Namuras

Considering the current railgun mechanics means that haveing a big armored cube might even be a disadvantage in PvP tbh.

https://www.avorion.net/forum/index.php/topic,2219.0.html Taking the findings of that thread into account: rails are by far the best weapon.

I never said you where wrong in the first place, i just didn't know and wanted to find out myself. Especially since railguns where so much better than any other option.

I don't think your family comparisson can be applied to the situation. You are just on friendly terms but not connected to the faction. So you beeing neutral and not taking a standing hit is perfectly fine... The situation you discribe is closer to you beeing part of BOTH factions and not doing jack shit... in which case a standing hit with both is fine. Also i am not against consequences or more interaction with factions. Also the 10km rule proposed is kinda "meh" and not harsh enough tbh. Just beeing in system should make you either leave or whatever, since -atleast between factions- it is a warzone.

I get your point but please consider the unarmed mining ship operating in a dense asteroid field. Faction battle between 2 the ship is friendly with erupts around it. Is the ship supposed to take a faction hit with both for not getting involved? What if it has one low tech turret and no shields and the ships fighting are all Frigates or better? Is the ship supposed to leave the mining it was doing and fight? I'm not sure if you remember, but I did specifically state that if you were within 10KM... but the specifics are less critical to the intent... if there is a battle... and you don't want to take a hit or help, you get out of the way... Just like the real world... you don't just sit there and ignore it... If mining that asteroid is more important than your faction standing... then by all means, stay focused on the asteroid.. if your standing is more important... either move out of range for 5 minutes for the fight to finish, or mine a different 'roid. This is not game breaking, its intent is to have you accountable to your faction standings. I can see how taking a faction hit would appropriate IF you are part of that faction, but for a friendly neutral party? Just no... why force combat? As i said: what happens if you are friendly to both factions? Maybe there can be a system where you sign up to be part of the faction... some sort of hired mercenary? It could open up to a few different missions you could run to further your factions wellbeeing. Or sth like the salvaging stations? You can buy a salvaging permit at any station / military ship and go nuts on wrecks. But w/o that you take the normal standings hit.

I'll redo it later and see what went wrong... Also i do test with and w/o integrity fields. Edit: So it appears it shows it now. Don't know why before, or maybe I just didn't see it. But i observed sth other: Still using the same setup as before. 336,7 dmg /shot railgun, 7 hull penetration. this is what happened: The thin layers of iron armor where hit for 2352 damage (7*336) The thin layers of ogonite armor where hit for 2352 damage (7*336) BUT The thick layers (3003 hp each) where ALSO hit for 2352 damage. I expected the first ones tbh, but the 3rd on? The gun does not have enough damage to kill the first block, but still applies damage as if it was penetrating and damage 7 layers even tho it failed to destroy the first block. Then i put one thick block (3003 HP) as single and wonder oh wonder: 336 damage It seems that railguns assume to penetrate all underlaying blocks they hit and apply THAT damage to all blocks... even if they cannot destroy the first block. The difference between using Integrity field and no field was: the thin layers of ogonite armor took 3 hits before getting destroyed. no observable difference between the others. It really seems that railguns are applying more damage than they should in many cases and are currently utterly broken.

The attacker has the advantage that he knows where and when he will strike... unless the hypothetical defenders can defend every entrypoint into the core with superior forces 24/7 they have no chance to keep others out atm.

I don't see what is so hard in making a practice dummy to run tests on... but as far as I can tell, yes, blocks HP doesnt matter. I used layers with more and less HP than Railgun damage rating was, yet the damage to the ship HP remained consistent. I made practice dummys... they just don't show damage numbers when shot. But i'll take your word for it that it isn't block HP that counts, but rather the damage per shot.

Yes, but again, you will always receive (base damage)*(penetration rating) to your ship HP. It is much better to instead just sandwich a single system block between the two layers of armor - this way the damage will only triple, and all the penetration beyond that will be wasted. Do you really? Or do you recieve the block HP * penetration depth in damage? when i try this in single player creative there are no damage numbers popping up since i am shooting myself basically. so i dont know for sure what damage i actually do. I just presume you wouldn't do more damage than the block had HP.

Not very sandboxy ideas you guys have... why force people to do stuff? Also: what happens when you are friendly with two factions that are at war? beeing neutral should be possible without them hating you... Also racing to an advanced material with an iron shuttle is sth you choose to do... same with breaching the core and following the quests. there is no where written you have to do that. If you want the game to push back more: try higher difficulty settings and DON'T rush to some advanced material... and then try to fight with your iron / tritanium ship if you want a challenge.

You could be right, but remember almost everyone is going to want to have avorion and to want to have a lot of it, the factions will be looking for dominance and want a edge over everyone else. Sure, but see my edit... Also the attacker is at an advantage here...

Tbh i think it will be very hard for a player faction to control EVERY supply of avorion... Edit: and if they can hold the core, they probably have "won" either way b/c of sheer numbers of players...

That are basically my findings too. Regarding armor tho: you could stack 0.05 x 0.05 x 0.05 hullblocks (weight) in in thick (20+) layers and abuse the fact that railguns only penetrate up to their penetration value and not further idependent of damage done.

Railgun hits not registering and them blowing thru more blocks than they should are both bugs imho...

