(this is continuing from this conversation, it was in the wrong section of the forum.)
Depends, is the gun supposed to be embedded into the hull of a ship or completely external?
If it is an external turret, try making an 'H' shape with six way connector blocks, balance about 40%-40%-20% Armour pierce, explosive and gauge increases along the shape, and the barrel should be made of one elevation barrel, x amount of motor barrels, and then the same amount of normal barrels, this gives it a good firing arc and accuracy!
Well, it is a turret weapon that is based at the bottom floor of the ship and is built all the way up to the deck.
It has four cannons, two big ones liberally spaced apart, and another two farther up along the gun.(These two are spaced closer together)
I have lots of gauge, but the gun do not seem to be putting out nearly enough damage.
(About half to two thirds of what the marauder puts out with its main armament.)
I have not added any armor piercing, i will have to get on that
I made four 6 way connector poles(All parallel) coated in explosive barrels. (With a few loaders mixed in)
All the gauges are at the top.
My gun barrels are pretty much fine, though i will try adding one aviation barrel to each one.
The top of my gun is a haphazard mess, of weaving connectors, loaders, and gauges.
I don't think any of the guns are balanced except in gauge terms.
And, i think i will follow you instructions and re-do the gun since i fucking forgot to save! Errrrrggggggg-g-g-g-g...
Most of your damage will come from gauge increases, but that don't do anything if you do not have any explosive of Armour piercing components or else all of that damage is only applied to one part of one block and gets wasted!
A good weapon design will almost always try to go for both explosive and armour piercing, because the explosion actually travels along the line the bullet pierces!
Yeah, i will be doing that. :P
Hang on i think i found my problem.
Do explosive barrels have to be connected to loaders in order for the gun to use them?
Because my gun was only firing normal shot.
Yeah, i will be doing that. :P
Hang on i think i found my problem.
Do explosive barrels have to be connected to loaders in order for the gun to use them?
Because my gun was only firing normal shot.
Explosive ammunition and armour piercing ammunition can be connected to any six way connecter, which MUST be connected to either the side or top of the firing piece. if you mouse over your firing piece it will tell you about the armour piercing and explosive attach rates for the bullets.
AP and He boxes can be placed strait on connectors, and they will make shots have higher Ap/explosion damage on shots that have their add on (he/ap) but they will not increase the chances that a shot actually HAS ANY ap or explosive. even if you have 2000 ap or HE blocks all the shots won't have explosive or AP unless you put at least SOME on autoloaders, as AP or HE boxes, when applied to autoloaders increase frequency of HE or AP add ons on your shells. Even If you only have a few autoloadered HE or AP, a good portion of your shots will be HE and/or AP.
You're welcome. also, I think the two games (this and FTD)'s demographics overlap heavily: FTD: 3D block based vehicle sandbox game, with RTS elements and more complexity than any other game I've played, airships: 2D modular vehicle sandbox game, with RESPECT elenents and not much hard to understand (most complex being damage types(?)) I suspect those similarities are why airships and FTD have many shared players.
Well, i'm already doing exactly that, but i did not want to use belt loaders again since they require an eternity before their ready to fire, but i did find that putting around seven normal auto-loaders seemed to work fine.(Firing four meter long shells :D)
On a side note, how do i make a bomber that actually drops its bombs when it is above the target?
OH! Your missing the barrel option for the rapid fire gun! open the gun menu (not ammo) and change the amount of barrels to six instead of one, if it's overclocked it fires REALLY fast (the trails make it look like a curved laser if the gun is accurate enough)!
Belt loaders work best with small ammo and one ammo connector per loader (if you do it right it takes >5 seconds to reload a full clip).
Are we talking missiles now about the bombs?
If so then try making the bomb bay (if it's a large bomber) a turret, or you can use ejectors and remove the arming time on the missiles so they impact instantly.
Try an adv. gun with two belt fed loaders either side, with whatever manlet/barrel you want and make it overclock x4 with six barrels, that makes it work well!
