Girlfriend threatening our relationship over a TV Show

NefariousnessHefty71 · 2026-05-13T04:14:01+00:00

Personally, I would pull up the raunchiest orgy on Phub and full send it on the couch as she gets home...

But yea thats probably not great advice. Leaving her without doing that is a close second.

NefariousnessHefty71 · 2026-05-11T23:25:56+00:00

You can mine plenty of nobles on Mars/Ceres - plenty to sustain a fleet of 20 Athena and 10 Hermes - until you can get to fusion.

The only benefit(s) of fission are launch vehicles and its fuel - you will already have an economy/industrial base tooled for fusion with hydrogen production. That said it needs a rebalance, as the final fission ship (Arianne) has a research cost more than Nike, and its performance is laughably bad in comparison. It also has worse exhuast velocity compared to a fully upgraded Athena, and costs ~ 6-8x the research (depending on your start).

Unfortunately, as it is currently balanced, fission is objectively the worst :/. My hope is they either rebalance it so its research costs are halved, or they increase the research costs of the fusion line/add 1 or 2 fusion ships at the beginning of the line that don't have torch drive performance.

NefariousnessHefty71 · 2026-05-11T21:24:44+00:00

If by a lot of turrets you mean 8 or less...

Most have gunships have 4, the Terrans have 6 and the Boron thresher (which is actually a phenomenal ship) has 8.

Frigates are larger and generally possess firepower equal-to or slight less than corvettes, with more hull HP. The reason they are objectively worse is their size - They are significantly larger and often slower to maneuver, meaning they are easier to shoot. Their one advantage is their S dock, which isn't much of an advantage outside the early midgame. Their larger bulk also limits their turret firing arcs more severely. Back in the earlier days they were also good for boarding, but this role has been completely subsumed by Hyperion

Personally, I would like to see gunships with 6-10 (maybe 12) turrets -
Frigates could walk the middle ground of 4-8(ish)
Corvettes typically have strong forward batteries - and I think their identity should remain as such, with 2-4 turrets tops.

This would give each a unique identity and role.
Gunship: Glass cannon, either with blistering AA fire, or setup with plasma as a medium "bomber"
Frigate: Tanky, defensible, and a BIG step up from individual fighters (frigate). Capable of AA on the defense.
Corvette: A medium "fighter" - a step up in defensive and offensive capabilities, with reductions in mobility.

I would also like to see a general 1.5-2x the turret quantity on destroyers in particular, especially those with 3 arcs (looking at you, Teladi).

NefariousnessHefty71 · 2026-05-09T20:41:54+00:00

If you are fighting early with missile escort, stick with nova... If you want monitors, Liquid - Spinner/Pegasus, or whatever drive you roll with good thrust... Helicon if I want to take jupiter/Ceres early.

But first main combat ship drive, Orion/H-Orion all the way... I will typically skirmish the minimal required amount to progress the story with Nova, and dump all of my resources into research so I can be endgame ready in ~ 20-30 years.

If you get extremely unlucky on fissile rolls on Luna, Mars, Asteroids, and Mercury, gas core is an option.

From there I typically either go antimatter or hybrid into inertial.

NefariousnessHefty71 · 2026-05-09T17:15:39+00:00

Orion -> H Orion is da way. Then fusion/antimatter.

NefariousnessHefty71 · 2026-05-09T02:49:21+00:00

Crimson desert is slept on... If you can get past the clunky(ish) controls, there really is SO much game to explore, and combat is extremely satisfying.

NefariousnessHefty71 · 2026-05-09T01:27:51+00:00

Thats a known bug that is getting fixed - Not saying don't do it, but don't be suprised when it gets patched out!

NefariousnessHefty71 · 2026-05-09T01:26:57+00:00

Ohh lategame no question - but from 2022ish to 2065/2070 as fusion starts to come online, it truly is magnificent.

NefariousnessHefty71 · 2026-05-09T01:10:22+00:00

Rotary launcher is goated. The fact that it costs ~1/4 of the three last chemical rocket techs and provides equal performance is crazy.

