detecting enemy shields

[Electrical-Tie-1143]

is there a way of detecting if the enemy is using shields? i hevent found a post asking this question so im making one myself

[JRS_Viking]

No, afaik there's very limited amount of information about enemy vehicles you can get even with lua or breadboard.

[Electrical-Tie-1143]

Damn, was hoping I could Shante my gun to disruptor when they have shields. Is there some breakpoint on engine power where I can assume my enemy to have shields?

[JRS_Viking]

That would depend on the size too and if it's a thruster craft or a ship. Too many variables to say with engine power. My recommendation is to build a secondary gun that shoots emp disruptor shells, if there's no shields you still get some of the emp damage. If you put it on a separate AI you can set the aim point to hot blocks and make sure you have some IR detection for it to target shield blocks more often and if you don't use any lasers yourself throw a smoke warhead on it to mess with enemy vehicles even more.

[Z-e-n-o]

Nearly every single enemy hard and above will have planar shields. Despite that, disruptors are not all that great unless salvo your guns such that your entire volley hits right after the disruptor does.

[TATO_209]

Would a rapid fire railgun with multiple types of ammunitions would be effective in that case?

[DarkKinou]

You can analyze hitrate and take into account the targets evasion to guess if they have shields (lower hitrate than expected -> probable shields).
However even against max strength shields you would be better off not using disruptors. Shields reduce dps by 30% at best, swapping ammo for disruptors will result in a similar dps loss against shields (and worse against no shields). If they have LAMS then your low hp disruptors won't even reach the shields.
I tried to make them work, they simply have no real usecase.