For bombs, try to adjust the firing parameters to only fire slightly ahead and down (if the ship flies straight and not at an angle)
If you want higher fire rates, just use smaller shells and a smaller caliber. I was screwing around with a single shell customizer. You just make shells with just 1 flak warhead and 1 gunpowder. The caliber affects the damage a hell of a lot more than the length, and shorter shells load a lot faster.
With a single 1m beltfed-autoloader and a twin 20mm barrel you can easily sustain-like 0.005 cooldown, or just about 12000 rpm. Which I'm pretty sure is the cap, its faster than the frame rate so its probably being capped at a slightly lower amount.
It basically turns into a bullet hose and you can easily shred anything made out of wood with just a single flak warhead at those sorts of fire rates.
If you shorten the barrel it turns into a pretty scary anti-air defense.
It only takes up 1x2x3 area, and because a full-mag is 0% volume its super duper economical in the campaign. If you slap on longer magazines you can fire near indefinitely and at max-rpm.
It even works (relatively) when you scale it up. It still has a scary fast fire rate when you get to the 100 mm range and because the shells are so short they still fit in the belt-feds.
Yeah, i realized you could do that with bombs whilst tinkering... Now my bomber can engage in the most epic fights! Unfortunately they last a LOOOOOOOONG time.
Adding an extra ammo customizer and creating a gunpowder, base bleeder, kinetic, composite head bullet will make the 1x1x3 minigun design work against metal ships fairly well (as flak bullets do nothing against the armour rating)!
Hmmm, well i cant get the diameter above .5 meters is there something i'm doing wrong? At any rate i can't wait until he fixes 8 meter clips.
Finally my doomsday cannon can come to life!!!!
@madking, .5 meters is huge. Max gauge is 50 cm, or 500mm. Largest guns ever mounted on a battleship were about 460mm, so you've got a decent reference point.
Yeah, but it is getting to me how small and frail the barrels look compared to the rest of the ship. :P
I know they're realistically scaled-but the est of the ship is not.
It is. I spent quite awhile in the devtest. :P
It tends to be really easy to transport massive quantities of a resource. The only one i have to worry about is fuel. :D
So, thanks to the engine update I have to use the new engines, and I like them.
You can do a lot with them, and they look awesome. However, they are much less fuel efficient, even when they're built for efficiency as opposed to power. And I don't mind having to also worry about fuel a bit, but as it is right now, resource zones take too long to regenerate oil and refineries make fuel too slowly to do... Well... Almost anything. Sure, you can make a ton of refineries, but that won't make natural oil generation any faster.
edit Oh nevermind, they changed the Development branch to Devtest..
Also a comment on the APS system, If you guys set ammo to use only fragmentation shells as ordnance and have them detonate above -500m at a spread of 1-2* you can make a pretty powerful shotgun.
Yeah they seem pretty bad, I haven't messed around with them too much but I think multiple single block refineries are faster than a single multiple block one, but even the multiple block ones don't give you much fuel unless you trade off minutes to get it.
Really? Because i made a multi-block one that could easily pump out enough fuel. Yeah, i would have to be pretty careful with how i use it, but i never really had a problem.
And, to be honest i don't have such a big problem with the huge resource crates. Having them contain less resource only creates a new problem which people will complain about. :P
Found the best way to create the oil refinery is to add one desalter, with cokers and catalytic crackers (Xhowever many you want). Have enough flare stacks to make sure the refinery doesn't explode but not too much that it doesn't ignite.
Also, anybody know a good combination with the 8m shells? I'm trying to create a huge AOE weapon to instantly deal with medium/larger enemy ships (because an oil refinery isn't going to last any decent amount of time in combat).
Tinker around with it, if you want flak a low negative time is usually good, concentrated frag shells might need a longer one (if you set this to the maximum (-) value with frag you get a shotgun).
Can you help e with a ship i'm making? Somehow it can not beat the ransack. Any ideas?
The ship is the velvet hammer, you can find it on the question section of ftd.
It's called "rolling ship problem"
Air Lord, Engineering Corps
(this is continuing from this conversation, it was in the wrong section of the forum.)
Depends, is the gun supposed to be embedded into the hull of a ship or completely external?
