I have already put a tonne of time into my Corsair, both theory crafting and bounty hunting, and here are my thoughts.

The size 7 thrusters are interesting. You end up not being able to underweight the ship to get more speed like you can with others. Instead, you have to work pretty hard to max out the weight to get the speed to drop. Even packed full of heavy modules and high ammo capacity weapons, I just barely lose a few m/s from max. This means the Corsair is an excellent multirole, smuggler, and tank, while still maintaining its fantastic speed and decent handling.

The hardpoints are begging you to use fixed weapons. In fact, gimbals and turrets may perform poorly here, due to the hull blocking much of their FOV. The only exception is if you’re doing all frags… Some of the hardpoints are still too separated to focus on smaller targets, so for frags I still recommend gimbals.

It works fantastic with 3x rail and 3x plasma. I ran this with grade 3 low emissions power plant and so long as I keep enough power in the wep capacitor, it doesn’t overheat. Unfortunately, the ship doesn’t have the greatest heat capacity and dissipation, and few utility slots for heatsinks, so you are forced to struggle a bit with power by using low emissions.

There’s an important trick with fixed weapons: set them up in two groups of three. The 3 top hardpoints (L, M, M) have good convergence, and the bottom 3 (L, L, M) do as well. To run 3 rails, you will hate your life if you use the 3 medium slots. Instead, use the top group and give up one of your large slots for a rail. I haven’t tried it, but I bet all 4 of the side mounted hardpoints (M, M, L, L) would be suitable for convergence as well, if you want to run a true rail sniper or 4x PAs.

Truth is, even with the size 7 distributor and its heat characteristics, the ship will struggle with too many high draw/heat weapons.

For AX combat, it seems to pretty much be the perfect ship. I haven’t completed or tried a build yet, but based on what I see from the community, my experience with AX, some EDSY theorycrafting and my experiences bounty hunting, I am certain that it will be the only ship I use for any kind of AX combat.

Based on the optional slots, this ship is probably the best medium tank. I haven’t looked at this exhaustively but it seems like it’s going to be hands down the best medium hybrid or shield tank, and probably competing for top spot as the best hull tank.

Jump range leaves a little to be desired, but you deal with that with almost any of the well-rounded mediums. I’d still rather a Mandalay as my space taxi and general “get around and get stuff done” ship. The Corsair will mainly find it’s home in combat operations, smuggling, and piracy.

Hope some folks find this helpful, feel free to post any questions!