General Empyrion Thread

[Gared]

Well, I started the day off intending to spend a little time in creative mode making a heavy fighter that doesn't fly like a nose heavy brick - having forgotten about the Ghost heavy fighter I'd already made. Fortunately, that already exists, because I spent my day building a planetary raiding CV instead. Clocking in at size class 6, this beast is a flying city (and looks like one). It has hangar capacity - fully enclosed hangars, mind you, not just hangar decks - for:

• 2 Bad Penny main battle tanks
• 2 Battlesheep fast attack/recon tanks
• 4 Nimble Miners
• 4 Treemowers
• 3 Artillery tanks
• 3 Antipersonnel tanks
• 8 Ballista heavy fighters or 4 Ghost heavy fighters
• 4 Skeeter light fighters or 2 Skeeters and 2 Grub Hubs or any combo thereof

This leaves the two main flight-level hangars empty. They're 14x7x10. Also, because the Ballista is longer than she is tall or wide, you could forgo Skeeters entirely and use the upper hangars for Ballistas and Grub Hubs. I'm not looking forward to the 22hr42min build time on her, though.

 

[GasBandit]

Well, I started the day off intending to spend a little time in creative mode making a heavy fighter that doesn't fly like a nose heavy brick - having forgotten about the Ghost heavy fighter I'd already made. Fortunately, that already exists, because I spent my day building a planetary raiding CV instead. Clocking in at size class 6, this beast is a flying city (and looks like one). It has hangar capacity - fully enclosed hangars, mind you, not just hangar decks - for:

• 2 Bad Penny main battle tanks
• 2 Battlesheep fast attack/recon tanks
• 4 Nimble Miners
• 4 Treemowers
• 3 Artillery tanks
• 3 Antipersonnel tanks
• 8 Ballista heavy fighters or 4 Ghost heavy fighters
• 4 Skeeter light fighters or 2 Skeeters and 2 Grub Hubs or any combo thereof

This leaves the two main flight-level hangars empty. They're 14x7x10. Also, because the Ballista is longer than she is tall or wide, you could forgo Skeeters entirely and use the upper hangars for Ballistas and Grub Hubs. I'm not looking forward to the 22hr42min build time on her, though.

The secret we found to chopping down build time like crazy is Armored concrete blocks. Each stack takes off 45 mins, and it gives you the dust back to put back in the constructor if the blueprint doesn't require rock dust. No blueprint switching needed!

Also, I've got the GB Space Superiority fighter ready to go now, I'll debut it tonight. It's about as long as a Ballista but actually has wings and stuff.

 

[GasBandit]

The GeeBee Space Superiority Fighter is rolling off the assembly lines.

While sporting a more limited arsenal than the Ballista Heavy Fighter, the GeeBee is trimmed down to what works best - homing missiles and gatling cannons. Additionally, the cockpit sits in the rear, so it is unlikely to be automatically targeted by turrets, as was often a problem with the Ballista. The nose has supplementary thrusters inside it, behind a nose cone many layers thick of solid hardened steel armor, made to attract (and then absorb) enemy turret fire, making it a much more robust solution for attacking alien POIs and enemy bases/capital ships. Moreover, its weapon package is spread much wider, so that one or two well placed missiles WON'T defang you of all your homing missile launchers. And when the going gets too rough, it even has a warp engine to jump to safety.

All of this comes at the cost of fuel efficiency and size. One GeeBee SSFTR takes up the hangar space of two ballistas and is also longer. However, I believe it much less likely to be shot down in typical use.

 

[Gared]

Dear god, The Ravenous is a big damn ship. I had to have Aislynn go move a couple of vehicles out from under her when I was parking her for the first time, she's so damn big. But, she does fit on the pad at the Lunar or Orbital Yard, which will make loading and unloading tanks much easier. In fact, I think I'll jaunt on over to creative mode and put together a new, device free landing pad that can be ready to spawn when we go raiding. That way, we can send someone down in an SV, spawn a landing pad, and land The Ravenous. I think I'll also throw together a cheap forge base design - basically a bit of power and some furnaces, since CVs can't use furnaces.

The good news is, even at 66.4 kt, the 120 T2 RCS units make it fly like a leaf on the wind, as opposed to some of my other designs, which fly through the air exactly the way a brick shouldn't. Now I have to paint and texture it though. If it weren't for PvP, I'd offer some poor schmuck on Akua a stack or two of Pentaxid to do it for me.

 

[GasBandit]

Experimental 8 phase 6 has hit - https://empyriononline.com/threads/alpha-experimental-8-0-part-vi.37877/

They say that this will probably be the last phase before release candidates, which means we're probably looking at 2-3 weeks til Alpha 8 hits the stable branch and every alpha 7 server has to wipe.

