Some notes before we start:

• This was tested before the latest hotfix today (11875683)
• There were 17 of us taking part in this testing
• There are many points that we have decided not to included here as we wanted to only include things that the vast majority of us agreed upon at the very least
• All ratings, thoughts, experiences, etc, are our own
• We paid for the Tiburon(s)
• It is a very cool and nice looking ship
• This is not a "Tiburon needs patching/fixing" (for the most part) review, we are intending to review it for it's intended purpose which is against sub/capital sized ships
• None of us are wanting or expecting it to roll over every ship in the game, we don't expect or even want something like
• There are multiple bugs with the ship which we hope will eventually be patched/fixed (day-1 Idris laser bug is still here)
• The laser carries over bugs from the laser of the Idris K-Kit, which means that a lot of the time the laser doesn't actually do any damage to some ships
• When the Tiburon turret's are manned, the pilot loses things like the PIP (which even without this specific bug, the PIP jitters over your screen anyway), targeting, reticle, etc
• The remote turrets, whilst extremely nice to control and are the best turrets in the entire game on any ship, are incredibly fast turning but we believe they should mostly stay like this (they are remote turrets after all)
• We believe in multi-crew gameplay but we don't think that it's there yet, nor do we think that fully crewing a couple of these along with a couple Perseus or more to take down an Idris is realistic in any way shape or form given the current state of Star Citizen (even though from what we can gather, that's what CIG wants), nor do we think that it's something that will happen much at all even when everything multi-crew wise is running smoothly (we planned this small test event as soon as we found out about the Tiburon, people aren't always available, you require a lot of active and (at least) semi-dedicated people to do stuff like this)
• Turret/AI blades will obviously make the Tiburon a much greater experience for a solo or semi-crewed ship, but we believe the Tiburon is still fundamentally flawed

Design: ^((8/10))

• Bloody great.
• CIG really nailed the looks of the ship. I especially really love the little fin on top of the ship, tell me it's not a Hammerhead.
• The sound design is pretty perfect for the most part, but there's also a lot of creaking in the ship that really makes it sound like you're piloting an old shoddy ship.
• They could've put in a bit of extra signage inside because a lot of people don't know how to get to the other floor/level of the ship, but once you run through the ship for 5 minutes you'll learn the layout easy enough.
• The engines inside the ship still blind you with their blue particles, and a lot of us (not all) had issues where if we stood next to the engines it was extremely loud.
• If you're the pilot and you need to quickly get out of your seat for one of many reasons, you'll be waiting a while for your chair turns around and for your character to sit there swinging their legs until they realise 15 seconds later that you wanted to get out of the seat.
• Overall, great job, could do with some improvements.

Mobility: ^((2/10))

• Slower than a Carrack, Hull C, Perseus, Starfarer (Gemini too), C/M/A2, 600i, and nearly half as slow as a regular Hammerhead (apart from the roll axis, where it's 2/3 the speed of the HH).
• It's barely faster at turning than a Reclaimer (2 degrees/second for pitch+yaw, 6 d/s for roll).
• Even a Polaris or an Idris can make it harder to attack the actual ship by simply rolling when using the Tiburon's laser.
• It's got a very poor response to slowing down/stopping, you will overshoot.
• The Tiburon's main weapon is it's laser, and it's incredibly slow to turn to your target.
• Definitely can be improved, even to balance it out.

What's it good at? (When the laser works and isn't doing 0 damage to the ship you're targeting without any shields) ^((5/10))

• RSI Constellation, Drake Corsair, Aegis Reclaimer, Origin 890 Jump, Ironclad (if not actively moving/avoiding), pretty much any ship that's big and slow.
• PvE missions (we're only counting those that worked and had little to no game related issues) for the most part are fine solo and easily doable with crew members. Don't expect to be able to do Gilly Flight School #8 solo, you NEED a crew (as you should).

What about it's intended/purpose built role? ^((2/10))

• The Tiburon is supposed to be designed for fighting large and slow ships.
• It doesn't do this well at all.
• Be it because the laser doesn't shoot for long enough, or because the laser takes so long to fully cooldown that their shield is already back up (even if you start firing immediately after the initial cooldown, you only get around 4 seconds of firing).

Perseus: (4/10)

• Can outmanoeuvre you and keep out of your laser.
• It'll also kill you very quickly with just 1 gunner, and stupidly quickly with 2 gunners.
• With all the turrets manned on the Tiburon, you have a small chance of winning the fight if you're against people in a Perseus who are at the same skill level as you, and pretty much no chance if they're highly skilled.

Polaris: (2/10)

• Can make it hard for you to keep track of at times, but for the most part you will be able to get your laser on target.
• However, for the Polaris the shields have a very short regen delay (6 seconds, 12 when shield is downed) and a very fast regen rate (nearly 50,000 HP/s). 648,000 shield HP total split between 4 sides gives us 162,000 HP per side.
• It takes around 3 seconds for 1 shield face to fully regen it's HP, with a 6 second shield regen delay that's 9 seconds total, and 15 seconds if that shield face is completely down.

The laser on the Tiburon does 18,000 DPS (burst, when under 1KM range) to the shield which would mean we need to shoot it for 9 seconds, but the first time you fire the laser from 0 heat lasts only 16 seconds. You get that shield face down, you've got 12 seconds before it starts to regen again so you get 5-6 seconds of actual armour/hull damage and then the laser overheats requiring around 4-5 seconds cooldown period before you can fire again. But this time, you don't get 16 seconds of firing the laser, you only get about 4 seconds because the laser doesn't completely cooldown after overheating, it only partially cools down. You only get around 4 seconds of firing the laser after it overheats unless you wait for it to fully cooldown (which takes just under 20 seconds), but by then their shield is already back up and at full health. This is just the laser on it's own.