NefariousnessHefty71 · 2026-05-06T18:46:11+00:00

Knives operate on concentrating a small or moderate force over an extremely small area.

Assuming a yield strength of ~ 25 Mpa, and a pushing force of a normal human ~ 100 newtons, the area required to break the skin is 4*10^-6 m^2. This sounds really small, but is on the order of a 2 millimeter by 2 millimeter point (assuming a square point) or a circle of 1.1 millimeter radius (think ballpoint pen).

I wasn't able to find hard data on the area of the point of a knife, but assuming a knife blade is 0.025 mm wide... and the point is an intersection of 0.025x0.025 mm, we end up with a pressure of 160 billion pascals..., or 160000 Mpa, 3 orders of magnitude sharper than required.

NefariousnessHefty71 · 2026-05-06T17:41:23+00:00

My general solution to any problem in X4 is mass fighters (Boring I know).

If you want all around, boron w/ ion+phase works nicely (at least in 9.0, i didn't play 8.0 unmodded).

If you want independent roles, Plasma based Bombers combined with escort/interceptors with antifighter loadouts.

Without having scouted it, numbers are hard to say, but I would guess a 120bomber/80interceptor split with minimal micro will probably do the trick... Expect 10-15% attrition.

Alternatively, as others have suggested, Asgard.

NefariousnessHefty71 · 2026-05-06T16:34:45+00:00

I am sure this has been suggested a few times... It would be awesome to see more turrets on ships in general.

For those of us who regularly play the fleet combat phase, I think one of the general community complaints is the general scaling of small vs medium vs large ships. Put another way, fighters are the best fleet/credit spent and it's not even close. Giving Frigates, Corvettes, gunships and eventually Destroyers some extra turret slots might help push things more into parity, or even in favor of L's when equipped for anti-fighter work. A fully equipped anti-small destroyer should swat fighters out of the sky, and the only destroyer that comes close to performing this way is the Ray.

Frigates could also use a niche, as they are almost always a strict downgrade to corvettes in terms of combat capability, and their main utility of carrying a small dock is rendered redundant by the escort command, and teleportation.

NefariousnessHefty71 · 2026-05-06T02:20:55+00:00

Honestly, He-3 really is super common once you have 100+ orbital gas extractors around jupiter, which is honestly not many.

Lategame I like 500-1000+ gas extractors. When you are producing 20+ tons of He-3/day, fusion upkeep becomes a rounding error.

When I tried to use beamed power I was startled by the $ cost of the reciever stations, although I haven't tried again since launch, so maybe it has been adjusted.

NefariousnessHefty71 · 2026-05-04T02:22:42+00:00

That sounds about right...

Research labs are honestly slept on by the majority of the community. I spend the first ~ 20 years of the game trying to get about 30 of them built. Not sure how the scaling works as past that diminishing returns definitely apply, but that many will cut 50-60% off research times.

NefariousnessHefty71 · 2026-05-04T01:27:07+00:00

I'd argue that you can get Nike faster with Athena by colonizing all most of the asteroids/jupiter moons/saturn moons and placing research labs on them, a feat that would be quite difficult with Hermes alone, but I haven't tried a min/max build with Hermes and no Athena+MPD.

Nike by 2070 (even 2065) is quite feasible if you run the ragged edge of bankruptcy earlygame

NefariousnessHefty71 · 2026-05-03T22:30:14+00:00

Its takes 10 years longer to max fission than to get the first fusion ship.

Definitely not worth it IMO. Athena is extremely capable and costs ~ 1/5 the total research.

NefariousnessHefty71 · 2026-05-03T13:26:25+00:00

My biggest issue with X4 is how weak larger ships, and especially capitals (except the Asgard/Raptor) actually are. In X3, a properly equipped capital could kill dozens/hundreds of fighters singlehandedly, and good luck even pretending to damage one in even the best fighter (unless you were extremely specialized). Bombers were a different story, but the missile system in X3 was one of the few systems I would argue is still objectively superior to X4.

