I suppose so...

/Agree'd

No they do not need a Retrofit.

They are not meant to be useful, they are fun vanity ships, nothing more.

I was very excited when I first puchased my Runabout.... that lasted about 2 minutes.

Why would Cryptic even bother with the development time/resource with Runabouts when there is nothing to do with them (apart from being target practice). A simple racing mini-game would be enough. Woudn't it be nice to have a use of it?

there are people out there who want to be shuttle and fighter pilots. Runabouts them self have been proven to be able to handle ship to ship combat quite well as has been proven in most star trek shows when facing a larger ship while they are not the best choice to bring to combat but in STO its isn't even feesable to use the runabout in game especially in PVP. Any ship that i work towards purchasing with ingame or out of game currenct should be usable, And while there is no information as to what tier this ship even actually belongs to other than the pricing of a captain ranked ship and the set up of less than a starter ship. I for one would like to see these shipsmade combat worthy for STO and expanded upon with the inclusion of other shuttle craft that is cannon and with weapons available for shuttles only. While the KDF might be limited upon the small craft side of this, there are all the small craft that have been brought into the game just for the Carriers to deploy.

Actually, I think runabouts could use some love in this game and given more of a role than just being there for novelty.

I have been thinking of ways to make them more viable and I think I have an option or two that would make them a pretty vital part of the game at least for PvP and potentially PvE unless someone has beat me to the punch on the notion.

I am leaning towards giving them a covert ops ship appeal rather than a combat facelift.
We already have a lot of ships to cover the combat role and nothing on the covert ops front to my personal awareness.

I am thinking something along the lines of personal ship codes i.e. being able to hack an apponent's ship in combat by having another player fly in close in a shuttle or runabout to the other ship and tail it and at the same time trying to gain access to the other ship's shields or what have you by decrypting your enemy's ship code.
Another runabout could fly along side you and keep your ship's code scrambled so the other team's hacker could not gain access to your ship's systems.

To make a long story short, yes they need more of a presence in this game and I support that, but as far as retrofits go, not until the ships get more of a role in the game first.

I wonder how much we can really do when the foundry is released?

I have a mission I would like to do were it uses the runabout.

It would start with your ship dropping out of warp and losing power. then you get attacked by 3 fighter ships, And you have to go out in the runabout to defend your ship while its being repaired.

And then come to find out it was a trap by this race to loot bigger ships. They have set up a device that only attacks bigger ships warping in this area. So the fighter/runabouts are not harmed by it.

So to finish you would have to take out that device and like 3 to 5 set of fighter. And after you destroy the device and get back to your ship then you would have like a battleship to take out from that race with your main ship. thats what I would like to do. But I know the foundry is going to be cookie cutter mission at best.