Hmmmm.... with the advanced turret stats mod you can actually see how many layers of blocks a railgun is able to penetrate (given enough damage done i presume). So far i have seen anything between 2 and 7 blocks of penetration. Considering a railgun does 1k damage per shot and can penetrate 4 blocks. I am unsure of how the mechanics for this apply tho. Does it mean a railgun (given enough damage and/or low block HP) can destroy 4 blocks and then damage/destroy the 5th but no further (even tho in theory it could)? or does it stop at the 4th and excessive damage is lost? They way to mitigate damage and render railguns somewhat less effective would then be to layer thin armorsheets and basically "abuse" the system. edit: I did i quick test in creative. a) 20 layers of Iron armor 0.05 thick (21HP/block), b) 20 layers of ogonite armor 0.05t thick (157HP/block) c) 10 layers of ogonite armor 1 thickness (3003HP/block) i shot each once with a Tech 12 Avorion railgun (single) with a damage/shot of 336,7 and a hull penetration of 7 blocks. What i expected to find was: a) 7 blocks destroyed, damage to 8th b) 2 blocks destroyed, damage to 3rd c) damage only to the first block What i found: a) 7 blocks destroyed b) 7 blocks destroyed c) probably damage to the first block Interestingly the game does not show damaged blocks in the repair screen. I thought it might. Also it seems that railguns do not bleed / lose damage if the penetrate a block, but instead apply full damage to every block up until their respective hull penetration value. So in this case each shot did the following: a) 7 x 21HP = 147 damage b) 7 x 157HP = 1099 damage c) ??? So considering railguns: the block HP only matters if it is greater than the damage / shot. Which means that if you want to reliably protect against railguns it is best to layer as many thin and small blocks as possible of trinium (high penetration, low damage /shot railgun) Or fewer small but very thick ogonite armor blocks. (low penetration, high damage/shot). Personally i think this is an oversight in the penetration mechanics of railguns, they should NOT deal full damage to each succesive block up until the max hull penetration value. This also explains why railguns are the superior weapon of choice in any circumstance either pvp or pve. Near instant application combined with a broken penetration system makes them shipgutters. Not even taking shield penetration into account. :P Edit 2: Since this was done in creative and i cheated in bunch of random weapons: the max penetration value for a railgun i found was 14. It seems that the hull penetration is affected by rarity mostly. All weapons where techlevel 12 since i spawned them close to the spawn system.

But the thing is that most AI ships are quite big as well ;D So you have to have a big ship later on to survive. Well... i know, i have been to 0,0... But i didn't need a behemoth to do so. The ship i used had 7 upgradeslots with computer core, weighs 0,16 Mt and has a volume of 6m m³. It was build with the ultra flat thruster stacking and i just loaded it into a creative world. It is flyable even without updating the thrusters... the only problem i see sofar with it is its inherent lack of yaw (which is a problem of the hulldesign)

I guess many of the complaints in this thread stem from people who where use to their multi million m³ behemoths to (keep) flying like a small drone. I for my part would wish to switch of the the automatic dampening (like space engineers) effect thrusters have while in standard control mode. I know the alternative mode gives you that but it is too akward to play with for me.

I am loving it... :) Been burning around asteroid fields at highspeed all night yesterday in a very small ship. Soooo much fun to actually glide around them. Also did the max values for pitch / roll / yaw increase? the buildmenu suggest so, since it now shows a max of 4°/sec of instead 2°/s as before?

regarding the "hit / miss" issue with railguns: i think it is an issue with the server recognizing hits... i have it happen to me aswell, but only once the game gets somewhat slow very late... And with ur machinegun rails that might just exagerate the issue

I think you missed the fact that it was 27k PER TURRET, not total. Best I got out of drops was a total of about 30-40k omicron with like 30 turrets installed, these turrets almost do that EACH. I don't use them though they are too OP, it just feels like cheating. I had them for fun when I fought the gate keeper and I took 25% off it's shields in like 5 seconds. All the adds were 1 shots. Proves the point custom turrets are broken. This is with 36 turrets installed: http://imgur.com/a/P9SlD I guess... maybe burstfire is not meant for railguns :P But the omicron value is really not all that telling. I have e.g. bolters which give me a theoretical omicron of 200k. Should be wastly superior to my railguns with only 15k, right? They aren't... they overheat so fast i actually have trouble killing stuff... (mind you i don't build big ass ships... the largest i ever build has 7 upgrade slots with a computer core)

Keep looking, I found 1000+ dps salvage lasers many times over... I'm still using 3500 dps lasers and I've found better since then, just didn't bother crafting them cause those already melt facea. The crown goes to my 27k omicron railguns, I can take out avorion level sector invasions with a lair of these... Had 40 made just for the heck of it and they vaporize all I throw at them one shot lol. I got good weapons... they say it is only 15k omicron, but the high level of shield penetration makes more than up for it.

How are they hit and miss? Every civ I found had at least one factory and often 2-3 of them and every 1/3 factory has at least one absurd combination of OP turret. Then it's just a matter of gathering mats which can be done across 2-3 civs easily, just takes time... Gimme 4 hours on a fresh start and I'll show up to your doorstep with 100k+ omicron no problem. Then you are far more lucky than me... i get lots of weird combinations for weapons, but rarely anything usefull or worth the hassel of gathering materials for. But then again i usualy only look for salvaging turrets and railguns / lasers.

Thing is: turret factories are as much hit and miss as drops... Also consider that you will have to gather materials for a long time to actually build these super weapons.

Also, if your giant ship is very very compact (aka deathcube) it is very likely that your thrusters are not very far from the center point of the ship. the further away they are, the more effective they get (exception for breaking thrusters)

1. Get a trademodule of highish tier 2. build a cheap throwaway freighter with decent hold 3. find amazing traderoute with 100%+ profit 4. run it 5. ??? 6. profit