If it is an external turret, try making an 'H' shape with six way connector blocks, balance about 40%-40%-20% Armour pierce, explosive and gauge increases along the shape, and the barrel should be made of one elevation barrel, x amount of motor barrels, and then the same amount of normal barrels, this gives it a good firing arc and accuracy!
Air Admiral
Well, it is a turret weapon that is based at the bottom floor of the ship and is built all the way up to the deck. It has four cannons, two big ones liberally spaced apart, and another two farther up along the gun.(These two are spaced closer together) I have lots of gauge, but the gun do not seem to be putting out nearly enough damage.
(About half to two thirds of what the marauder puts out with its main armament.)
Air Admiral
I have not added any armor piercing, i will have to get on that
I made four 6 way connector poles(All parallel) coated in explosive barrels. (With a few loaders mixed in) All the gauges are at the top.
My gun barrels are pretty much fine, though i will try adding one aviation barrel to each one.
The top of my gun is a haphazard mess, of weaving connectors, loaders, and gauges. I don't think any of the guns are balanced except in gauge terms. And, i think i will follow you instructions and re-do the gun since i fucking forgot to save! Errrrrggggggg-g-g-g-g...
Air Lord, Engineering Corps
Most of your damage will come from gauge increases, but that don't do anything if you do not have any explosive of Armour piercing components or else all of that damage is only applied to one part of one block and gets wasted!
Air Admiral
Yeah, i know. Which is why i have only used explosive. I will also be trying armor piercing.
Air Lord, Engineering Corps
A good weapon design will almost always try to go for both explosive and armour piercing, because the explosion actually travels along the line the bullet pierces!
Air Admiral
Yeah, i will be doing that. :P Hang on i think i found my problem. Do explosive barrels have to be connected to loaders in order for the gun to use them? Because my gun was only firing normal shot.
Air Admiral
Yeah, i will be doing that. :P Hang on i think i found my problem. Do explosive barrels have to be connected to loaders in order for the gun to use them? Because my gun was only firing normal shot.
Air Lord, Engineering Corps
Explosive ammunition and armour piercing ammunition can be connected to any six way connecter, which MUST be connected to either the side or top of the firing piece. if you mouse over your firing piece it will tell you about the armour piercing and explosive attach rates for the bullets.
Air Admiral
K, because none of the tracers are red.
Air Lord, Engineering Corps
Try making a gun that looks like this
Air Lord, Engineering Corps
the = should actually be ammo boxes and auto loaders WITH gauge increases
Commander
AP and He boxes can be placed strait on connectors, and they will make shots have higher Ap/explosion damage on shots that have their add on (he/ap) but they will not increase the chances that a shot actually HAS ANY ap or explosive. even if you have 2000 ap or HE blocks all the shots won't have explosive or AP unless you put at least SOME on autoloaders, as AP or HE boxes, when applied to autoloaders increase frequency of HE or AP add ons on your shells. Even If you only have a few autoloadered HE or AP, a good portion of your shots will be HE and/or AP.
Air Lord, Engineering Corps
I'm starting to think that Airships Conquer the Skies has a lot of fans who also play From the Depths...
Air Admiral
Ah, so that's what i was doing wrong... Thanks Tortuga.
Commander
You're welcome. also, I think the two games (this and FTD)'s demographics overlap heavily: FTD: 3D block based vehicle sandbox game, with RTS elements and more complexity than any other game I've played, airships: 2D modular vehicle sandbox game, with RESPECT elenents and not much hard to understand (most complex being damage types(?)) I suspect those similarities are why airships and FTD have many shared players.
Commander, Engineering Corps
Whats 'RESPECT' elements?
Commander
Phone auto correct. Meant RTS
Air Lord, Engineering Corps
Has anyone tinkered with the new APS system yet?
The eight meter shells are really fun to mess with (although really impractical)!
Air Admiral
Yeah, i have. How do i best make an AA gun? I can never seem to properly ballance out the fire rate and damage.
Air Lord, Engineering Corps
Smaller bullets and less autoloaders (because each one adds 0.12% to load time after the first) make for faster fire rate, use a belt loader!
Also overclock the gun to the max. and it should work really good paired with a AA manlet!
