USS Defiant Mk4 (interlocked entities: lessons learned)

[alterintel]

So I decided to try something novel. The maneuverability of a small ship, the accuracy of a turret, and saving space by only applying passive Ion to the armor, and not the rest of the ship. The Idea came about after I did some testing with the transfer-ability of passive effects on turrets, and how turning speed is affected by docked entities.

1) First test showed that if I put passive Ion on a turret, with very minimal 220 shields, that 60% damage reduction would be passed to the mother-ship. Even if the mother ship didn't have Passive Ion installed. Cool! What this means is that I could only apply ion to the armor shell. This would result in dramatic savings with ion blocks needed for Ion effect.

2) Turning speed is determined by the dimensions of the mother-ship only. So I could have a very small 3 block mother-ship with huge 1000 block docked turret, and it would turn the same as if I had a 3 block ship. The problem comes in when you start considering thrust to mass ratio.

So with these in mind I decided to make a Defiant V4 which was later dubbed Defiant Mk4.
I built 3 main entities simultaneously jumping in and out of different cores as I built the whole ship as one.

The Helm Entity:
- Main Power
- Thrusters
- Passive Push "Impulse"
- Passive OverDrive
- Jump Drive (Over Clocked insta-jump)
- Radar Jammer
- Allot of Inter-Ship remotes linked to Wireless blocks.

The Shield/RP Entity:
- Shields
- RP Space
- docked shuttles
- docked Offensive Weapon Turrets (phasors, and quantum torpedoes)

The Armor Entity:
- Advanced armor skin
- Passive Ion
- Passive Punch Through
- Passive Pierce
- Docked Anti-Missile Turrets



So how did it go?
Well it didn't go very well.
Biggest Problem: AI is stupid. they would only fire about 10 to 25% of the time. I was getting creamed in test trials, while my turrets were just sitting there twiddling their thumbs. And don't even think about taking on a Pirate station. If I was in a empty sector with only one enemy ship, they performed well, but other than that... utter failure.

In an attempt to overcome this issue I included a manual over ride for the weapon systems. But this introduced bigger problems. I could only get the Phasors (Cannon/Cannon/OverDrive) fire rate up to 2/sec vs. the standard 5/sec. And I couldn't aim, which really sucked. This was especially bad for the torpedoes (Missile/Beam) I couldn't lock them on. And I couldn't tell when then the recharge was ready. I ended up building a 45 second timer and linked it to the manual torpedo button. It turned out nice, I got it down to 19 blocks, but I still couldn't lock on.

(A screen shot of when the AI actually engaged )

Also you'll notice that the shield effects are red. This is because the armor skin only has one shield recharge block. This is necessary to get the Ion effect to pass to the Shield Entity.

The next big problem. The armor skin didn't stop all the damage. My mother-ship which I was trying to keep as small as possible to maintain maneuverability, was constantly taking small bits of damage here and there. I ended up having to add a small shield to the mother-ship. I'm not sure if it's Pierce effect that's getting through my armor, or if the shots are managing to get in between my armor blocks at an angle or something.

So what went well?
1) Well, the maneuverability went really well. I was able to more than double it. I was able to keep up with Isanth's pretty well. It was relatively easy to keep them in front of the ship.
2) The OverDrive for sure and I think the Push effects only had to be big enough for the mother ship. This saved allot of space considering the mother ship was only like 1.5K mass.
3) Armor effects were allot smaller considering I only needed enough effect blocks to cover the 4K mass armor shell.
4) The warp drive (over clocked Jump drive) was freaking awesome

What I expect to change with upcoming bug fixes and features:
1) AI should get fixed soon, this is the main problem of this failed experiment.
2) I expect there will be a way to control turrets from the mother-ship in the future
3) I suspect AI will be able to use passive effects in the future.
2) Over clocked jump drives will probably be gone really soon
3) Turning speed will be fixed and no longer be tied to only the dimensions of the mother ship. But hopefully this will include a way to increase turning speed in other ways.
4) passive effects on the mother-ship will have to be big enough to account for the mass of docked entities
5) If damage is somehow going in between armor blocks to get to my mother-ship, hopefully this will get fixed.

Possible solutions:
1)Put main shields on the mother-ship to avoid mother ship taking damage
2)Make armor shell thicker to absorb pierce effect.

In the end it's a very maneuverable battle cruiser that couldn't hit the broad side of a barn if it was in the barn

 

[Mork2]

I can answer some of these as I have asked these questions as well.

What you expect to be changed

1) normal mounted turrets should work. The sheer lag for collision calculation was probably killing your computer enough that the AI couldn't engage. To reduce lag to help the AI, if possible to reduce collision calculations if possible have a gap as much as possible between docked entities and/or For the stationary entities use the rail speed controller set to 0.

