Read by Council Fixing the beams

[color98dove]

I recently noticed that my beams were going thru my ship after hitting it, i realized this was a very very old issue, that i thought broke game play, in my own little opinion afterall whats the point in designing a good looking ship to have a beam blinking out the side, and people asking whys it doing that,
this needs to be fixed, we have fixed the other features of the game, what not this too.

rant over....

 

[Monchoman45]

All weapons fire through your ship, because this allows you to use other blocks (like crystals or lava) to cover the front of the guns for visual effect.

If you have a beam blinking out the side, you've probably linked your weapons wrong. All of your beams should be travelling in the same direction, for one; if you see a stray beam that you don't want, it's probably because it's an isolated group. You can get rid of it by adding beam modules until it's connected to your other beam modules.

Screenshots might help too.

 

[Edymnion]

He's talking about docked reactor power transfer beams.

Limit your reactor to only one beam (make sure all your modules are coherent) and then have that single beam hit the rail the reactor is docked to. That should stop it from leaking out the rest of the ship.

 

[Frigidman]

All weapons fire through your ship, because this allows you to use other blocks (like crystals or lava) to cover the front of the guns for visual effect.

Oh, so this is intentional?

We keep wondering 'if I put a block in front of the weapon output...' is it going to A) destroy it, B) not fire, C) look like it fired but actually have no damage, D) any of the above sometime in the future when they 'fix' this?

I've noticed some pre-made things have weapons hidden behind blocks, so you can't tell until they shoot out.

Just couldn't figure out if it was allowed, or going to be changed later to have block collision.

 

[Monchoman45]

Just couldn't figure out if it was allowed, or going to be changed later to have block collision.

I highly doubt they'll change it, basically everyone does it and it's not really a balance issue.

 

[Edymnion]

Oh yeah, for weapons it is intentional. You do not need to have the output block open to space. You can bury it behind layers of armor to protect it.

Its the power transfer beams that are supposed to stop when they hit any part of your ship that don't. Or more precisely, they shoot straight through things like hull for a split second before the game apparently goes "Oh yeah, thats supposed to stop" and then it hits the inside of the ship normally like its supposed to.

 

[Frigidman]

Cool, yes, opens up design flexibility by NOT having 'ports' open to space in spots.

 

[color98dove]

I was researching Docked Reactors as a possible power source for my newest ship, however as edy explained it to me, to get a reactor to be as efficient as block on the hull, i would need to go above the 2m cap at the moment, otherwise it would be woefully unefficent and just suck
he used the analogy of 65%-80% at its possible maximum so if this is true docked reactors are only good after the 2m cap and not a possible battery fix for my ship core

 

[Benevolent27]

I was researching Docked Reactors as a possible power source for my newest ship, however as edy explained it to me, to get a reactor to be as efficient as block on the hull, i would need to go above the 2m cap at the moment, otherwise it would be woefully unefficent and just suck
he used the analogy of 65%-80% at its possible maximum so if this is true docked reactors are only good after the 2m cap and not a possible battery fix for my ship core

No, docked reactors are only useful up to the 2m power cap. Why would you want less efficient power reactors? It's all about weight for power. The concept is this, up to the power cap it may only take a few thousand power reactors to get to 2m, but to get to 4m, it takes tens of thousands. If you instead of docked power reactors with the beam, you can produce the same power for a lot less weight. Better to have two 2m e/sec docked reactors than one that only produces 2.4m e/sec. The same power transfer efficiency applies, no matter how efficient the power reactors are on the docked reactor.