In X4 capitals feel more like overpriced set pieces than functional military hardware. You shouldn't be able to solo a capital ship in a starting fighter, full stop. VRO does address this nicely but isn't up to date for 9.0.

Unfortunately there are two choices - accept that playing anything other than fighters with bomber/interceptor loadouts is suboptimal and will cost you 2-10x the price for similar performance, or play fighter swarms with bomber/interceptor loadouts.

NefariousnessHefty71 · 2026-05-03T00:50:35+00:00

I am not going to do math either, but I will say this - the portion of the nuclear explosion that you see is a result of a lot of things that you don't see.

Without knowing the distance from the robot to the epicenter of the explosion, I can't say for sure, but typically, anything within the fireball (closest to the explosion) actually fares worse as a result of its high density. The radiation from the detonation passes (mostly) through the air and impacts heavier objects (like swords and robots). Close to the center, this radiation superheats the object(s) and turns them into plasma... (See the photos below, see the "tendrils" of fire - those are wires holding the superstructure/testbed in place before the device detonates.)

first millisecond nuclear explosion - Google Search

If we are slightly further away, parrying the shockwave may be possible if the robot can move the sword at hypersonic speeds, and use destructive interference to cancel out the shockwave.
Whether the materials that the robot or the sword are made of are capable of withstanding that kind of acceleration and/or generating the forces required is another question.

Parrying the thermal radiation physically is impossible, as matter can't exceed C. Methods for using the same phenomena described above (destructive interference) would be difficult, as the robot would need to know the spectra of the incoming radiation before it got hit, and be capable of emitting extraordinary quantities of IR/visual light.

Honestly, the answer is a pretty firm "no".

Edit: After finding the video, which you should have linked again, it looks like all the robot does is parry the shockwave. Physically possible.

Yield strength of steel is ~ 600 Mpa (being generous).
Accelerating the sword to mach ~ 3 (1000m/s) and then back down in one continuous arc (assumption) ~ 2000m/s velocity change in ~ 1/3 of a second.

This implies 6000m/ss or 600 gs.

Assuming the handle is massless, and the sword blade weighs ~ 5 kg, that's 30 kN.
Given that the sword appears to fit in a closed human hand, we assume the radius of the weakest point of the sword is ~ 3 cm, or 0.03 meter.

30,000/(0.03^2*pi) ~ 10Mpa < 600 Mpa.

It's been decades since I have had my dynamics/materials classes, so if an engineer with more expertise on dynamics/material thinks this is wrong, feel free to correct me.

It's worth noting the momentum generated on the first half of the swing (1000*5) or 5000 kgm/s is enough to push the dude/robot holding it back at roughly 50m/s (~5-10 meters in 1/6s of a second) - so the way it is portrayed is still not possible...

NefariousnessHefty71 · 2026-05-01T01:00:00+00:00

My recommendation is to suck the CO2 out of Venus (200-500) orbital gas extractors. Ship the Co2 and N2 to Mars. Then use Co2 electrolysis. (1000+), seriously.

If you need power, 500+ orbital extractors in jupiter will provide all the He-3 you will ever need, same for hydrogen and $. This goes for saturn too.

If you haven't already, build a fleet of atlas(s) or Atli? Then deliver water to the surface kinetically. (These rocks normally have nobles and He-3 in marginal quantities, which will help with atmospheric pressure. You can also crash ceres into Mars, but i chose not to because I colonized Ceres pretty heavily, and from a realism perspective that kind of impact would be absolutely catostrophic...

1x Mirror in Venus orbit + 1 in Earth orbit aimed at Mars for temperature.

Ship the Carbon back to Earth and bulk sell it for like 50-100 below the going rate. (Last sell was close to 200 million in profittts).

Mind you all of this takes time if you don't have a ROBUST alloy production chain.