Air Admiral
Well, i'm already doing exactly that, but i did not want to use belt loaders again since they require an eternity before their ready to fire, but i did find that putting around seven normal auto-loaders seemed to work fine.(Firing four meter long shells :D)
On a side note, how do i make a bomber that actually drops its bombs when it is above the target?
Air Lord, Engineering Corps
OH! Your missing the barrel option for the rapid fire gun! open the gun menu (not ammo) and change the amount of barrels to six instead of one, if it's overclocked it fires REALLY fast (the trails make it look like a curved laser if the gun is accurate enough)!
Belt loaders work best with small ammo and one ammo connector per loader (if you do it right it takes >5 seconds to reload a full clip).
Are we talking missiles now about the bombs?
If so then try making the bomb bay (if it's a large bomber) a turret, or you can use ejectors and remove the arming time on the missiles so they impact instantly.
Air Admiral
Yeah, i already have six barrels, but i did not try the overclock...
Yeah, missiles used as bombs. I want to make it fire when it's over the target opposed to whenever it pleases.
Air Lord, Engineering Corps
The overclock is the only way to shoot fast! Otherwise the gun waits for it to cool down completely (increasing accuracy).
Air Lord, Engineering Corps
Try an adv. gun with two belt fed loaders either side, with whatever manlet/barrel you want and make it overclock x4 with six barrels, that makes it work well!
For bombs, try to adjust the firing parameters to only fire slightly ahead and down (if the ship flies straight and not at an angle)
Commander, Engineering Corps
If you want higher fire rates, just use smaller shells and a smaller caliber. I was screwing around with a single shell customizer. You just make shells with just 1 flak warhead and 1 gunpowder. The caliber affects the damage a hell of a lot more than the length, and shorter shells load a lot faster.
With a single 1m beltfed-autoloader and a twin 20mm barrel you can easily sustain-like 0.005 cooldown, or just about 12000 rpm. Which I'm pretty sure is the cap, its faster than the frame rate so its probably being capped at a slightly lower amount.
It basically turns into a bullet hose and you can easily shred anything made out of wood with just a single flak warhead at those sorts of fire rates.
If you shorten the barrel it turns into a pretty scary anti-air defense.
It only takes up 1x2x3 area, and because a full-mag is 0% volume its super duper economical in the campaign. If you slap on longer magazines you can fire near indefinitely and at max-rpm.
It even works (relatively) when you scale it up. It still has a scary fast fire rate when you get to the 100 mm range and because the shells are so short they still fit in the belt-feds.
Air Admiral
Yeah, i realized you could do that with bombs whilst tinkering... Now my bomber can engage in the most epic fights! Unfortunately they last a LOOOOOOOONG time.
Air Lord, Engineering Corps
Adding an extra ammo customizer and creating a gunpowder, base bleeder, kinetic, composite head bullet will make the 1x1x3 minigun design work against metal ships fairly well (as flak bullets do nothing against the armour rating)!
Air Admiral
I see.
Air Admiral
What is the max shell gauge on the new cannons? Because i'm trying to make 8 meter long shells which are one meter wide.
Air Lord, Engineering Corps
20?
Air Admiral
Hmmm, well i cant get the diameter above .5 meters is there something i'm doing wrong? At any rate i can't wait until he fixes 8 meter clips. Finally my doomsday cannon can come to life!!!!
Commander, Engineering Corps
@madking, .5 meters is huge. Max gauge is 50 cm, or 500mm. Largest guns ever mounted on a battleship were about 460mm, so you've got a decent reference point.
Commander, Engineering Corps
That said thou, A link
So bigger guns are certainly possible, but you start getting into comic-book villain levels of impracticality.
Air Admiral
I know. :D
Commander
Shaped charges and Inertial fuses seem like an Interesting combination. haven't messed with It yet but everything else in the New cannons is awesome.
Air Admiral
Yeah, but it is getting to me how small and frail the barrels look compared to the rest of the ship. :P I know they're realistically scaled-but the est of the ship is not.
Captain
Localised resources. Logistics should make things interesting.
Air Admiral
It is. I spent quite awhile in the devtest. :P It tends to be really easy to transport massive quantities of a resource. The only one i have to worry about is fuel. :D
Captain
All those containers need a nerf, imo. Right now their capacity is absurd.
