Thanks! I had that problem for a while since I got back in the game.
are you accounting for the initial tick bonus? You get 10 ticks on contact with a block, by default, when the beam hits a block.
I've noticed that Basic armor harvests super quick even with astronaut mining, you just need to tap them and they pick up. Have you tried this test vs actual asteroid/planet matterials?
10 free tics! Why would Schema even add an abusable mechanic like that? If anything it should be an inverse function that builds with continuous fire so that you need progressively bigger beams to mine faster. That said, I could see something like that generating the super ridiculous mining rates we've been seeing. new mechanics just encourages people to make super cheap ridiculous looking world eaters with stacked outputs.
No, I've been meaning to do that. Will see about further testing today with some roid rock rather then basic but the build bug has me at the moment and I find testing gets old quickly. Especially when things change so rapidly and unexpectedly. Even if the mined material is a factor the salvage mechanic seems to be in an erratic state of flux. A week or two ago I was testing 83 module beams as the max cap and getting a similar amount of material. Then it was 60 module beams and far less material and today I'm testing 4 module beams... There's been at least these 3 changes when I've been paying attention and possibly more in between... /shrug.
Was not aware of that but not sure how that would effect my testing as it applies to all tests. I've taken a planet plate and attached a big block of basic hull to it and have been running my test rigs up and down the side...
Are you running it for X amount of times and then counting the blocks? If you do the math and ignore the initial tick burst then you want 8 per rod to get your 200 points per normal tick. If you are doing this with logic then the beams wont stay on like they would if you mined manually because by default the behaviour is to stay on forever (no recharge anymore) - this is not the case for logic controlled beams, so it may be that you are getting more "initial tick bonuses" because it's constantly reloading which is a good case for only using logic for salvagers now that I've typed it "out loud".
I've just been doing a single button push pulse. Number of blocks per firing is consistent at 8 blocks every time. I also tested against rock blocks instead of basic armour and got the same block count.
