards (or in the middle). However, the orientation of the final position has much less variety. He is always facing forwards or at a 45 degree from his original position, whereas Tycho can turn up to 135 from his original position. For one final comparison between the two, I am going to overlay the most drastic positions of each in one illustration.
As you can see, not only does Tycho go further away from the original position, but he has much more control with his orientation. That’s all well and good, but without a solid game plan to use this flexibility, one can quickly become lost and give up on Tycho. So, I figured I would share with all of you a few combinations of maneuvers and actions that I have found to be useful. Finally, I will conclude with a demonstration on how to approach and stay in Dash 58’s blind spot.
To begin with, we will discuss the obvious and not as obvious K turn. Tycho can perform a 1 turn, followed by a DD to pull a K turn with minimal horizontal movement (and no vertical movement). This can obviously be used with any speed turn to translate his position further up and away. But more interesting are the K turns you can complete if you use a bank as your starting maneuver. This requires boosting as well as DD, but can get you further away horizontally, which is often useful when circling around a rock.
As for other useful combinations, I have found doing a bank one direction and DD in the other to be quite successful. I’ve used the same idea with DD one way and boosting the other. I’ve decided to call the 3 right bank, DD left, boost left the “question,” because not only does it get your opponent questioning how the heck you ended up where you did, but it also looks like a question mark. This combination works great to close around the side of a ship that is looking to joust. Even better is when you side slip an entire enemy formation, and end up with a R1 shot on the target of your choice while they’re left with nothing.