4) Some of the effects require the mass of the entire ship mostly those that are required to be on the main body, others just the bit there on. For ion/pierce/punch its just the entity there on. Radar jam, cloak, overdrive and I suspect others have to be on the main body to work need to cover the entire mass of the ship. I asked this as a bug under the old bug reporting system and was told that it is as intended. Only effects that effect the entire ship has to have its effectiveness calculated against the entire mass of the ship and all docked entities.

Although there is a bug at the moment which is confirmed. Logic doesn't turn on or off effects. If you hold shift down and view the computer (probably only in build mode) it shows as active from the logic but it isn't drawing power and not applying to damage. Bug tracker T382. Another reason for now to have the cores adjacent to each other so you can manually activate defence effects.

5) Known bug weapons bypassing blocks due to a combination of lag and sector size apparently for details check bug tracker T524. You might be able to get around this by using multiple layers of blocks.

Monitor lag
To monitor lag while ship building. I play windowed and have my windows task manager showing processor %. From experience with my computer if I'm running close to 60% I'm overloading my PC. At high lag levels the AI have a hard time detecting a target in their limited fire arc. At around 40-50% I can spawn in a second normal titan to fight mine, while laggy it will work. Find the limits of your PC when you are running into laggy situations. Collision of complicated or large railed entities, having many docked entities close to each other, many bobby AI, many docked power cores, large trigger areas etc all produce lag. I re-engineer my designs to reduce lag when its starting to push my computer.

With a design that has many docked parts it would probably be a good idea to have some beam push weapons to help keep other ships from getting to close (20m or so, ramming distance)to you and lagging out from the collision detection calculations.

I didn't even think of reduced size for turning speed. Hopefully that will get fixed.

Your reward for a heavily engineered ship is one that is far more effective than something that is just a mass of blocks slapped together (doom cube).

I've had to start rebuilding my titan build from scratch to incorporate a similar system in the last couple of days..
Main ship hull: with most energy, engines, jump drive, radar jammer, boarding defences and some shields just encase. Saves have full ion shielding on covering all of this.
Core defence block: with pierce and punch armour connected to main ship surrounding the core.
Shield shell: main shield block and regeneration connected to main ship. Covers almost everything with 2 layers except when something needs to poke through. Also covers where possible the internal systems of all other objects when possible. When under 50% the external armour shell will negate 100% ion hits until enough of the external shell is gone for ion hits to hit the shield shell. Which should be protected by ion as well.
External armour shell: connected to shield shell with pierce/punch/ion defence.
External fittings eg. turrets/railed doors or decorations. If required to be protected by main shield block will be connected to that. If its sacrificial then it will be connected to the main hull so that hits which aren't reduced by ion effect do not drain the shield shell.

Nice side effect of the main shields being docked is people will wonder why your main ship shields aren't taking damage :D

Adjacent cores
And like you putting all the cores next to each other while a pain really makes building so much easier. (You don't have to wall between cores or put build blocks all over) I stacked mine vertically so that the side to side mirror stays in the same spot. Just got to remember to turn off the other mirror modes.

 

[alterintel]

Thanks for the feed back. I really appreciate it

The sheer lag for collision calculation was probably killing your computer enough that the AI couldn't engage.

I thought if I put a speed controller on the rails that the docked entities were attached to, and set the speed to zero it would turn off the collision checks. I'll have to look into that some more.

Known bug weapons bypassing blocks due to a combination of lag and sector size apparently for details check bug tracker T524. You might be able to get around this by using multiple layers of blocks.

This is what I'm hoping. Maybe it will get fixed soon, but in the mean time, a thicker hull should work.

To monitor lag while ship building. I play windowed and have my windows task manager showing processor %

This is an awesome idea. Thanks

I didn't even think of reduced size for turning speed. Hopefully that will get fixed.

Bite your tongue (lol)

I've had to start rebuilding my titan build from scratch to incorporate a similar system in the last couple of days..

Please post your results. I'm very interested in how it turns out.

Nice side effect of the main shields being docked is people will wonder why your main ship shields aren't taking damage :D

I didn't even think of that. Good one

Just got to remember to turn off the other mirror modes.

I can't tell you how many times this bit me in the butt. I was constanly having to redo allot of work because I forgot to reset the symmetry.

I may end up trying again. But given how much free time I have, it may be a while. Lets see what happens this week as far as updates go. Maybe the AI will get fixed?

Thanks again for the feed back

 

[Mork2]

Thankfully rebuilding each time is faster as you get use to laying things out each time. In a couple of days time I've have most of the core systems laid out. In two days though "Rebel Galaxy" will be released and I'll get my capital ship fix which will reduce my starmade time.

