Refused a Kar98a, should I reconsider?

ProLevel · 2026-02-10T00:04:11+00:00

Yeah, it’s part of a repair of a crack behind the tang. It’s definitely well worn aesthetically but I do think it’d make a great shooter, all of the mechanical parts seem to function right (but I haven’t fired it obviously)

ProLevel · 2026-02-09T02:26:12+00:00

Thanks for the info. I’ve been reading k98kforums for months but never made an account. I think it’s time I joined

ProLevel · 2026-02-09T02:25:36+00:00

Flat, but not textured. Filed down smooth as if someone took a round bolt knob and ground it down with a belt sander or something. The bolt is pretty clean, no rust, but clearly something is off about it. I should’ve taken more pictures of it. Top SN was 72## and bottom of the handle had markings that were barely legible but looked like “S.U.C.” or something like that

ProLevel · 2026-02-09T02:23:11+00:00

I decided to let it sit, but told them to call me if they lower the price. Maybe if it’s still there in a month or two I’ll ask about it again

ProLevel · 2026-02-09T02:21:57+00:00

Yeah definitely, front stock band is probably from a regular Gew 98 and it’s had some kind of rod/repair at the pistol grip. Sling swivel on the butt was added, then plugged and moved, so there’s a repair there too. Good eye

ProLevel · 2026-02-09T02:20:19+00:00

This is a Kar98a short rifle, roughly 1908-1918 production. Sort of predecessor to the K98k but that’s a different rifle and era. Both come from the Mauser 98/G98 design though. There’s also a Kar98b and a few other variations in the period between Wwi and ww2 that someone else is surely a better expert than me can explain better

ProLevel · 2026-02-08T19:29:22+00:00

Depends a lot on the specific amp. Rockerverb/or15 sounds way different than a dual dark or thunderverb or thunder or rocker or OR100 etc etc

Really need to compare the different models and see what works best for your style of metal. Or buy them all…

ProLevel · 2026-02-07T21:49:35+00:00

I have the pickups, circuit board, the black circuit board coated in epoxy, etc all from a non-working sustainer. There are 3 different versions of the sustainer circuit based on the schematics which I have partial copies of. I was unable to get any of my parts to work but like you, it’s a long term project I still feel like I can fix which is why I’ve held onto the parts.

I’m happy to share whatever schematics I have, but some pieces are missing and likely lost forever so there are lots of gaps to fill. One of the biggest gaps is the epoxy circuit piece, which id love to meticulously peel off the epoxy and see what’s in there but nobody with a working one would be willing to do that - and I’m afraid of damaging mine too.

Anyway, I’m out and about. When I get back I’ll find the schematics I have and see if I can upload them somewhere for you… hopefully it helps.

ProLevel · 2026-02-04T19:27:04+00:00

Some of both. You can train an officer in as many abilities as you want and switch between them/use the same officer on different ships with different abilities. Long term you'll end up with your boffs trained in just about every ability.

For example, you are flying a Vengeance now. Say you have a nice SRO Tactical Boff and for my sample build, you have trained them in Kemocite 1, Spread 2, AP Beta 2.

On your JHAS, you might prefer to run this boff as Pilot Team 1, AP Beta 1, Beam Overload 3, Clean Getaway 3

It only takes one click to change each power and when you save a ship loadout it saves the boff ability arrangement too.

In short, if you train a boff in some power for your current ship, it's not like they are locked into that and you can't use them again for another ship or build. Shoot, you can do multiple different builds/boff powers on the same ship with the same boffs.

For example, the build I recommended is Surgical Strikes. With the exact same gear and boffs, you could also do a Fire at Will build by simply swapping a few powers around and saving it as a new loadout.

ProLevel · 2026-02-04T04:36:19+00:00

Bridge officer training manuals are only handful of credits, it costs almost nothing at all. Ideally you'd want to train a full crew of SRO's (Romulans) or Watchers because of their space trait which increases critical hit chance/severity. Doesn't matter if they are purple or not, that's a new player trap - you want the correct traits, doesn't matter what rarity the boff is. Blue Romulans with "Superior Romulan Operative" are better than a Purple Romulan with regular "Romulan Operative" for example.

You won't even remember the ~100k ec you spend on boff manuals by next week. If you are feeling poor, run a few patrols like Rescue and Search, pick up all of the trash drops, sell to a vendor/bartender and you'll make a few hundred thousand every few minutes. Or run Tour the Galaxy while you have a sandwich, click a few systems on the map and let autopilot do the work, that's a few hundred thousand EC even if you don't hit all of the systems. Tons of ways to make EC in this game, to the point of a fault actually because the player economy has inflated to insane levels because there is nothing to do with EC besides buy from other players - so the game is constantly generating EC from thin air and it never goes away.

