General Empyrion Thread
- Thread starter GasBandit
- Start date
Trying out my death cube on an alien POI. 5-ish minute video Sorry there's no sound. I forgot to enable it in OBS.
Lessons learned:
Lessons learned:
- Spread out weapons to avoid losing a bunch at once due to splash damage.
- Add better side thrusters.
- Reduce internal block count to reduce weight. I lost no outer armor blocks, so I can remove a bit of internal armor (all those holes in the front at the end of the vid are where weapons once sat).
- I'm a decent shot on stationary targets. I don't have homing rockets on this thing, but I was still pretty effective.
- If you have the luxury of sitting still, gatling guns are pretty effective.
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I like to think of what we're doing here as practice for future conquests. We already know that the fast attack tanks will work well against low level PoIs, or higher level ones on starter planets, I suppose, but that we're going to need main battle tanks to really storm strong opponents. I'll work on one of those tomorrow.
Kati has been playing a lot of Torchlight lately as well.
It's like you two subscribe to the same channel.
--Patrick
Don't worry, I'm sure there will be plenty more. Gas commissioned a new tank and now we need to go test the first run. We seem to've gone into the planetary raiding business.
GasBandit
Staff member
There are LOTS more POIs to raid. We didn't even break this one down for parts, so it's probably already back again, complete with the 20-odd turrets we had to destroy.
Edit: Also, I need to design a new fighter that doesn't have the cockpit up front. Hrmmm... I got an idea. It'll probably end up looking like a Gee Bee, but that's also appropriate, considering MY initials
Edit: Also, I need to design a new fighter that doesn't have the cockpit up front. Hrmmm... I got an idea. It'll probably end up looking like a Gee Bee, but that's also appropriate, considering MY initials
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GasBandit
Staff member
One thing I think some people don't understand about bases and POIs is it is actually a lot of work to just "pound them flat" with weapons, even CV turrets (most of the big boomers don't work planetside), or HV artillery (really slow firing). Most POI structures have multiple subterranean floors, and chewing through that much combat steel armor (or Alien Armor blocks, which is roughly equivalent) is a slow and expensive process. Note that even Evasong's super-cheaty basekiller didn't completely level the Titan Branch, and even left some devices intact (of course, when Shadow then went inside the broken-open base, he then proceeded to crack open containers and devices with small arms).
This is because armor blocks have an undocumented "damage negation" feature, where each individual attack against them is reduced by a given number, and that number is never really published. So, you can empty magazine after magazine of rounds from your enhanced pulse rifle into a combat armor block and never have it even take a single point of damage. A plasma cannon or rocket launcher might dent it, but it's gonna take hundreds of shots to destroy. This also works against high DPS/low burst weapons like gatling guns, minigun turrets, and pulse laser turrets.
Once again, your best bet seems to be missiles, or if you're on foot, satchel charges or a shoulder mounted RPG. But that gets expensive in a hurry.
This is because armor blocks have an undocumented "damage negation" feature, where each individual attack against them is reduced by a given number, and that number is never really published. So, you can empty magazine after magazine of rounds from your enhanced pulse rifle into a combat armor block and never have it even take a single point of damage. A plasma cannon or rocket launcher might dent it, but it's gonna take hundreds of shots to destroy. This also works against high DPS/low burst weapons like gatling guns, minigun turrets, and pulse laser turrets.
Once again, your best bet seems to be missiles, or if you're on foot, satchel charges or a shoulder mounted RPG. But that gets expensive in a hurry.
Will it wind up as much of a death trap as the real thing? Stay tuned, folks!There are LOTS more POIs to raid. We didn't even break this one down for parts, so it's probably already back again, complete with the 20-odd turrets we had to destroy.
Edit: Also, I need to design a new fighter that doesn't have the cockpit up front. Hrmmm... I got an idea. It'll probably end up looking like a Gee Bee, but that's also appropriate, considering MY initials
GasBandit
Staff member
It's standard, but can be customized, though the methodology and exact formula are opaque and confusing.
Also, you can't deconstruct an enemy structure/ship until the enemy core is removed.
Fresh off the success of the Bad Pennies, I set out to design a light attack/recon tank for planetary exploration and/or predator hunting. It won't stand up to the pounding that the Douglas Mk IV or the Bad Penny will take, but it should get you the hell out of Dodge in one big hurry. This one even has some styling work on it. The prototype is parked on Elites and the blueprint is set to Friends on Steam.
GasBandit
Staff member
The temptation finally overcame me today. I bought a refurbished server on ebay. Should get here middle of next week. Processor's not the strongest ever (It's got two Xeon E5530s, which are each quad core but about equivalent to a low grade intel i5), but it also has 64 gigs of ram and windows server 2016 preinstalled. Not a bad pull for $375.
GasBandit
Staff member
No, this is my toy
Edit: and in all seriousness, I don't know how this will work out. I'm a little worried the CPUs are too weak. We'll just have to see. If that turns out to be the case, I kinda plan to use it for something else.
Should've talked to me. I know someone who has a Proliant they're going to be unloading in the next month or two. No OS, though, just a COA.
FYI for anyone else out there getting ideas, X58-based servers (well really, the 5500/5520-based "Tylersburg" server equivalent) are all plummeting in price right now, and no matter what they come with, it's not really that expensive to replace whatever processors you buy in it with something like a pair of 6-core Xeon X5675's. They may have been $1500 when they were new, but I've seen 'em on sale for as little as $80ea. Memory will set you back, though. A single 16GB registered ECC DIMM will set you back anywhere from $80-$120, and some dual-processor boards can hold up to 18 of 'em.
FWIW I still have a 6-core 3GHz Xeon system with 24GB RAM just sitting here doing nothing. I still haven't even started the OEM Win7 setup yet.
--Patrick
GasBandit
Staff member
Well, I think I got memory covered, 64gb should be plenty. If performance isn't good enough, I may start watching sales for a couple X5675s.
It also came with 3 300gb drives... I'm thinking of doing a Raid 1+0.
If you don't mind playing Refurb Roulette, newegg has them for $100 a pop right now.
GasBandit
Staff member
I saw that... we'll see how things go once I have the thing in my hand and we do some testing.
Heck, Ebay has refurbs of them going for $80 a pair.
I got mine off eBay from a seller with a nice high reputation.
Also I still have that 12-core 2010 Mac Pro sitting here doing nothing, but I don't have a copy of Windows for that (Yet! A copy of 8.1 retail is supposed to arrive by next Tue) AND I still only have 8GB RAM in it (see my comments about memory pricing, above), so that's why I was offering up the 6-core.
How the mighty have fallen. Also that generation of server is coming off its long-term lease EVERYWHERE, so the market is getting inundated with them right now. Also that motherboard silicon apparently does NOT support booting from NVMe-based SSDs, I think?...which is probably pushing people to finally decide to trade 'em in. Plus they only support PCIe v2.0.
--Patrick
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The X5690 is faster (I mean yeah, but only up to a whopping 10% faster), but it is a 130W chip, while the X5675 is only a 95W chip. Also, many of the people selling the -90 appear to want an unreasonable premium for them, probably because they they know it is the top end model.
Personally I’m perfectly happy with 90% the max possible speed but at < 75% the power budget, especially when there’s 2 of ‘em.
—Patrick
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GasBandit
Staff member