PSA regarding the Triton

[Zippicus]

While playing my newest game I got fairly lucky with some early Reticulan missions including the imperial probe mission so I managed to unlock all the Reticulan stuff.  One of those techs is the seemingly nice Triton, a hybrid transport that you can load up with 15 gals.  I thought hey that sounds pretty good and proceeded to build one.  I loaded it up with my "B" team and sent them off to a ratman mission for some easy stat gains. 

When the mission starts I'm pretty happy with what I see.  The thing has doors, big beautiful 4 wide doors.  I don't know what problem my runts have with doors but they sure don't like to put them on any ships I build.  I start thinking that my new toy has real possibilities, a big ass ship where my gals aren't automatically exposed to gauss toting mercs or plasma blasting cyberdiscs.  So I pop open those doors and don't see anything and take a step out of the ship.  This promptly triggers reaction fire from some rat outside of my night vision range.  Now I'm thinking that this is no big deal, rats have wimpy guns and I'm in some mid tier armor so no sweat.  The shot sails past my gal, and the 3 or 4 behind her and slams into some fancy equipment lining the side of the transport.  Now this fancy equipment lines the sides and back of the transport and there is a lot of it.  Said fancy equipment promptly explodes.  That explosion, in addition to damaging some of my gals, causes the fancy equipment right next to it to explode.  As  you might guess this causes a chain reaction of exploding equipment, including the stockpile full of rockets, grenades, and other explody stuff.  Long story short, the lone bullet sent the whole craft up in a massive fireball killing all 15 gals.  Other than that, nice ship.

All I could do was stare dumbfounded at my monitor until I burst out laughing.  I wish I would have thought to take some screenshots to share but it was too much shock and awe.  So if you do decide to use one of these ships, have one of your runts stick a warning label on there somewhere warning of the dangers of stray weapons fire.

[Ethereal_Medic]

Rule Nr. 1 - Never leave the craft on turn 1.

Other than that I'm quite surprised that this is IN FACT something this particular ship is doing if the fragile controls getting shot at. Seems like the flintlock rolled high enough to make the consoles explode.

Don't leave the craft on turn 1 if you have solid doors to hide your army.

Edit: Checked the vessel in question and it really seems like you got unlucky quite alot.
The bullet swoops through your squad and hit one of the engine-thingies with at least a 50-ish roll to cause the chainreaction.

[Marza]

I feel a bit bad to laugh at the unfortunate luck, but that's a great AAR!

Similar thing with the purple turtle. Don't flush out a flying enemy standing on the roof of the turtle with molotovs. You may have a bad day.

[sinisteragent]

Rule Nr. 1 - Never leave the craft on turn 1.

Pah! No booty for cowards!

[legionof1]

Flavor aside not moving turn does have legitimate value, since all enemies on turn one have full TU and as such much more opportunity for reaction fire. 

[Dwarmin]

Yah, 2nd turn exiting the craft is always optimal...smoke grenades to break enemy LOS vital if you are being bracketed (Important because Open Xcom aliens try save their TU's)...but don't wait too long, because after a few turns aliens can start lobbing grenades or blaster bombs. I also like to use HWP's for extra security.

Note, I dunno how much of this advice applies to this specific mod.

[ohartenstein23]

Unless you have a door, that smoke turn 1 may not save you from that enemy staring into your transport - the recent sniper AI code lets them fire into the smokescreen even if they can't see you.

[BetaSpectre]

I try to avoid open door transports. The Triton is optimal for that kind of scenario imo. The Reaction fire risk is real, but unless you fight mercs it's not that bad.

[Ethereal_Medic]

I try to avoid open door transports. The Triton is optimal for that kind of scenario imo. The Reaction fire risk is real, but unless you fight mercs it's not that bad.

If you're going to avoid those transporters, you've to find an alternative for the drill-reward ships and the thunder-horse.
You'll probably have to stick with various small-crew ships until you can get a leviathan in the later stages.

[legionof1]

Doored ships are nice but they are the minority outside the early game. But then again once you get to ships that take a whole map tile or more the odds of faceing down something you can't handle staring down your doorway drop alot. The Menace ships for example need to spawn on the upper left edge of a map to have a decent chance to expose the interior to fire right off the bat.

[Ethereal_Medic]

Doored ships are nice but they are the minority outside the early game. But then again once you get to ships that take a whole map tile or more the odds of faceing down something you can't handle staring down your doorway drop alot. The Menace ships for example need to spawn on the upper left edge of a map to have a decent chance to expose the interior to fire right off the bat.

Selling point of those are the crew size and 2 HWP slots. You can also use the roof. El Fuego and Fortuna shouldn't pick more than 1 HWP or run low on actual crew on the field while Boni and Metallo can bring 2 HWP's and still have a decent fighting crew of hands/lokk'nar/slaves/syns etc.

The huge open ramp facing on the whole map is the worst spawning situation possible since the front row can't move or trigger shots facing the craft. The pit in the back has to be used carefully as well since a drop down without visual contact on landing = reactionfire. In this situation you also can't climb the ladder to the roof. Since the game doesn't allow to 'moonwalk' the stairs your hand pokes out the head in the wrong direction = reactionfire.

High-risk missions against superior weaponry using the menace class is a gamble considering the spawning location. Snapshot-rockets and tankfire into the craft is a common thing only doors could prevent. Maybe in one version the ships get their own unique maps other than just a palette-swap. Quick and efficient solution but myself as a Fortuna-User until I can get a decent alternative don't need this big-ass ramp in the front if I can only use 13 hands or 9 hands / 1x HWP or 5 hands / 2x HWP.

I feel like there is space for a 'all codex' troop transporter to have a different choice other than using menace -> thunderhorse -> leviathan. Maybe safety doors for 0x HWP slots as a trade off and no gunports?