 

[Dave]

Maybe by then yours will be up & running.

 

[GasBandit]

Maybe by then yours will be up & running.

It's hard to say exactly when. The replacement CPUs won't get here until a week from monday, and I don't think I'll have too much time to work on it that week, and then that weekend I'm out of town to go to a family reunion. So it might be up and minimally running next weekend on the weaker CPUs (which would probably be enough just for a few people), but it won't be full blown ready for 3 weeks or so. We'll just have to see how it all works out.

 

[PatrThom]

What is it you planned to use the server for when it's not Empyrion-ing? You didn't say whether you got a 1U or a tower, so I don't know if you planned to make it a game box, either.

--Patrick

 

[Gared]

Y'all, I present to you, The Ravenous. I was gonna use thumbs instead of spoilers, but even the thumbnails are huge.

Spoiler: Fore shot

Looking down her throat. There is a slight chance of a down the throat shot getting through that forcefield that doesn't have a door in front of it and either going straight through (and wrecking both battlesheep) or exploding recklessly in the tank bays and making a royal mess. That sounds more sexual than I meant it to. Oh well. There's still room for more blocks, so it could be styled to look a little less like a city, and some of that styling could potentially be used to obstruct those shots better. That's why this is the first version, I s'pose.

Spoiler: Starboard

From the starboard side. You can see the Huntress III in that big bay in the middle. Gas reckons he can fit two SSF's in that main bay (or four if he wanted to dock two upside down). I couldn't resist including Covenant rising in the background. Aislynn is thinking of colonizing it, just as a personal base like the one back on Ningues.

Spoiler: Aft

From aft. On this end I at least managed to fit a shutter door on the outside to cover the forcefields from the emitters (she isn't symmetrical front to back, only port to starboard, and her internals aren't exactly symmetrical either, for reasons). That big blue beast in the background to the right will take up one of the big tank hangars on the bottom, but this whole thing would be more capable if they included large elevators for moving SVs and HVs inside carriers and bases.

Those base designs are going to have to wait though, I'm too burned out on design to even lay concrete pads and deal with structural integrity today.

 

[GasBandit]

What is it you planned to use the server for when it's not Empyrion-ing? You didn't say whether you got a 1U or a tower, so I don't know if you planned to make it a game box, either.

--Patrick

Probably gonna "move" my Killing Floor 2 server there, too, so I can stop renting one, as well as move my video library to it as well. And then any other time I want to run my own server for a game... there it is. Hrm, maybe also a plex server? Not sure.

Assuming of course, that Empyrion doesn't gobble up all the resources.

 

[PatrThom]

the only limiting factor would be my 5.6Mbps upstream.

Soooo...thanks to investigations predicated by our discussion in this thread, I just discovered my ISP upgraded all their customers from 60/6 to 100/10 ... last year.
...but not us.
...because apparently since I don't have a phone/TV/refrigerator/alarm/toaster subscription, they didn't do it automatically. I had to call in today and say, "Where's my 2017 upgrade?" and they said "Ha ha our bad OK it's there now no change to your bill or anything" and here we are.

-_-

--Patrick

 

[Gared]

Soooo...thanks to investigations predicated by our discussion in this thread, I just discovered my ISP upgraded all their customers from 60/6 to 100/10 ... last year.
...but not us.
...because apparently since I don't have a phone/TV/refrigerator/alarm/toaster subscription, they didn't do it automatically. I had to call in today and say, "Where's my 2017 upgrade?" and they said "Ha ha our bad OK it's there now no change to your bill or anything" and here we are.

-_-

--Patrick

Yep, that sort of thing and bundle pricing is why I keep paying every month for a phone that hasn't made a connection to the outside world since February. Which it did for four hours. Once. And why I also pay for an extended basic cable package, when the cable box isn't even plugged in right now.

 

[GasBandit]

I just pony up for 200/20 out of my own pocket -_-

At some point here, though, the radio station here is getting fiber... I might sneak my server into the server room here. Haven't made up my mind.

 

[PatrThom]

I live in an area where 100/10 is about the best you can get...even though I live literally a block away from the local telecom's fiber distribution node, because American ISPs are all jackasses and don't boost speeds because 1) competition isn't really a thing and 2) if we boost speeds then of course there will be rampant piracy and our entertainment arm doesn't want that so enjoy your throttled Internet.

¡-_-!

--Patrick

 

[Gared]

Two things.

1. I discovered that the SV hangars on top of the ship weren't connected to any of the rest of the ship. That has been resolved.
2. It occurs to me that it would be dumb as hell to go build a new base that has just a concrete pad and another new base that has just furnaces when the base I already have has both. And it's not like The Ravenous is an early- to mid-game ship. When am I ever going to have access to 41,5k Sathium ingots and not have access to 26k stone dust?