Captain
So, thanks to the engine update I have to use the new engines, and I like them.
You can do a lot with them, and they look awesome. However, they are much less fuel efficient, even when they're built for efficiency as opposed to power. And I don't mind having to also worry about fuel a bit, but as it is right now, resource zones take too long to regenerate oil and refineries make fuel too slowly to do... Well... Almost anything. Sure, you can make a ton of refineries, but that won't make natural oil generation any faster.
Air Lord, Engineering Corps
Wait did the engine update come out today?
edit Oh nevermind, they changed the Development branch to Devtest..
Also a comment on the APS system, If you guys set ammo to use only fragmentation shells as ordnance and have them detonate above -500m at a spread of 1-2* you can make a pretty powerful shotgun.
Captain
Is it just me, or are refineries really inefficient?
Air Lord, Engineering Corps
Oil refineries?
Yeah they seem pretty bad, I haven't messed around with them too much but I think multiple single block refineries are faster than a single multiple block one, but even the multiple block ones don't give you much fuel unless you trade off minutes to get it.
Air Admiral
Really? Because i made a multi-block one that could easily pump out enough fuel. Yeah, i would have to be pretty careful with how i use it, but i never really had a problem.
Air Lord, Engineering Corps
How did you assemble it? I assume you just put the other parts on the sides of the main block?
Air Admiral
And, to be honest i don't have such a big problem with the huge resource crates. Having them contain less resource only creates a new problem which people will complain about. :P
Air Admiral
Well, i actually connected them all in a row. I just assembled it in the order it recommended and added a few extra blocks.
Air Admiral
With a shit-load of exhaust vents.
Air Lord, Engineering Corps
Found the best way to create the oil refinery is to add one desalter, with cokers and catalytic crackers (Xhowever many you want). Have enough flare stacks to make sure the refinery doesn't explode but not too much that it doesn't ignite.
Also, anybody know a good combination with the 8m shells? I'm trying to create a huge AOE weapon to instantly deal with medium/larger enemy ships (because an oil refinery isn't going to last any decent amount of time in combat).
Air Admiral
I don't know any good one. Try a kinetic based weapon. HE only works against wooden ships.
Captain
Gunpowder casing - gunpowder casing - gunpowder casing - gunpowder casing - gunpowder casing - gunpowder casing - gunpowder casing - gunpowder casing - gunpowder casing - gunpowder casing - gunpowder casing - gunpowder casing - gunpowder casing - gunpowder casing - gunpowder casing - gunpowder casing.
Best 8m shell design.
Air Lord, Engineering Corps
I don't even think the game will allow that.. AKA 8m shells are not useful?
Also, Finally PID controllers added!
Air Admiral
How does one make the laser targeter detonate the shells in front of aircraft?
Air Lord, Engineering Corps
Set the timer to -s, and make sure your shells have a timer in them. (s=seconds)
Air Admiral
K, so -0.1?
Air Lord, Engineering Corps
-0.1 will make the shell detonate -0.1 seconds before the expected point of impact with the enemy.
Air Admiral
Would that be good?
Air Lord, Engineering Corps
Tinker around with it, if you want flak a low negative time is usually good, concentrated frag shells might need a longer one (if you set this to the maximum (-) value with frag you get a shotgun).
Air Admiral
Can you help e with a ship i'm making? Somehow it can not beat the ransack. Any ideas? The ship is the velvet hammer, you can find it on the question section of ftd. It's called "rolling ship problem"
Air Lord, Engineering Corps
Rolling ship problem? Is your vessel too top heavy? (and the Ransack is that tank-turret-ship-thing, right?)
Air Admiral
Not anymore, at the moment i'm trying to figure out why it's so under-powered.
Air Lord, Engineering Corps
The old custom cannons got replaced with new railway cannons in the dev branch, I bet they are perfectly balanced.
Speaking of railway guns, that might make for an interesting Airships suggestion.
Air Admiral
FINALLY! I can have my doomsday cannon of doom!
Air Lord, Engineering Corps
They nerfed them, same damage but only fires about once per minute now.