I haven't read everything, but from what I got was there's some discussion if the Aux cannons are worth it.

They are.

In fact, I ran with Horizon the other night as DPS wingman. I kept up with him and scaled higher than him on the spike that was needed to take out TRH members. The Vesta spike measured at 23600 per second for 12 seconds. Damian's Bug went approximately 19600 DPS from all weapons for 12 seconds. The 12 second margin is the quantum focus phaser firing time frame. It's what makes this ship keep up with big bad bugs on DPS. However, I measured at 9.5 million damage, and he went 15 million in total damage dealt. But the spike is what scored the kills. We saw guys survive these blasts.

It was a TRH hybrid vs another TRH hybrid. We host these on a regular basis, please drop by our TS for some of these thrillers. INTERNATIONALPVP.TYPEFRAG.COM:62245

Anyway, back on topic, the drop in aux power due to power drain from the cannons is mediocre and does not effect the numbers too much.

Let's weigh the effects of the cons and pros.
Cons:
You lose about 1% in shield resistance buff from your TSS 2 and 3. Your hazards lose about 1k heal as well. You lose some DPS on the focus phaser. You are heavily reliant on your aux system for damage, heals, and science abilities. Aux disable will mess you up.

Pros:
The losses to damage resistance are pretty mediocre to say the least for what you gain in return. The power reliant heals are also at a sufficient power level not be disregarded or deemed 'useless'.

With commitment into auxilery power, you can freely commit all remaining power into engines for increased turn rate. This improves your DPS tenfold. Having said that, you can put three turrets in the back, a weapon battery, and when on an attack run you can buff those turrets with a weapon battery. The drain on all your weapons would not exceed that of a tactical escort because the weapons are spread across two subsystems.

The focus phaser relies heavily on turn rate, and auxilery power. So it is crucial to have both of these systems at high power. Having said that, my cannon fires at 13k dps tops (no pun intended) w/o particle generator consoles.

End Pro/Cons

The ship does have a significantly low hull. So your main defense will be shields. I took 14.5 million damage in a match that lasted 1 hour, and died 7 times vs 3 Tactical Escorts. Hank was flying his Science Tac Odyssey, and died 6 times taking 13.5 million damage. The amount of heals dispersed to us was respective to the amount of damage taken. The ship holds out well with the following setup.

2 RCS Mk XII Purple
2 Field Generators or sacrifice 1 field generator for Tachyokinetic.
1 Quantum Focus Phaser
1 Jump Console
4 Phaser consoles
Shield repair drones.
2 Piece Borg + Maco Shield

Rep Passives +30 shields +10% hull regen

This is the standard DPS set up. And here's the spec tree for it.

http://www.stoacademy.com/tools/skil...=PaxTacVesta_0

You can play around with the console lay out, the TBR is primarly for AOE crowd control. It gets a decent amount of push with all that aux power too, so you can push your enemies out very effectively and damage them while you do it.

This build is open to constructive criticism, but note that I have respec'd around 8-9 times. This is the best version of it I have run. Also note, you can adopt a more crowd control method, by adopting the purple bubble console that pushes stuff away from you, lose the quantum phaser for this so drop the tractor and pick another EPS1 or Hazard. Or a healer role where you put on the fermion field, you can lose the field generator for this one. These variants fit the description of the ship, where you swap one console for another, but never run three. Here's why:

You lose way too much defense. Yes I get the perfect shield, but any disable turns it off. So you have an ability that does nothing every 3 minutes. You can sacrifice a console for this for more beefy feel.

Anyway, good luck fellow Vesta captains.

I want to add that if anyone knows this ship it's Pax, I've seen him run it in just about everything for a long while now, and he was very interested in pushing the envelope with it.

atleast there would be something in there worth buying now.

I have a tact in a Vesta with a somewhat similar build:

http://www.stoacademy.com/tools/skil...ild=vesta123_0

My Consoles for this one are:

Borg Console
Neutronium
Quantum Field Console
3x Phaser Relay
2x Field Generators
Shield Emitter
Wave Function Console

Im open to critique on this build. Was kinda thinking about something else other than VM3 and possibly running EPtS1 and 2 on the LT Eng, and running TSS1 on the ENS Sci for some extra team healing instead.

Weird coincidence that a ship with this layout seems to be a natural fit for a tech doff build, yet you can't do it effectively with aux powered cannons.

Thanks for the clarification Pax. That ship of yours does bring the pain, that is for damn sure. That was a great match too. You guys have those number parsers to get that raw data, which is great.

If the aux cannons do not nerf your healing or Sci goodies, then I say rock em.

A side note: see how Pax is running 2 RCS.....

Smart pilot.

Have fun kill bad guys.

That's like saying water is wet....

Oh **** I've seen you around dude.

Right on.

You can never have too much RCS. NEVER!

Would you trade 1 RCS for a Tachyokin if you had more than 1 RCS...?