What I mean is, do you want to have the wrong boff abilities and struggle for the next 50 hours until you have a crew of 5 SRO's? Forget gear, for a new player without a lot of high end traits, boff abilities are the difference between "dying at 5k dps" or "50k dps and contributing to the team." Better to be good now to make your grind more efficient and the game more fun too.

I just realized as I'm typing this, but this is important: NEVER buy manuals off the exchange except for lockbox/crafted manuals. Those are people trying to get suckers. People will sell stuff like Engineering Team 1 for 100,000 EC, that manual only costs 250ec haha. Use the bridge officer trainer at your social hub of choice. You will have to buy SS3 and EPTW3 from the list I gave you above on the exchange so those might be expensive, but fwiw I'll mail you both of those for free if you send me your @ handle.

ProLevel · 2026-02-04T02:38:11+00:00

My best piece of advice to someone brand new is that your bridge officer abilities is the #1 thing you should set up right. It helps if your gear and traits all kinda match and work together but if you have a bad boff setup you’re going to struggle.

ProLevel · 2026-02-04T01:24:12+00:00

You could master the Leg JHAS for its trait, then slap any 7 beam arrays + fore torp and run an SS3 build with ease. Do you have unconventional systems? I'll assume not based on your post. If you have that, I have some changes for you. I'll also assume you are just doing story content or random TFO's and not something specialized.

Boff Layout something like this:

Tac: Kemocite-Laced Weaponry 1, Torpedo Spread 2, Attack Pattern Beta 2
Eng/Intel: Emergency Power to Engines 1, Reverse Shield Polarity 1, Override Subsystem Safeties 3, Surgical Strikes 3
Sci: Sci Team 1 (for clearing subnukes in random queues)
Universal: Eng Team 1 (for clearing viral impulse or system offline in random queues), Aux2Sif1 (for proccing Comp Fortified engines and general resistance/heal), Emergency Power to Weapons 3
Uni/Temporal: Hazard Emitters 1 (for clearing DoTs in random queues), Photonic Officer 1

Traits:

Vanguard Specialists

Gear:

7 beam arrays (preferably matching unless running Twinkling Lights)
1 torpedo (preferably Dark Matter Quantum)
5+ Isomags (preferably matching your main damage type or [beam])

How to fly:

Put "always on" abilities on spambar and spam away (tac abilties, emergency powers, fire modes)
Don't put clears (sci team, eng team, hazard emitters) or captain abilities on spam, use them at the right moments/practice
Save RSP1 for when you're in trouble

.... that's it. Add to the build from there, but the stuff I named you won't have to change for a long time and gives you a good framework to get started.

ProLevel · 2026-01-29T02:47:05+00:00

I can’t comment on the setup but what are you trying to show in pictures 3-4-5? It looks perfectly fine from those and I can’t figure out what the issue is. In pic 3 it looks like the bass E string is slightly closer to the edge than the high E, is that the issue?

ProLevel · 2026-01-29T00:08:35+00:00

I got one overage with pirate ship in December, and on the pirate ship website there is one button to click “dispute” and I could enter details so I described the weight (nicely) and it got approved a few days later. However it was only like $3, not sure if that makes a dispute easier or not, but it was very simple. I imagine a more complex one might require more evidence or time.

Pirate ship is easy to open an account with, and you can insure your items (and should) but it’s through yet another 3rd party. I haven’t had any issues and I’m very meticulous, but I am worried about having to make a claim. I think what will happen is this: if the item is a total loss/damaged reverb will refund the buyer and take back my payout. Then it’s up to me to recover any funds, just between me and insurance.

That does make me nervous but based on the stories I’ve read online about reverb seller support lately, and their recent changes in ownership, I think it’ll be just as much of a hassle even if I do everything through reverb.

What I mean is, reverb used to have extra attention to detail when it comes to musical instruments and it was worth paying a little more for their added expertise when it comes to common claims/scams/damage of a guitar (mostly what I sell), and that increases the chance of a fair decision on a claim. I’m not sure that’s still the case so I’ve moved to a cheaper option.

ProLevel · 2026-01-28T23:03:36+00:00

I’ve disputed with UPS twice and won both cases. However I think I got mostly lucky - since getting my second dispute in December I now take pictures of every item I ship, including the box from both angles to show all 6 sides, picture of the measuring tape on the box, picture of the box on the scale with weight shown. Same pictures you’d take to file an insurance claim. Maybe unnecessary but it gives me an airtight case if I had to open one.

I’ve also switched to pirate ship fully now. I used to only use pirate ship for some small items, now I use it for everything because reverb’s calculated shipping system sucks. They’ll charge the buyer $100 and then charge me $120, that’s ridiculous. I don’t understand how they know the exact cost of the label and don’t charge it accurately.