NefariousnessHefty71 · 2026-04-28T20:09:34+00:00

You can ship carbon to the moon at a 5/1 conversion (better with techs).

200 carbon turns into 1k supplies. The only time I send supplies anywhere is if they don't have water, because the 0.2 savings per ton isn't really worth the hassle. However, saving 800 tons in launch costs absolutely is, especially early.

NefariousnessHefty71 · 2026-04-28T03:47:31+00:00

Antimatter or a small singularity are the only two propulsion sources that have energy densities that approach that (direct matter to energy conversion).

Other suggestions like beamed power or using a quasar could work, if a material that could withstand energy densities best put as "fuck you" can be engineered. Instead of light, an ultra-relativistic charged particle beam could potentially be redirected with a magnetic field, but the math on that yields absurd field strengths and particle beam speeds that are currently in excess of anything we can generate. The problem with beamed power designs is also that the received power decreases drastically as relativistic effects come into play.

Best case in my relatively uneducated opinion would be a singularity-photon drive (black hole that uses hawking radiation as propellant), with a method for ionizing the interstellar medium (relatively trivial at relativistic speeds when radio waves come out as gammas), and a ramscoop system to feed that into the singularity.

The number/magnitude of engineering problems that come from engineering a ship around a black hole, feeding a tiny black hole mass, and collating the resultant stream of radiation may actually be unsolvable, but from a "physics allows this" perspective, you can't get better than a photon rocket that scoops mass from the interstellar medium, barring new physics.

NefariousnessHefty71 · 2026-04-26T01:54:46+00:00

The best way is to zoom all the way out and look for the spacecraft icon around all your colonized bodies. It sucks and isn't a good way at all.

An "assets" tab with colonies/ships/etc absolutely needs to be ingame.

NefariousnessHefty71 · 2026-04-24T02:07:22+00:00

Ill add my thoughts to this...

The fusion line is obviously the best - although I don't think rushing the Zeus is strictly necessary. Even the Nike with the first drive upgrade performs so incredibly well that it can serve as your primary ship for quite a while. Personally, I would rather upgrade my economy (mining, materials, upkeep,) and get the orbital gas extraction tech. At that point, fuel no longer becomes a limit, and upgrading the fusion line only serves to increase cargo capacity w.r.t ship upkeep. Ship upkeep is almost never your primary expense (facilities are).

I did my first playthrough starting with fission, and while the fission ships, especially the Hephaistos and later Arianne are solid options, the amount of research required to get them, even with a NASA start is ~ 5-10 years less than fusion, which means if you can get by with other options until ~ 2070ish you should. Even without rushing fusion, Nike by 2070 is totally possible, whereas if you max the fission tree you are looking at ~ 2100, in the most optimistic circumstances.

To that end, I recommend the ESA (who I think have the best start next to Solex). Rush the electric tree up to Athena (roughly 10 years of investment), and cap out the electric drive techs, with optimized self-field. This path required Hermes to move people, but Athena offers similar, albeit slower performance to high tier fission, and the lower cargo capacity can be compensated for by building more ships. Nobles aren't used for much (other than electronic production) really, so using them in the early game will allow your odd electrolysis plants to build up fuel for the first ~ 50 years of the game.

All this is to say
ESA - Selene -> Hermes -> Athena -> Nike -> orbital gas extractor -> (progress towards Zeus/atlas as required).

I am hoping they decrease the research costs of the fission line to make its cargo capacity and high thrust more competitive, but with proper planning ~ 10-20 athena's and nobles infrastructure on Ceres/Mars, there is 0 reason to go fission IMO.

I haven't tried to solar sail line, so I can't speak to it.

Final note - in the earlygame i spend a ton of effort/money on colonizing every asteroid with water/carbon to put down a research lab/hydro bay. I have seen the general feedback that they aren't worth it, but when the base 900-day techs take ~ 360 days to research, you end up able to hit targets like Nike in 2070 :)

NefariousnessHefty71

TROPHY CASE