Playing with missile turrets

[Panpiper]

I am on a server with AI difficulty set to medium or easy, and my cannon turrets virtually never hit anything. (And sadly therefore, neither does point defense work against missiles.) However my homebase is regularly visited by pirates. While the base itself and anything docked to it are invulnerable, it happens often enough that I want to be working on something that is 'not' docked, and so, I want to equip my base with missile turrets that can actually hit things.

I could easily enough just spam many turrets that together can launch sufficient missiles to clear the sky, but I am wondering if there might not be a more elegant way to do things. Assume for instance I want to fire sniper missiles (missile/damage beam) for in excess of 5000 damage. We are looking at over 50,000 power required per launch. If I have a power plant that produces say 25,000 power per second (and of course has sufficient capacitors to make sure it can store enough to both power it's regular systems 'and' reach a firing energy capacity), I should be able to have that turret launch such a sniper missile once every two seconds (roughly).

My question is, would my turret require each missile to have it's own targeting computer? Could I not perhaps just have all of say, ten such missiles linked to one computer and it will just hit fire each time it has enough energy to launch one? (I know personally I can do this if manually firing.)

I understand that turrets can pull power from the ship they are docked to if their power requirements exceed their generation capacity. What effect would this have on my plans? Would my turrets just fire off everything they've got as fast as my station powers them, or is there some sort of delay I can play with to space their fire a bit more thematically?

What I would like to achieve is some sort of machine gun effect with a turret firing a missile every second or two.

(Yes, I could always just blow up the nearby pirate stations, but I enjoy the company.)

 

[Crusade]

Don't forget to look at the missiles reload times. They are important. Capacity, on turrets using that much power is more important. IIRC, turrets will draw power for weaponry from the dock, but not for shield regen. So it's a good idea to have a little onboard regen just to keep their shields up. Unless it's on a homebase, in which case, go nuts.

 

[Sven_The_Slayer]

If you have the power regeneration and capacity on your planet to support the turrets then go nuts. I have found it is best to have missile turrets be self sufficient as they consume a lot of power at once and have a tendency to cripple my smaller ships when they fire.

You can't really do a sniper missile machine-gun as even if you have multiple missile systems with independent computers will still fire simultaneously so the only reason to do this would be to jam systems closer. Having multiple "barrels" can be beneficially to missiles as they will have multiple strikes but that's personal preference.

 

[Crimson-Artist]

from my own tests I've found that the AI don't have a hard cap on how many weapon systems it can handle at any given time. meaning that you could technically put as many missile computers on a turret as you want(if there is some kind of cap i haven't seen it).

Since Missiles are the only weapon that the Ai can actually hit things with having raid fire missiles have a tactical advantage. You would need multiple missile/beam combos, each having an even lesser beam to missile ratio than the last. the way it works is that the closer to a 1:1 ratio you get, missiles become more powerful, fly faster, and have greater range but have a longer cooldown and require more energy.

from a "cold" start, the turret will fire all its missiles/weapons. after that if you done it right, it should fire one missile after another

 

[Sven_The_Slayer]

from my own tests I've found that the AI don't have a hard cap on how many weapon systems it can handle at any given time. meaning that you could technically put as many missile computers on a turret as you want(if there is some kind of cap i haven't seen it).

Since Missiles are the only weapon that the Ai can actually hit things with having raid fire missiles have a tactical advantage. You would need multiple missile/beam combos, each having an even lesser beam to missile ratio than the last. the way it works is that the closer to a 1:1 ratio you get, missiles become more powerful, fly faster, and have greater range but have a longer cooldown and require more energy.

from a "cold" start, the turret will fire all its missiles/weapons. after that if you done it right, it should fire one missile after another

This is going to be your best bet for achieving a missile machine gun. This will also have the additional side effect of having missiles of varied speeds so even the first volley should theoretically hit the target at different times.

 

[Crashmaster]

Your station power would dump into the turret too fast and the missiles would launch with very little delay like you suspect. If you made each bank of the missile array require double the power per sec that the station and turret combined produce (and have not much over the required capacity) then it should fire at once every two seconds - though the cool-down time means you would need so many banks...
I would bet you would need separate computers for each bank.

 

[Marduk_Zoekoff]

I had a question relating to this because I wanted to try to do something similar. I noticed that I can attach an activator to a bobby ai, which I stuck a delay on and tried to use it to switch the ai on and off, but the activator does not seem to actually interact with the bobby. Is the activator suppose to interact with the ai's or maybe at one time did or will?