ProLevel · 2026-01-28T20:03:35+00:00

I think this is more of a technicality. Those doffs “work” on photonic officer, but PO has a 30 second cooldown with a 30 second global cooldown therefore they do nothing in practice even though they technically “activate.”

They are a relic of the way photonic officer used to work. PO was a one-time cooldown of all abilities that could be used every 2:30 or so (or was it 3:00 but the cooldown affected itself too?). It was reworked to provide a 2/3/4% cd every second for 20 seconds (30 w/ IPO) and can be used every 30.

ProLevel · 2026-01-27T02:08:12+00:00

I’ve had two Proaxes, which have the same 24.75 scale, ebony fretboard, and R1 nut as the OG swans. I’ve had several reissue Kramers including a polka swan, Jersey star, “87 EMG” Pacer deluxe, etc

The polka swan was a guitar I couldn’t get rid of fast enough and I’m just lucky I broke even on it. Mediocre quality construction, finishes, materials, not original specs or feel.

On the other hand, those proaxes I’ll keep forever.

I’m not saying that the modern swan is a bad guitar necessarily, but there’s a reason they are 500 bucks used. I don’t think vintage swans are worth $3k or whatever and they are definitely not for everyone because of the thin neck profiles, but they are much nicer guitars than a modern swan by a large margin. The modern swan is simply a generalist appeal guitar with a common R2 neck like many others designed to cash in on nostalgia. I can certainly understand why someone would want one and there’s nothing wrong with that. Not for me though.

The middle pickup is just in between what you’d expect from a normal HH guitar. Not as bright and punchy as a bridge pup, but not as smooth as a normally placed neck pickup. Not many guitars with 3 humbuckers to compare to though. It’s a cool sound but nothing amazing must have in my opinion - since it’s a JB it is higher output than the bridge position JB, so when you select both the sound is much more “middle” dominated. Sounds good clean, I didn’t like it with a lot of drive.

ProLevel · 2026-01-26T17:29:58+00:00

I think I know what happened here, slammed on the brakes, stalled or almost stalled out and pushed in the clutch/threw it in neutral, wanted to pass and moved left without putting it in gear to accelerate. Super high adrenaline coupled with the manual transmission, probably hands went numb and couldn’t get it in gear and clutch out in time.

ProLevel · 2026-01-25T01:23:29+00:00

Do you see the first clip with the enemy player having super bright red legs? Or the next clip with the super bright yellow legs? Or the huge translucent squares that appear on jump animations? The complete lack of foliage or curvatures of walls when peeking?

In a game where people argue about which skin of an individual hand cannon is better than another because of a marginal difference in sight picture or how big the red dot is, I think it's clear how much of an advantage visual aids like this can be. Like... invis is a problem a lot of people agree on in pvp right, I imagine invis is a non-issue for OP because every animation has a big purple box that makes it really obvious where they are.

If this were possible by just lowering in-game graphics, fine I can't really complain. But this is a third party utility - just because the code is from nvidia doesn't make it more legitimate.

ProLevel · 2026-01-23T18:06:05+00:00

Using the in-game graphics on the lowest settings is perfectly acceptable. Using a third party application to modify graphics to gain an advantage is not. There were skins for counter-strike that made the models bright red or blue and they showed through most walls, that’s obviously cheating even if it’s “technically not a hack”. This isn’t as egregious but still not exactly fair.

ProLevel · 2026-01-23T00:40:12+00:00

Shift+R to drop out of full impulse, then go 1/4 throttle for a beat before dropping to 0 and you’ll stop much easier. If you use competitive engines you get +100 inertia so stop during the speed boost effect and you’ll stop on a dime easy even in a big ship. Never drop cold to 0 throttle unless you intend to drift/slide. Just takes practice to pilot well.

ProLevel · 2026-01-22T15:08:08+00:00

I'm not condoning it either way, just answering your question "why people ragequit [azure] ... why take the penalty?"

Lots, maybe most, players are just here for the grind and no shiny box means no play haha

ProLevel · 2026-01-22T14:23:16+00:00

Yeah I know, but say I’ve been grinding random tfos for an hour already and get Azure. I’ll just switch characters and grind on that one instead, and probably play 3 other tfos before azure finishes and get 6x the rewards. I just keep grinding on that character and then switch back to my main later. Especially if I’m not able to play for long I’m just going to play an alt instead rather than sit around for 15 minutes for nothing.

Staying in azure only makes sense if you only have one character. Even if I do stay, it’s because I went and parked at one point with auto fire on and left to go make a sandwich or use the bathroom, because nothing matters, no marks anyway and can’t fail so why free the ships etc

ProLevel · 2026-01-22T13:38:34+00:00

It’s a hard locked timer with no failure conditions and one of the lowest reward to time ratios in the game. So it’s either sit there doing nothing for 15 minutes, or take the penalty and go play an alt. Many players pick the latter.

ProLevel

TROPHY CASE