New Pulse weapon, somewhat underwhelming.

[Captain Fortius]

First off, a job well done on improving weapon varieties.

This new pulse weapon is interesting and provides some new tactics, but it still needs some work;



Me and my pal did some testing and found out that the force bubble isn't very large to begin with- It barely encompassed our 25 block wide fighters, but when we installed it on a bigger ship, the effect was ... unexpected.

Ship size doesn't affect the size of the bubble. The size or configuration of the weapon blocks won't matter much either in that regard, only reload time seems to improve. Also, the bubble's center likes to pick one corner of the weapon as a starting point.

Here's some screenshots:

In my opinion, to make it work properly, the weapons's base radius should be two times that of the ship it's placed on, and adding more weapon blocks should improve it further, and the bubble should always be centered on the ship core or the ship's geometric center point.

Keep up the good work!

 

[Visitor]

Well, that\'s quite disappointing. Hopefully it\'ll be fixed soon. As far as I am concerned, add in some sort of continuous beam weapon (a\'la scavenge/astrotech beam but made for damaging ships) and I\'ll have all the weapons I need till final release.

Especially as, despite recent work, game became far more demanding on hardware and somewhat bugged (as detailed here) and the balance is still a bit shot (still very easy to make big, powerful shield and weapon - especially antimatter - systems with power requirements not scaling faster than effectiveness, still shields being very powerful while hull of any kind being rather weak (personal opinion also expanded here, a generally good thread schema should check out for the sake of balance)

 

[Minsc]

I can see your point, maybe the area of effect should be increased a bit.

Here\'s my approach to the current state of the weapon, in my head I had an image of the sience vessel from Starcraft. Taking the cross effect when building in to account I placed many small 7 block emitters around a ship. Here\'s a visual result of my experiment.







Instead of the installing pulser on your capital ship, give the job of disabling ships to another person. More fleet coordination? Of course the above ship is unskinned. I haven\'t tested meneuverabilty of a skinned ship with adequate shields, etc.

 

[Vii]

I have pulse canons lined across the entirety of this ship, back to front, and all axis on the wings. I expected a much larger radius, but i have to actually stick my nose at a ship :P

 

[wilbee10091]

they need to be totaly reworked cause i have a huge ship and i put them all over and it does a 5 block radius so i have to touch the other ship just to use it

 

[Minsc]

I added more emitters, did more testing, noticed some quirks.

In my current setup I have 104 emmiters each containing 7 pulse blocks for a total of 728 pluser blocks. In the picture below I have a 20 block measuring stick off the side of an emmiter (total of 21 blocks out from the emmiters center). I positioned the end of this measuring stick next to a ship and fired off the pulser. At the 20-21 blocks I was able to repel the other ship away from the pulser ship. This is certainly greater than the five block radius stated above. Size or number of emmiters may have no influence on the area of effect. I haven\'t spent time testing this out.

Quirks: As mentioned above the pulse seems to emit from one corner of the cross, not the center. Another quirk I noticed was being able to fire off four shots during the cool down. Likely a bug from having a large number of emission points. Visually it appears only certain clusters fire off each shot, however testing showed I was still able to repel a ship even if the emitter appeared not to fire.

Under the weapons tab there appears to be no information displayed for the pulser. I\'ll just chalk that up to not being added yet. Work calls so that\'s about the the testing I can do for now.

 

[SageOfThunder]

I really do hope he improves the range of this weapon. It seems really awesome if you could get a larger distance away from your target.

 

[CorenTiger]

pulse weapons seem to suck horribly at the moment, and are woefully underpowered, i tried multiple configurations of the zyx grid and multiple sizes, the largest one i made managed to move a medium size ship 3 meters away, over the course of 2 seconds....so completly pointless imo

 

[SageOfThunder]

Couldn\'t agree more.

 

[GaeasSon]

Like a dolphin nudging a tanker.

 

[Illswyn]

The X, Y, Z lengths matter now. Look at the weapon properties. I forget which is which, but:

Length affects force

Width affects reload

Height affects range

 

[jburke4]

Try as I might I cannot get the range to increase. I have 200 length, 60 width and I have tried anywhere from 20-200 height. The length and width seem to be altering the stats but not height. No matter what I just keep getting a bigger and bigger bubble on the end of my gun.

 

[lman94]

is what you are supposed to get. this is not a projectile weapon.

 

[Zyrr]

Necrobumpers...