Fidelis Cutter

The Fidelis Cutter is an old design, and a very heavy ship. Blocky and hard to kill, the Fidelis Cutter is popular with pirates and Smugglers alike. Armed with a Mk-Alpha torpedo, the Fidelis Cutter carries 30 crew.

Unlocked By
The Fidelis Cutter is always available. It is a starting ship option if your Ship priority is set to at least B.

Best Professions for this Ship
The Fidelis Cutter is a combat-oriented vessel, especially for those who are attempting to disable vessels at long-range (rather than cracking hulls or boarding them.) This lends itself particularly nicely to Military Officers and Pirates. The decent defensive characteristics of this vessel also lend itself to a Bounty Hunter or any other job relying on boarding tactics in Crew Combat. It should be noted that successful boarding tactics with the Cutter will require some investment before they will be viable.

Best Early Upgrades
Like many vessels, upgrading the weapons locker to at least an A3 locker is a rather urgent need. After that, there are two broad strategies for your upgrades:

Improve the long-range
The default setup for this ship already has you using all eight reactor points to good effect with the missile system, and two sizes of torpedoes. If you can still hit reliably, you will typically be safer firing from range 4 where enemy torpedoes are less accurate rather than range 5. (However, unless you upgrade to a Chaser engine, your move to range 4 will only permit you to fire a single weapon during that turn.) A reasonable approach for improving your combat efficiency is to slowly swap your existing weapons for the higher level variants of the same exact type. Your main concern is to stay in range 4 or 5 and burn the enemy crew and components alive with electrical fires and aftershocks. You do not want your enemy to close to range 3 where your firepower is going to seriously fade. To this end, investing in components that add to your range change dice may be a defensive necessity.

Focus on boarding
A less common approach for the Cutter is to take advantage of defenses and focus on crew combat. The Cutter doesn't start with any weapons that cover range 1 and the Imperator isn't going to be very strong by itself at range 2. What you want is to be able to move every turn, while also using exactly 4 reactor points in weaponry. That typically will mean swapping out any 3 RP cost weapons with something that benefits boarding such as a Peak Velocity Matrix. You'll have to do some shuffling to then replace some of the lost firepower with smaller 2 RP weapons. You'll probably want to swap the Mk-Alpha torpedo first as it will only be able to contribute damage for two ranges whereas the missile array can hit for three of your advancing turns. While this is a lot of work to get started, the Cutter's natural defenses and initial defensive components (and medical bay) give you some leeway in taking hits while you get in position to board. Talents permitting boarding actions at more ranges should be seriously considered with this ship.

Risks of this Ship
This ship is most comparable to the Guardian Interceptor. Unlike the Interceptor, the Cutter doesn't have very balanced firepower coverage, forcing it to pigeon-hole itself into long-range combat, or, more rarely, boarding. Like the Interceptor, it is a strange choice for mercantile efforts as ships larger than it and smaller than it all seem to be naturally better suited to those tasks.