Modular shielding and power

[infinity123]

Hi all i build Modular shielding and power while working on my new ship the part has 80k shields and always gives the ship 1 million power regen and the way it works is that the part got a pulse switch that always keeps the power supply beam on.So i was wondering if anyone test this out yet and wanted to know what you think about this concept.

If you like to check out some of my other project you can check them out here:

http://starmadedock.net/threads/infinity-shipyard.2796/#post-41382

 

[FunnyBunny14]

Cool! I knew it was just a matter of time until someone built something like this.
Does anyone know how the power flow works when you are docked? I'm thinking of making modular tools/weapons now

 

[infinity123]

Hi this part is docked and you could make weapons the same way but they would be always on.

 

[der_scheme]

Well, the concept itself obviously is rather old and has popped up quite a few times. It was however not really practical in the past, due to limitations in power generator layout (and because before logic people were needed). I can imagine that it can become very powerful if one can balance out power and shield supply in one docked generator.

 

[BDLS]

Old news, many people do it with different systems.

 

[FunnyBunny14]

As big as he did with completely modular 'rods'? I doubt it.
Can anyone please answer my question of how power flow works throug docking? Does the power regen get shared with the docked ship or the ship it is docked to?

And I have a theory that could possibly mean another overpowered system, so here it is:
Everyone knows that in combat shield regen gets limited to about 6% right? And the system knows that you are in combat because you are taking damage (am I still right?)? So theoretically, if you were to put a shield regen modular module docked inside your ship where it couldn't take damage, and have it setup with logic to shield supply, you would be able to get full regen out of it. All you would then have to so is have loads of shield storage modules (easy!) and enough e/s in the module with the shield supply beams, and you'd be able to get a really powerful shiled system.

If this is true, I'm going to make a flying planet (or massive cube with missiles that do a bit more than 10 billion damage with 10 billion shield capacity and loads of shield supply modules, if you want to get into specifics. It will also need some thrust, hull and an area with nothing for you to get to the core. And turrets to do the shooting down of other, always smaller ships ).

 

[infinity123]

That would be cool can someone tell me what exactly shield supply beam does i am still kind of new to the weapons changes is it the same thing as power supply beam becouse when i try it all it does is drain shield and there no beam or anything.

 

[starhaiden]

thanks for the idea funnybunny14 now I am going to build dock ports inside my ship with shield regenerators and keep my shields charged

 

[BDLS]

As big as he did with completely modular 'rods'? I doubt it.

I've got a ship that has 12 such generators, and I'm only going to add more. I know others who have been using these systems for a long time too.

Guessing you never saw Calbiri's old Valhalla ship with 80ish docked power generators (before logic, but same idea, just used power drain beams when they worked on docked stuff)

And yes, people already have these systems with shield restoration batteries.

 

[FunnyBunny14]

Shield supply, well, supplies shield regen. Most of the names are straight forward and you should be able to figure out what something does by it's name. That actually is one of the thongs starmade, even though it is in alpha, does really well. It invites you to test, improve, look up, perfect and build ships.

And to everyone here: please never forget that everything can have slaves. It is overpowered for certain things, and the damage pulse has no use. So I would suggest changing some things in the config to give damage pulse a use and to make the cannon less overpowered (with salvage, astrotechnician, shield supply/drain, power supply/drain it decreases your power by a factor of 5 and increase your speed by 10, resulting in an efficiency bonus of 50 with no penalty, because those beams don't so any damage, which normally is what it decreases. The effects were literally copy/pasted).

Edit: No, I haven't seen anyone use those designs. Probably because I never play MP (yet). I always draw my conclusions from myself, and as you can see, they are mostly wrong about things like this.

I'm still going to build my 100 million block ship (probably more ).

 

[Aridhol]

I have a very large ship with 'power conduits' as I call them, which are perfect rods of power generation that feed exactly what they generate (1m power/sec) into my battleship, I have 9 of these conduits and then of course the ships primary 1m generation, so the ship has a grand total of 10m power/sec.

It works amazingly well, but has drawbacks, namely it takes up a TON of space, and each conduit is pretty large and thus if you play on a server with docking limits, you might be hurting yourself a good bit with these.

As far as shields, I have found them to not be very useful. The transfer of shields with a transfer beam causes the transferring ship to act as if under fire even though they are not, and therefore their regeneration of shields is nearly non-existent. Thus, not very useful at all, unless this is changed in the future (unlikely, as I would expect that would be pretty over-powered...)

So yeah, not the first person to do this, but nonetheless it is a powerful technique... And quit mentioning it on the forums, other people might copy us and eventually be as powerful as we are.. GASP!