 

[Keptick]

This is going to be your best bet for achieving a missile machine gun. This will also have the additional side effect of having missiles of varied speeds so even the first volley should theoretically hit the target at different times.

Missiles hitting at different times also means that the game has time to calculate the previous explosion, That means that the missiles will cause a lot more physical damage and drill into the target.

 

[Thalanor]

True. On my larger ship designs, I have multiple outputs behind each other instead of next of each other, in order to for example use a 6-output missile/beam/explosive system to instantly drill to any core on an unshielded target.

The minimum distance is around ~40 blocks for 100% beam supported missiles and scales linearily with missile speed.

 

[Panpiper]

I am very happy to report total success!

Oddly, what worked probably should 'not' have worked as well as it did, given how I understood things to work. I had previously built a smaller missile turret that had nine sniper missiles serviced by one computer. but only enough energy to fire one per four seconds, with it's powerplant charging batteries. I had not had opportunity to witness it in action however until earlier today when I chanced to be outside when it swung to bear. I watched joyfully as it fired off two missiles in close succession, a second later another, then another second another, then two more, etc.. It was piecemealing it's fire just the way I would want it to to deal with fighters.

(These were reasonably powerful missiles, one could easily knock down the shields of most small craft, the next punch a great gaping hole in it. I wanted them to fire in succession, so they wouldn't all waste themselves on a single target.)

I was in fact at that moment in the process of starting a new turret, a much larger missile turret built along similar lines. Seeing the smaller one in action gave me the confidence to build the new one the way I did. It was a beast, ~13000 blocks, no less than 110 35 block sniper missiles (15 missile, 15 beam, 5 ion) all controlled by a single set of computers. The turret generated roughly 185K energy per second, Which was enough to fire a little more than two missiles per second, not including what power it might draw from whatever it was docked to. It had battery storage sufficient to fire nearly nine right off the bat, though it is unclear what role that may have played in it's performance.

I also gave it a 'small' autocannon (200 cannon/200 cannon/200 punch). The rest of the space was filled with shields, regenerators and sufficient pierce and ion to give it max ion shields and max block resistance. It was left with a little over 40K shields and 10K regen.

Having built it and installed it on my station (foreground), I fortuitously did not have to wait long to see it in action. Within a minute or so, something ventured within firing range, it swiveled and fired, two and a bit per second! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! ...

20 seconds later, with plenty more potential shots to fire before it's first recycled, it ceased fire. It had killed all of it's targets. It was a thing of beauty.

Having witnessed it in battle, I wanted to see what it would be like carrying such turrets on a ship. I had sufficient resources, and my plan had been to install several on the station in any case, so I built four more and added them to my mining ship (vaguely viewable in the background). That ship was built to fire a large salvage/pulse array (13x13x8) dualed so as to not have to wait while the other recycled. The ship was built for massive power, enough to both feed the huge power requirements of pulse salvage beams, 'and' keep jamming up while it mined. It was defensible enough with 100K of maxed ion shields, 15K regen, and able to launch 320, 700 damage heatseeker warheads. That was enough to deal with any wandering pirates that spotted it despite it's jammers. But it made for a good platform to test those turrets.

So, four turrets later, I found myself adding a LOT of extra thrusters to it's interior, and then adding more ion and overdrive modules to compensate for the additional mass and get those effects back to max. I found that despite the 1.1 million energy gen, the ship while maintaining jamming, overdrive and ion shields, would dip into battery power whenever if fired it's (it's now quite large) engines. Fortunately it had enough battery (necessary for the heatseekers) to reach max speed before the batteries were depleted, allowing me to then burst with the thrusters and allowing the batteries to slowly refill. With the extra mass however, it could not both salvage and keep up jammers at the same time. I figured loosing the jamming while mining was a small price to pay for four mega-turrets. It remained to be seen how they would perform in combat. So, I selected an unknown station on my map and hit jump...

Now, I don't actually have alarm klaxons and red flashing lights on my bridge, but it sure felt that way. I am unclear on exactly what happened. My attention was instantly drawn to my power line which dropped like a rock! Jamming was off! What I had thought to be HUGE power generation struggled desperately to rise above the barest minimum. I looked up to the screen to see what was going on, just in time to see everything go quiet. My power refilled. A dozen pirate ship hulks floated in space, the pirate station's turrets disintegration creating sparkles. I missed it!

