Building Academy

kieffer5101

damkiller how are you going to win a fight if your ship is meant for defence? that is a bad excuse to tell yourself.

damkiller

kieffer5101
If my ship is in group of ships Must has role this role is defender protect coming fire meanwhile group attacking in back ship must has role

Sombreroman

kieffer5101

To be fair, it is possible if you have good enough fire, or suppression damage (I.E. Electro-Bolts & EMP Missiles).

However, these examples were from my older designs, before Electro-Bolts were changed too much and EMP missiles even existed at all... Not sure if I should post them because of that; they may not still be viable.

Astrum

CursedPh4nt0m Sturggling with being able to properly defend the beams, while still having beneficial firing arcs (A perpetual sturggle for diags, right? 😉):

Armor might be a bit much, and I don't think it's doing much good, anyways. Beams are fairly accurate, due to their rotation, but the prisms tend to get sniped during combat, rendering the design weaponless. I've found a good deal of success fighting against cannon based ships, due to the range advantage, but it struggles against laser based designs, which are able to blow up the prisms due to having similar range,

I've come to the (incorrect?) conclusion that these diagonal prism ships need to be mobile, having plenty of thrust to stay out of range of their foes. Otherwise, more traditional "rammer" style designs with deeply buried ions might be better? They could most likely achieve better speed (as they aren't diags), while also having a better shot at retaining their prisms.

Thrust is messed up, obviously (I literally just copy pasted the modules from my "Septum" (now "Illuminant") diagonal.

CursedPh4nt0m

Astrum Successfully went ~~lightyears~~ over the top again:😇
image https://imgur.com/Ve1iTdT.png
Both the emitter and the focus still need loads of polishing, might send them as examples tho. (Each of these emitters has 8 ion modules with 4 beams each, meaning a single emitter has the power of 32 ion beams focused in it's beam. Feel free to multiply that power with seven after subtracting the damage falloff, I'm happy with only knowing the result is powerful enough to cut through armor like a steaming knive through warm butter. The entire 'construct' costs almost 11.000.000 tho...)

Burying ions is always a good idea, same usually goes for prisms. Diags are generally more maneuverable than other designs, so I don't really feel the necessity to have prisms with large fireing arcs.

Astrum

damkiller Your ion beams can't fire right. There is armor blocking it.

damkiller

Astrum
I'm don't like update my game so basically it been working good (before update) but now is not work so changed it
(if you're don't undersand please tell )

Astrum

CursedPh4nt0m Please do! I was under the impression that combining beams vs. having single prisms was generally inferior, due to cost and diminishing returns.

CrazyBirdie

CursedPh4nt0m Hey, a Death Star! (perhaps connect the ships to make a real death star)

CursedPh4nt0m

Astrum This thing was mainly designed as 'power source', but effortlessly breaks through both shields and armor, making it a great flanker or rammer design.
image https://imgur.com/LiAsIZ2.png
(No, attaching pictures still doesn't work, I've merely figured how to do it myself.)

Astrum

CursedPh4nt0m Oh my... that's quite powerful. Now, I really like diagonals (who woulda guessed... 😉), but what advantages does having a nestled ion diag normally have vs. a more generic front facing ion ship? Shield stacking? They are also slower.

Equalizer

CursedPh4nt0m By the way, the ion merge pattern greatly effects the final beam strength.

A better merge pattern would increase that ships final beam strength by about 50%.

Sombreroman

CursedPh4nt0m

^{^{^{Sombreroman_likes_this}}}

CursedPh4nt0m

Astrum Well, they are just like any other diagonal ship, only with a hole and some extra shields in the tip. But you can focus up to four ion beams in the same prism, which would result in way higher damage.

ProntoManagement

@Alpha Super impressed by this post. You guys are awesome!

Alpha

ProntoManagement
You shouldn't be impressed by the post, but rather by the awesome people who dedicate some of their time helping others here. They deserve all credit.

Even though I'm quite busy lately and struggle finding time, this thread just keeps going. It was never my intention to make a popular thread, I only wanted to help others. It makes me happy to see others think the same about that.

Astrum

CursedPh4nt0m right, but I meant comparing a diagonal prism ship vs a non diagonal prism ship. Presumably, you could obtain similar results using a non diag, just perhaps lacking the shield-stacking durability. Or am I just being dumb?

CursedPh4nt0m

Astrum Diagnonal ships are usually more maneuverable than normal ones, which should be a bonus when working with ion beams. Guess you have more freedom placing ion beams and other parts too, but that isn't impacting. The overall results should be similar, but that's to be expected, as prisms work the same on both ship types.

Astrum

CursedPh4nt0m Makes sense! I guess I'll have to create some ion ships that have their prisms buried deeper.

Also, did some testing against your Fusion Orb, and managed to beat it using my 1 million triangle. I know you said it was more of a "power source", and would be better as a rammer, but I just thought that it was interesting.

(And how'd you manage to get a workaround for the picture attaching?)

CursedPh4nt0m

Equalizer I only started using prisms yesterday, you're free to demonastrate something more effective. I'm fully aware of the damage falloff on the center prism, but didn't bother enough to fix that.

Astrum Just wait until someone told me how to use prisms more efficiently and I'll send you something meant for battle. Guess I might even pack it in a missile barge or something, just 'cause I don't have any of these yet.
(Use ![image *image source*.png](*image source*.png) I simply copy-pasted the code from an old reply and changed the source.)

plooop

Equalizer

newageofpower

Equalizer eagerly awaiting Equalizer-sempai to demonstrate an efficient, compact, scalable, non-bomb prism pattern

Aisling

CursedPh4nt0m I have reached the functional stage of building this ship, but there is still a fair bit of refining to do. How is it so far?

Nordwolf

CursedPh4nt0m The pattern is each prism takes an input of 2 equal powered beams, more beams into one prism mean greater power loss.
With such pattern you can calculate power loss (not accounting for distance falloff) with this formula:

(2*0.875)^N
Where N is the number of combination stages (each time beam merges into a prism)
With 4 ions combined (2 stages) you get an output of 3.0625 beams, with 8 it's 5.35, with 32 beams you get just 16 out of them. The more beams you combine, even with the most optimal setup, the more power you lose. I'd say it's not worth it combining anything above 4 beams into one, maybe sometimes 8.

To see how much more beams into one is worse, let's take 3->1 as an example, the formula would be (3*0.77)^N.
With just 2 stages (9 ions) you get an output of 4.62, worse than 8 ion output of the previous combination method, note that it's always worse combining non-equal beams together because the larger beam gets reduced damage first, to the point that if the power difference is too severe the smaller beam doesn't add any power to the chain.

Generally I prefer to just focus prisms without combining them at all, or combining just 2.

kieffer5101

Aisling you have way to much armor in your ship, if you remived the armor in your engine section and replace it with thrusters you could fit twice the number of thrusters that you have now