Exploit to Make Missiles Ignore Shields

[Eleid]

Before I get started I want to make this very clear that this ISN'T due to missile damage being greater than shield strength.



How to replicate this:



1. Set 2 (or possilby more, though I haven't tested that yet) d-1000 missile batterys of ANY strength to two seperate hotkeys.

2. Approach shielded target until you are nearly touching it.

3. Very quickly fire your first battery then switch to/fire your second battery in rapid succession (both must be fired within ~0.5 seconds of eachother or less).



If done properly this will breach any strength shield and cause massive block damage to the target.



My test setup:

Target with ~10,000 shield HP

d-1000 gunboat with each battery doing about ~300 damage.



I don't believe this is just a glitch in my client, because a friend and I have replicated these results repetedly on different computers.

 

[Winterhome]

I noticed this while playing around with my Very Heavy Bomber, the Pacifier. 20 d1000s, 20 KBs, 210ish damage per rocket. Shield capacity is roughly 11,000.

One salvo of d1000 rockets should be doing roughly 4300 damage, but it\'s got no problem completely bypassing the shields on the second Pacifier that I had spawned in for testing purposes. The thing was destroyed completely instantly.

 

[TangentialThreat]

So a fast missile fighter now has a purpose.

 

[SkyTitan]

I\'ve also done this. I did the math and my frigate should not have been able to dent the regen of my target. What I did is fired my missiles, then fired my antimatter cannon until my missiles were recharged and then fired my missiles again. Went right through and blew up a huge chunk. And then I fired my cannons some more and still couldn\'t beat down the regen.

You can do the same thing to shops, but you don\'t even need to use cannons. A missile shot alone will do.



It seems to be that when shields are damaged, there\'s a chance that a shot will go through. I noticed when my ship started melting to pirate turrets despite the fact that I still had shields. Might be a feature of letting shots through, might be a bug, but missiles are currently overpowered.

 

[Winterhome]

Retested with my gunboat against my carrier class, which has 72k shields and 12.7k regen.

Same missile batteries did absolutely nothing of importance.

 

[Charlie_]

Fighter: \"Boop\"

Capital: \"Uh? What now-- hey WAI--\"

Fighter: \"BOOM!\"

 

[Trafalgar]

Did you have anyone on the other ship to see what was going on with its shield values? A couple days ago, two of us tried replicating this with just missiles against a 400,000 s/sec (IIRC) starship. I was on the missile firing ship, the other player was on the shielded target. First we tried individual missiles. The shields did not change when hit at all, as if they just ignored the missiles. Then we tried bigger ones, then salvos, then firing multiple missiles from multiple cpus, and finally firing ALL THE THINGS. Something like four different cpus and a swarm of missiles, one of which was a 10x10x10 block for science. Result? The shields STILL did not budge from their maximum value at all. Later testing showed that it was damaged normally by AMCs and appeared to regen once per second. The complete ignoring of the missiles, even when firing from 200m range (practically point blank with two huge ships) is baffling, but I have never seen a missle proc the shield glow. It either detonates with no shield effect or blows up part of the ship, still with no shield effect. That said, I sometimes see AMCs hit without procing the shield glow (generally at range) too.

Edit: typos. tablet.

 

[Ludovsky]

Which, you know, is historically how fighters/bombers where used historically. Carrying dangerous anti-ships/anti-heavythings.tm weapons at very high speed and leaving before the \"capital\" ship(or unit) or it\'s escort can retaliate.

People forget that the most notable feature of capital ships is not their armor(which historically has always been easy to overcome by \"smaller\" enemies with the right weapon) but their weaponry and range. The \"capital\" part of their name do not even come from their ability to \"own stuff\"(as any capital ship can be actually -very- easy to bring down if cornered) but rather their capital \"importance\" as a mean to -project- power(either from carrying guns able to shell other capital ships or defensive fortifications from miles away, or from being able to carry fighters able to do the same at even greater range thanks to their mobility, as is the case of carriers).

Armor historically is just a mean to technically \"hopefully\" survives a first shot and hope that if you do your own shot will go through the other guy\'s and not bounce like his did. It was rarely meant to \"win\" fight by itself but really more to give you a \"standing chance\" as it was still offensive capacity which determined the winner... in fact sometimes less armor was better than too much because of the strain it could give one one\'s engine and fuel consumption(there\'s something to be said about the fuel consumption of all those german heavy tanks of WW2, and how many had to be abandonned on the battlefield without even being shot due to simply having run out of fuel before being able to be refuelled).

 

[schema]

Huh, very interesing.



Thank you for the exact replication method!

 

[douglasg14b]

There are a few people on the server I\'m aprt of who have taken advantage of this and have made small ships capable of killing anyone or anything. They do not even need to be right up on their targets.



It\'s a bit riddiculious that a 500 block ship can take out a several hundred thousand block ship in a few seconds.

 

[Slapmaster]

i feel that your ships are too small for these experiments, a true capital ship on my server exists pretty much as one per large faction, mine being 301m long and has 2.25mill shields, the issue with the fighters isnt that they would be able to fire and possibley blow parts of my ship up with said exploit but you forget that most capital ships carry turrets, and mine personally outclass most fighters and i have over 30 of them, with roughly 50k shields each

im just saying dont expect that you can counter counter capital ships with said strategy as one commenter suggested

Thanks

 

[McDili]

This is also possible using only one battery. I have a d1000 boat that I build yesterday. It fires 12 missiles at once, each at about 200+ damage, yet it destroys shields with strengths of over 300k.