 

[Gared]

The Ravenous lost a landing foot in last night's assault by Evasong. He must now die (again).

 

[GasBandit]

The Ravenous lost a landing foot in last night's assault by Evasong. He must now die (again).

His Starfury was still hovering in midair. I declawed the POI, then managed to fly up, core it, and re-core it, then drop it to the deck so I could multitool the good stuff out of it

 

[GasBandit]

Say hello to the Leviathan Supercarrier.

She's a bit boxy, and expensive as hell, but guaranteed to get you there firstest with the mostest.

She can easily fit 10 bad pennies inside her, with room to spare for battlesheep, miners, and whatnot. That's assuming you want to dock fighters to the flight deck up top. You don't have to

 

[Gared]

Yesterday Aislynn and I decided to see if we could take out one of those big PoIs near us without fighter overwatch. The answer is yes, we can, but it costs two bad pennies if there's no fighter on overwatch to take out the upper level of turrets. Still died about the same number of times on the inside of the PoI though.

We'll see how much mental energy I have to devote to Empyrion today. After the dungeon crawl I pretty much spent the rest of my day breaking down the two tanks and putting their ammo back in the storage lockers.

 

[Gared]

Say hello to the Leviathan Supercarrier.

She's a bit boxy, and expensive as hell, but guaranteed to get you there firstest with the mostest.

She can easily fit 10 bad pennies inside her, with room to spare for battlesheep, miners, and whatnot. That's assuming you want to dock fighters to the flight deck up top. You don't have to

I think she's gonna need some more fuel tanks for planet-side operation. Yes, you can turn thrusters and RCS off once you get down safely, but this thing is so big it dwarfs the Planetary Yard, so you're going to have to spend a lot of time looking for a flat space big enough to land her, and she only has 6.5 minutes of fuel during flight ops in Akua atmo.

Also, I threw together a quick CV defense tank - basically a turret on a hover platform. The cockpit isn't secure in any way, so you can't ride these into battle or you will die, but for deploying a quick defensive shell around a planet-bound CV, they should do quite nicely. It doesn't matter how many of them we could fit in the Leviathan, because our computers would all give up long before capacity from core-overload. These should replace the Antipersonnel and Artillery tanks Mk II for CV/LZ defense, as they're cheaper, smaller, and less clunky. There's one of each turret type, one turret per tank, so you can set up a defensive shell of LZ -> Artillery -> Plasma -> Rocket/Minigun, with some faster turret types scattered in amongst the Artillery ring to defend against people dive-bombing the LZ.

Now, since I'm still not happy with the performance of the Robert Grey or the Ghost heavy fighters, I think I'll go work on something a little smoother.

 

[GasBandit]

I think she's gonna need some more fuel tanks for planet-side operation. Yes, you can turn thrusters and RCS off once you get down safely, but this thing is so big it dwarfs the Planetary Yard, so you're going to have to spend a lot of time looking for a flat space big enough to land her, and she only has 6.5 minutes of fuel during flight ops in Akua atmo.

Hrm, I'll stick some more in and update the blueprint on the workshop.

 

[GasBandit]

The Leviathan is now in on Renntech, too. Here's a CV parked on top of it

The first fighter to go in her hangar:

Size compared to the Reliant:

And compared to the Legion:

 

[Gared]

I'm gonna start working on an "escort" for the Leviathan - something truly worthy of the battleship class name. I'm aiming for Size Class 8 at least. The issue with that is, you have to fill the inside with various compartments of some sort or, as we discovered last night, you're open to shots phasing straight through your armor to the soft insidey bits. So I guess it will also be a troop transport and/or just have a bunch of compartments for the "crew" required for a BB class ship.

 

[GasBandit]

I, too, will be designing stuff over the next few days. Taking what I learned from our latest bouts with Evasong, I've got some design ideas for... well, a giant bullshit CV that won't even look like a ship but could be a massive 1v1 cv beast because it uses/abuses all the meta features of online PvP - gapped armor, decoys, widely spaced turrets functioning as unidirectional weapons, thrusters entirely protected on every side by armor, etc, etc.

I don't like it, I like the aesthetics of ships like the Legion or the Belial much better, but if you want to win at pvp, you gotta be a weenie flying a big hunk of cheese.

 

[Tinwhistler]

I don't like it, I like the aesthetics of ships like the Legion or the Belial much better, but if you want to win at pvp, you gotta be a weenie flying a big hunk of cheese.