Missile turrets for the win!

 

[Panpiper]

That was an interesting experiment with missile turrets. It worked as well as I hoped, but drained all the power from my main ship. My desire is actually to 'starve' the turrets for power so it spaces out it's missile fire. I am wondering if there is any reason I can't put the turret on a ship that is then 'docked' to the main ship? That way the turret will only drain that which it is docked to, not the main ship. Could this work, or would the docked ship that the turret is docked to, itself try to drain the main ship?

 

[Sven_The_Slayer]

That was an interesting experiment with missile turrets. It worked as well as I hoped, but drained all the power from my main ship. My desire is actually to 'starve' the turrets for power so it spaces out it's missile fire. I am wondering if there is any reason I can't put the turret on a ship that is then 'docked' to the main ship? That way the turret will only drain that which it is docked to, not the main ship. Could this work, or would the docked ship that the turret is docked to, itself try to drain the main ship?

I believe once the docked ship is starved it will also pull power from the mother-ship that will be fed to the turret. I'm not 100% certain of this so you'll have to test it out.

 

[Panpiper]

Well, if nothing else, my weapon systems will be drawing from supplementary 'modular' reactors, without the loss associated with power beams. ;-)

 

[Panpiper]

Has anything been written about how precisely turrets draw power from their host ship while firing? The actual process during game ticks...?

I am thinking that perhaps by having 'only enough energy storage for a single weapon to fire, and by placing the turret on an intermediary platform (that is docked to the mothership, otherwise unarmed) that itself only has enough energy storage for a single firing, that perhaps the way the game mechanics actually work it will only draw as much power each tick as the batteries in the chain. (Of course I would have that intermediary be a substantial power generator and up the turret accordingly.) I suspect the voracious energy draw I experienced with those turrets may have had as much to do with the large battery storage present on the turrets so as to contain the power drawn, as it did on the weapons themselves.

I believe there are five 'ticks' per second. I have no idea however if power will transfer each tick, or if only one 'process' happens per tick such as 'fire', or 'get power'.

 

[TheFloorMatt]

Your explanation of what you're trying to do is incredibly unclear to me. I'll just go through some basic mechanics.

There are way more than 5 ticks per second. You can't limit anything through ticks. (if you think about it cannon primary/cannon secondary at 1:1 ratio fires 10 times a second in the first place)

The turret fires, it draws power when it fires. If it doesn't have enough power to fire, it takes it from what it's docked to. If you still don't have enough power to fire the weapon, it won't fire. It goes down the entire docking chain. You could have a turret docked to a ship docked to a ship docked to a ship docked to a ship, and the turret would be able to draw power from the very last ship.

Also, weapons from turrets can only draw power from either the main ship (or a chain docked ship) or the turret at once. If you have enough power in the turret, it will use the turret's power. If not, it will use the ship's. If you have a missile that needs 100k power, and you have a turret with 50k storage and a ship with 60k storage you will not be able to fire that missile. So you can't really chain dock storage quite how you're thinking, probably.

Maybe you have two computers, let's say two missiles. If each takes 75k to fire, and both the turret and the mother ship have 100k storage. In that case, one would use the turret's power and the other the mother ship's.

This part is under the assumption your main ship has zero power of it's own, or your turret has zero power of its own. If there are multiple different weapon systems on one turret, it will try to fire both at once. But, if it can only fire one, it will only fire one. Let's say you have a missile and a cannon on the same turret. Let's say your turret has 1k/s recharge and 50k storage. Firing the missile takes 95% of the power and the cannon takes 500 power/s to fire. Every time your turret's power reaches 95% it will always fire that missile, and it would always be firing its cannon with that setup.

Here's an interesting way to limit missile fire... if you really would ever want to do that. Make your missile have 10 outputs. Make the total power required take about 10x more power capacity than you have. Every time you fire at 100% your power, you'll only fire 1 missile out of the 10 outputs because you only have 1/10 the power to fire all of them at once. That one output will go on a reload timer, but the next output will be able to fire as soon as you have the energy to do so again. This works at any number over 50%, as anything >50 when multiplied by two is >100. This method doesn't work well with turrets though, as you'd draw power from the main ship to fire all 10 at once. That, or your main ship would end up having serious power issues.