The speed controller should stop collision being calculated until something near all the stationary railed entities moves then it has to calculate if its colliding with any of the docked entities. I use to get this problem if I approached a bunch of power cores with another too close. It has been reduced by the speed controller on zero but won't completely eliminate it. I assume turrets to close to the power cores will cause the same thing.

I leave the power cores all running so I can monitor overall lag.

Another thing that bites when building these things is R to leave the core. You could be looking at a wall but it belongs to a different entity so you accidentally change the output block on a weapon behind the wall......or logic....

Unfortunately for my design, the turning radius my main hull is along the entire thing as I have a docking port on the front and the rear end and that has to be part of the main ship.

Only some of the really tricky things left.
Internal hangers 3 of.... going to be a pain this time. Before I had them as 3 separate dockable modules with elevating platform and split doors each. So I just had to do one up. This time the doors and platforms will all have to be docked to the shield shell while the rest of the hanger as decoration will have to be part of the main ship. It also means that the shield shell with have the hanger logic and I'm going to have to wire up all three sets. Hopefully copy and paste will help some. The Logic is a pain. It was set so the speed controller was on when you wanted to move it only. Turns off when not in use. Was reversible in direction okay as long as you didn't button spam. Docking on the platform when deployed would retract and close the hanger, but undocking or docking while the hanger wasn't deployed didn't do anything. Undocking while the hanger was deployed left it there. The external switches would only open the hanger if that hanger was empty. Getting all that logic working together was a small nightmare and redoing it won't be fun but maybe I can lay it out properly this time so I can copy and paste it. Have to template it this time. I wonder if the display contents are including in template pasting now as that would seriously help.

Main turrets, Secondary turrets, Detectors and logic, System and logic display, Pilot display, Escape pod/decoys, A display map, then fill out the rest of the shields and balance complete main defence effects. If I'm a sucker for punishment block torpedoes, decoys, drones, Maybe block torpedo turret....

Once I get the most of the turrets setup ill test point defence fire and some AI target practice to see if it all works and my CPU load.

 

[Mork2]

Just had a question. While dimensions modify your turning rates in different directions.

Was the basic turning rate decided by mass?

If so then its still a win as I'll be saving around 140k mass by shifting the main shields.

 

[alterintel]

While I haven't done allot of testing to determine if dimensions vs mass plays more of a role in turning speed, I've found that overall dimensions play a bigger role, if not all of it. If I had to guess without testing I would say that a cube of mass as the same turning speed as does a minimal skeleton of a ship that has the same dimensions.

 

[alterintel]

So I thought I'd play around with this guy again, to make sure that the rails for my non-moving docked entities were turned off.


I went ahead and moved all the rail speed controllers to accessible parts of the ships where I could monitor whether or not they were on or off.

The results were much better. However, not as good as I would like. I monitored the FPS, and the CPU. My FPS seems low mainly because I had V sync on. The FPS very rarely got below 30. And the CPU rarely went above 50%.

The AI's did a bit better as well, but not reliably so. I would notice also that when the AI Pirates were more active, my fixed AI guns were more active as well. I even took on about 10 Isanth Type Zero Mb's at a Pirate base, and I did OK. I had to set the AI's to "Any" to attack the base. While the AI's never targeted the base itself, it didn't take long for my guns to neuter the turrets. I then switched the AI's over to selected target. The results were mixed. It took a little bit of patience. I tried switching targets, but that didn't seem to help. I think what helped most, was getting to within 300 meters of the target. Sometimes this helped, some times it didn't. But once the number of enemy ships got down to about 3 or so, it seemed to be a bit better.

Hopefully AI's will see some love on the next update

 

[Mork2]

The ANY setting for the bobby AI will only attack things with an AI setting which I don't think includes the actual station. That and the AIs don't have great accuracy. Generally bobby AI will work against missiles when set against missiles that's when their accuracy is actually pretty good.

Otherwise their accuracy is horrible against small targets. That's what makes drones fighting from range so dangerous is because cannons and beams from bobby AIs hardly ever hits them. The AI will lead the target its shooting at but it will randomly shot within a small angle of that target point. Since by default that angle results in a pretty large area the shots can randomly hit, its hard for it to hit small targets at range, unless you fire a lot of shots to increase your chances of hitting. Or you can decrease the area it aims at by getting close enough that the random error they put in is close enough to hit anyway.

You can check that by having an AI fire at a target block. In a new world spawn in a base, add the turret preferable ion, create a large target block a distance away with no engines or guns. You can then use admin commands to turn the target block into a AI controlled ship with a pirate -1 faction and the turret should engage it. You can then see the error to hit at that range. Suggest using a rapid fire ion cannon to demonstrate. You might need to turn the AI on the target block on and off a couple times for the turret to notice.....