That was the idea by the battle cube SV that I built. It was basically a big cube of armored steel, with only a tiny door in the rear that let you get in the thing. No glass (can only fly using the 3rd person camera), everything bunched up in the middle of the ship, and surrounded by two layers of steel (with useless stuff between the layers designed to ablate and absorb any phased damage). My first iteration held up really well in my test run, except for me losing most of the too closely spaced weapons all at the same time.


I got about half-way rebuilding it to space out the weapons, but got tired of it and quit halfway through. It was a big ugly hunk of metal, but I figured it would have held up really well to Evasong's basekiller.

 

[GasBandit]

Well, I do have to give Evasong credit... ever since that planet battle, he hasn't used the same ship. Every time he's come after us, it's been with something new. Yes, they're still cheat ships (too many turrets) and meta-cheese but at least it's not the same one every time.

 

[GasBandit]

My server arrived today! I can't wait to get to work on it! But I gotta, because it's the end of the month and there's tons of shit to do at work >_<

 

[GasBandit]

OMG and now the new processors just arrived! AAeeeIIIIGGHHH!!!

 

[Dave]

*cough* *cough* Gee, boss, I'm just feeling so poorly right now. I think I have to go home...

 

[GasBandit]

*cough* *cough* Gee, boss, I'm just feeling so poorly right now. I think I have to go home...

Well, for the first part, I'd like to actually get it on my workbench here at the office, it's better appointed than I've got at home right now for working on machines So, once I get the billing and stuff out of the way, I'll go elbow deep in the server and nobody will bug me because they'll assume I'm doing something important

 

[PatrThom]

OMG and now the new processors just arrived! AAeeeIIIIGGHHH!!!

You haven’t even posted the specs!
I mean, if it’s a 1U, then I assume you won’t be mounting it at home unless you’re hoping the constant VrRRRRrRRRRrRRRRrRRRR will help lull you to sleep, or maybe act as one of those sonic pest repellers.

—Patrick

 

[GasBandit]

You haven’t even posted the specs!
I mean, if it’s a 1U, then I assume you won’t be mounting it at home unless you’re hoping the constant VrRRRRrRRRRrRRRRrRRRR will help lull you to sleep, or maybe act as one of those sonic pest repellers.

—Patrick

It's a 2U, and I'll probably be keeping it on a shelf in a closet with the door closed

Here's the specs, obviously the CPU is about to be swapped out, tho.

Model Dell PowerEdge Poweredge R710
MPN R710-48GB-1.2TB-11961
Processor Two (2) Intel Xeon Quad Core E5530 2.40GHz 8MB Smart Cache 5.86GT/s 80W
Memory Installed 48GB Total; Eighteen Slots Available: 12 x 4GB PC3 Registered DDR3 Memory Installed
Hard Drives 4 x Dell Enterprise 300GB 15K SAS 3.5" Hard Drives (1.2TB Of RAW Storage)
Drive Bays 6 drive bays
Riser Board 2 x Riser Board with 2x PCI-e G2 x8 Slots Per Riser Board
External Media Dell PowerEdge R710 SlimLine Optical Drive
Power Supply Single 570W Power Supply Unit - Power Cord Not Included
Backplane Backplane for 6 x 3.5" SAS or SATA Drives
Ethernet Broadcom BCM5709C 4 x iSCSI TOE NICs (4 On-Board Ports Total)
Video Embedded Matrox G200 8MB
Form Factor 2U Rackmountable
RAID Controller PERC 6i RAID Controller with BBU and Cables
Remote Access Card Dell iDRAC6 Express Card Included
Front Bezel Not Included
Rapid Rails Rail Kit Not Included
Operating System Windows 2016 Server Pre-Installed
Software Software Media or Licenses Not Included
COA Not Included
Service Tag Various
Processor Manufacturer Intel
Processor Type Xeon Quad Core
Return Policy/Warranty 60 days Money Back Or Exchange

 

[GasBandit]

Aww man, it's win server 2016 EVALUATION edition. Of course the price was too good to be true. Gagh. Well, $375 is still a good price for the hardware.

Also holy shit this thing is heavy as fuckballs.

 

[PatrThom]

The server my buddy just purchased was a T710 for $250, but his didn’t come with RAM, so you got him beat there. He just got it so he can set up a half-dozen VMs so he can simulate trying stuff in his production environment without accidentally taking down his production environment UNLIKE THE LAST GUY (not me).

—Patrick

 

[GasBandit]

Hrm. Also, despite coming with 4 300 gig drives, the current raid configuration just seems to have one 900 gig volume. I'd like to reconfigure that into a raid 10. Of course, that'll blow away the current windows install, but as it's just evaluation edition, I'm probably just gonna install windows 7 pro on it and be done with it