 

[Mork2]

Docked Power usage
Ships that are docked use power off the main ship exactly the same as docked turrets. You don't share energy regen or energy or shields just when the turret or docked ship requires more energy then it draws it from the main ship.

It uses onboard power first then draws power from the main ship when it can't supply it itself. If you don't have enough energy storage onboard to fire a weapon the turret/docked ship can draw that off the main ship as well, you don't need an onboard battery capable of storing enough energy for a shot. Personally checked. Not sure what happens if the main ship also doesn't have enough battery. Probably fails to fire.

Power Drain system
Instead the new system drains 20/second per block so I need 50,000 blocks to drain 1mil energy/second. Hitting a power block or hull block seem to make no difference when i was testing. Uses only 10 power per individual weapon. So if all 50k blocks were joined together only uses 10 power. It does give you the energy you drained from the target though. Even if you hit the power cap you still get 1.25mil energy from 50,000 power generator blocks. Range 200m. If you use a beam slave at 100% bonus you get 500m range.

Power supply beam
I just tested this putting the power supply beam on a turret docked to a ship with no power generation on main ship and some of the turret and it does supply power. The turret loses power at 20+280 per power supply beam block. Not sure exactly how much power is being supplied to the main ship.

Shield supply beam
Shield supply beam modules probably aren't going to be effective supplying your own ship. Since the shield recharge rate is completely linear your better off putting more shield recharge blocks. It works for energy cause after around 1.1mil energy per second the power regen blocks only get an extra 25 per block.

It should be good for keeping something alive though like a docked ship or turret maybe. Only problem is it keeps draining shields while transferring when the target ship has full shields.

 

[NeonSturm]

How about adding delay blocks to this shield gen and using cannon slaves for shield suppliers?

The delay blocks should give it time to regenerate and cannon slaves to reduce the amount of suppliers needed.

If cannons buff really is sufficient, you could make a docked entity that draws power from another docked entity (as long as the dock can not hit the docked) and transfer it to the ship to circumvent the restriction on suppliers, except it is also a restriction on drainers.

 

[Aridhol]

How about adding delay blocks to this shield gen and using cannon slaves for shield suppliers?

The delay blocks should give it time to regenerate and cannon slaves to reduce the amount of suppliers needed.

If cannons buff really is sufficient, you could make a docked entity that draws power from another docked entity (as long as the dock can not hit the docked) and transfer it to the ship to circumvent the restriction on suppliers, except it is also a restriction on drainers.

I thought of this also, and in theory you are correct, however from my initial tests the delay would have to be very very long, it seems the shield regeneration debuff for firing the supply beams lasts a good long while (10+ seconds for absolute certain, possibly more like 20) and then you also have to delay for enough time for the shields to recharge to a point where there transfer is significant enough to be useful (that additional delay will depend on how many rechargers the slave ship has, naturally).

So yeah, you are right, a delay COULD work, basically a really slow clock like 30 seconds or so potentially, but it isn't a great solution. Still, if you micromanaged it BIG TIME, you could have say 6 slave ships with clocks offset by 5 seconds each, and basically have say a 50k shields recharge burst every 5 seconds.. This would require a pretty sizable slave ship though, and on servers with limits to turrets and etc (as I mentioned before) its probably very impractical...

 

[WaffulMann]

So... system upgrades without touching the ship itself?
Yeeessssss.

 

[NeonSturm]

If we could transfer shield but it is only drained when supplied, we can combine our turret and ship shields with this system.
=> would like to see that together with power-supply for turrets instead of them taking from your ship directly.

Too bad that weapons take such a short time killing a ship (and shields) to make capacitors always look bad compared to more weapons.

 

[starhaiden]

can you use draining beams and fire it at the docked turret

 

[FourFire]

How large is the debuff on shield regeneration when transferring with a shield supply beam?

if it is < the debuff on shield regen when fired upon, then there is still a point in having internally docked power+shield supply ships since regeneration during combat would be higher for the same number of (shield) blocks, something which would make DoomCubes even Doomier (and anti-DoomCube ships too, of course)

 

[NeonSturm]

I guess shields regenerate twice as fast as long as they are completely drained. Maybe 50..0% difference on average for your ship during 100..0 shield.

 

[infinity123]

Well i just tested the shield supply beam and when the shields on the supply ship gets below 20% you get 10% shield regen so from an 80x9x9 cube with 31400 max shield regen you get 3140 shield regen for my main ship so i dont think shield supply beam ship would be worth it.