So really, it shouldn't be a problem then, right?

Well like any other ship in the game the Polaris can move, and anyone who knows anything about shields and regen will turn to force you to shoot a different shield face whilst the one you were just shooting at recovers.
Even when trying to correct for this, you can't keep up with it. You have to hope that the Polaris gives you enough time to be able to take that shield down.

And on top of that, the Tiburon has very poor pitch/yaw/roll control, you're very likely to "wobble" when aiming.

So what then?

• You NEED the Tiburon to be fully manned otherwise you're fighting a cat with no claws or teeth whilst you're a single mouse with stumps for teeth trying to nibble away.
• And that's just against a solo Polaris. Even if the Polaris has 1 pilot and 1 manned gun (using it's S6 cannons), you do not stand a chance as the cannons on the Polaris will 1 shot each of the Tiburon's S7 turrets (each turret only has 5,500 HP), just 1 click for the Polaris gunner.

What about 2 Tiburon's?

• It's the same story, except if you're both targeting the same side you will be able to do some damage to the armour/hull.
• I would recommend taking it in turns firing lasers and whilst 1 is firing the other should be waiting for their heat to reduce further, giving them more laser firing time.
• Target the Polaris main gunner first, that will be the only thing on a stock Polaris that can kill you (unless the Polaris bumps into you, then that will also kill you).

So for 1 fully crewed Tiburon against a duo in a Polaris, good luck, but it's possible.
And for 2 fully crewed Tiburon, why are you not in 2/3 Perseus?

Idris? ^((0/10))

• Don't waste your time.
• 300,000 HP per main engine, you'll be there a while taking them all out.
• Even a fully crewed Tiburon barely puts a scratch in the paint of an Idris.
• We tried 3 Tiburon each with a pilot and 4 remote turret gunners on the S7 cannons vs an Idris M, then an Idris P with the K-Kit.
• Each test the Idris had 1 pilot and 1 main gunner, each test the Idris won quickly.

What we think needs to change:

Ship HP:

• It's way too weak.
• With just 187,200 total HP and 60,000 HP for it's vital hull.
• A single S9 missile will take it out (we've also noticed issues with flares/chaff not properly working this patch, they seem to hit much more often than not), Idris railgun's are back on the menu and will 1 shot the Tiburon, and due to having such a low total HP pool we found that a single Perseus (2 gunners) can take out the Tiburon in under 10 seconds when shooting at just the hull.
• The Hammerhead on the other hand, has a total of 403,400 HP and is much more in line with what the Tiburon should have.
• Medium fighters can destroy the Tiburon with little to no effort with Deadbolt ballistic cannons, and even a single light fighter (Gladius + Deadbolt works) can neuter/take out the Tiburon with simple manoeuvres to not get hit.
• On a side note, the laser for the Tiburon has 750,000 HP which is 4 times the actual ship HP itself.

Engine armour/HP:

• The engines are very big, very open, very easy to shoot, and are very fast to be destroyed (especially with ballistic cannons).
• There also seems to be a bug that happens half the time where if 1 engine is destroyed, all the others will fall off along with it.

Remote turret HP:

• 5,500 HP is a single shot from a Polaris main gun, a single shot from a Perseus main gun, a single shot from an Idris S7 ballistic main turret, or a couple shots from most fighters with ballistic cannons.

Laser cooldown speed:

• The cooldown rate it really slow.
• We believe it needs either double the cooldown rate, or have a 4.5-5 second cooldown that completely cools it down.

Ship rotation speed:

• We played around with using a Hammerhead and pretended to shoot a laser at multiple ships, we strongly believe that the Hammerhead is a good balance for ship rotational speed as smaller ships can still easily avoid the laser, whilst larger ships like the Polaris and 890 Jump are better to target, with ships like the Corsair or Constellation still being in a good spot of being able to escape if they want to, and being abled to be tracked if they don't.

Manoeuvrability speed/force:
We've noticed that it can be extremely slow to stop when moving at regular SCM speeds, even with the afterburner.
A slight bump to this we think would be a nice to have change as it's extremely easy to overshoot things.

Obviously these are our opinions and we each have our own favourite playstyles, but we all dabble in combat a lot as it's a pretty big component of Star Citizen.

We don't know where this ship sits in a fleet:

• It's very nice looking and it's cool, we all agree with that, but we cannot find a place for it in a fleet.
• Cannons are pretty much the go-to now and the ballistics punch through to components.
• You'll take down larger ships with the ballistics on the Tiburon before you can do any meaningful amount of damage with the laser.
• There are much better ships out there for much less if you want to attack sub/capital sized ships, namely the Perseus.
• If you're solo, you're targeting ships between the size of a Constellation/Corsair up to an 890 Jump. Anything smaller and you're not hitting them for more than a couple seconds (which isn't enough, even against a lot of smaller ships).
• Fully crewed, you're going to have trouble with a 2-man Polaris and you're wasting time against a solo or even duo Idris crew. You can win, you've just got to hope and pray you don't get shot first or they don't QT out of there (bring a QI, but it'll be the primary threat more than the Tiburon).

We are curious as to where you would/are planning to fit this ship in with your fleet/crew?
So far, the 1 thing that we can agree on liking it for is solo PvE missions.
However, this ship wasn't designed for that, but instead for battle against sub/capital ships.
We do not see this as being something used in fleet battles as it's incredibly weak/easy to take out, and ships like the Perseus already exists at a much lower price with much better firepower, survivability, and lower crew members required to get full use of the firepower.

Overall, it's a very nice looking ship with a pretty great design to it.

But in it's current state, we don't think it's a great ship, and for it's intended purpose it's pretty bad with better choices out there.