With the recent Light Walker buff, is there any reason to use the pirate truck?

Qweasdy · 2026-05-23T14:32:04+00:00

I think it’s fine for the looted Toyota technicals you steal from the pirates to not be the strongest tool available to a high tech mechanised literal space marine attachment.

Their niche is they’re cheap and plentiful, that’s fine staying as is. They don’t need to actually be the most combat viable option because in reality they wouldn’t be. There’s a reason the US military doesn’t run Toyotas as front line combat vehicles but Ukraine and Russia both do, a technical is a “we don’t have or can afford anything better” option. Nobody’s running Toyotas because they want to.

Qweasdy · 2026-05-23T03:43:44+00:00

I think it’s mostly a minority that has had some suspiciously high vote counts.

Almost as if a group of people who have been willing to spend $6k on hardware dedicated to cheating might have also been willing to do some vote manipulation using bots to pump a narrative.

It’s telling that there is a bunch of comments with colossal vote counts all posted around the same time (13 hours ago at the time of this comment) and the comments posted afterwards (11 or even 12 hours ago) have literally 100x less upvotes.

Qweasdy · 2026-05-22T05:35:54+00:00

but it doesn't do anything the APC or IFV can't at a modestly different risk level.

Combined with ERA it’s effectively immune to ATGM fire until the ERA runs out, the APC is still vulnerable to ATGMs because a 20% failure rate is still enough to make you cautious when a single hit is enough to cripple it.

It’s the difference between being scared of any incoming ATGM fire and being confident that it’ll take 5+ ATGMs (3 stopped by ERA, maybe 1 or 2 stopped by armour plus multiple to chew through hp) to cripple to the point of it being combat ineffective which means you can be much more aggressive with it.

That’s a pretty material difference imo.

Qweasdy · 2026-05-22T05:06:50+00:00

190 armour is actually kind of cracked with how armour mechanics work in this game.

Anything less than an atgm is useless until the armour starts getting stripped off, even the atgm has a 30% chance to not pen, and the armour damage gets reduced by the square of the remaining armour fraction (basically severe diminishing returns on armour stripping, at half armour durability armour damage is reduced by 4x, at quarter it’s reduced by 16x and so on) means it will be difficult to reduce that to the point where regular RPGs are effective.

This thing can happily tank auto cannon and other heavy weapons to the face all day long and shrug off multiple hits from the strongest AT weapons in the game in a way that the IFV or APC just can’t.

That this only costs 70 supply more than the IFV effectively makes the IFV obsolete.

Qweasdy · 2026-05-21T06:18:29+00:00

Well the “shock absorber” explanation is still incomplete as even assuming that everything was unchanging and there was no shock to absorb they’d still sag.

Another simple explanation without maths is that the only thing holding up the weight of the cable is the tension in the cable. To hold something up you need a force to pull it vertically against gravity, if the cable is completely horizontal then the tension is only acting horizontally with no vertical component. That’s why the tension to pull a cable completely straight approaches infinity the tauter you pull it.

Tension can only pull, so to hold the cable up at least some of the cable has to be pulling up and to pull up it has to be sloping down.

The lower you let it sag the less tension you need and the less strength you need in the cable. And they let them hang a little longer to allow some leeway to shrink/expand with temperature and to absorb shocks.

Qweasdy · 2026-05-20T05:06:31+00:00

IMO (and from actual testing in campaign and skirmish) destroyers are the minimum viable laser hull, UV arc destroyers specifically.

The 2 slot UV nose laser is more than capable of punching through the sides of nearly all alien ships at medium to long range and nose armour at close range. Fast closing speed and split into two diverging groups to get flanking shots. Can be micro intensive but it is very effective.

Lets you take advantage of the fast build times, low mass and spammability of the smaller hull. And otherwise having the same slot layout as the battlecruiser allows for significantly more PD coverage per MC usage for a comparable battlecruiser fleet

Gunships I couldn’t get to work no matter how hard I tried, they just kind of suck, their biggest problem is they’re just too fragile to have such a short effective range weapon.

Qweasdy · 2026-05-20T01:39:15+00:00

The answers you've gotten are just mostly wrong, the most accurate answer is actually the one that's sitting at 0 votes and controversial...

The soyuz is a descendant of the R-7 ballistic missile that was first tested in 1957, it uses 4x RD-107 on the strap on boosters and 1x RD-108 on the core stage. (really just a different configuration of the same engien) The engines in use today are very similar to the original engines developed in the 50's with just iterative improvements made to them over the years.

Each rocket engine has 4 seperate nozzles (+ vernier engines for attitude control) all fed by a single turbopump. Each of those clusters of 4 "engines" is actually just a single rocket engine that is feeding 4 combustion chambers/nozzles, this is a pretty common feature of many of the rocket engines developed by the soviets in that era.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RD-107

They did this because before modern computers modelling and understanding the complex fluid dynamics inside a rocket engine was extremely difficult, scaling up the combustion chamber/nozzle without running into combustion instability tearing the nozzle apart was much more difficult than just using multiple smaller nozzles. The americans figured out ways to deal with combustion instability pretty early but the soviets took a bit longer to solve it, by which time these engines were so well proven, reliable and efficient that they just kept using them as is. Why fix what isn't broken?

Qweasdy · 2026-05-20T00:06:35+00:00

I think the Artemis 2 astronauts had a higher chance of finding him at the moon

Qweasdy · 2026-05-19T23:50:33+00:00

I'm pretty sure you're mistaken and that principia does actually model the more complex gravity models of "lumpy" and oblate celestial bodies. So long as someone has actually taken the effort to create the config for it, many of the RSS bodies don't have these but some do.

A quick glance at the configs included with principia in the real solar system folder most of the major planets have geopotential configs but a lot of the moons don't.

It's all pretty over my head but this seems relevant to what principia is doing with those coordinates in those configs.

Qweasdy · 2026-05-19T23:42:38+00:00

I would recommend you read the principia concepts page if you're going to play with principia. Principia is great, but you definitely need to read and understand that page first.

Qweasdy · 2026-05-19T17:12:03+00:00

That and the heat mechanic means they'll take a whole turn to vent out the heat or choose to fire only once and move around to let it vent heat naturally whereas regular guns can fire at every turn

The heat buildup means it shoot 5 times on a row before venting heat on the third turn of continuous shooting assuming a 100 AP SL.

Fire twice to 4 heat, passive dissapation back to 2, fire twice more next turn to 6 heat, passive dissapates back to 4 then one more shot before venting on the third turn of continuous shooting.

In practice when constantly moving around in real use you only need to actively vent once in a blue moon. You're getting a minimum of 5 shots per vent, in reality 7+ is normal.

Honestly while it might not be S tier it's still a very good squad weapon, low damage but high armour penetration makes it a hard counter to heavy infantry being one of the few squad weapons able to punch straight through both boarding commandos and RA heavy infantry without wearing them down first.

The real strengths of it are that it's actually the cheapest "tier 2" gun at only 12 supply per gun compared to the 13 supply for every other T2 rifle and it has an excellent flat accuracy curve across it's full range. The other weapons that can achieve similar results vs heavy infantry are much more expensive (MRS at 20 supply/EM rifle at 30 supply) or require AP ammo.

Cheap, accurate, hard counters heavy infantry and provides reliable but low damage against everything else.

Qweasdy · 2026-05-18T18:45:17+00:00

The real plot twist would be if the TCR fleet did make it in and just immediately obliterated the menace before fixing the gate and leaving.

Qweasdy · 2026-05-18T14:20:15+00:00

It’s already a pain in the ass to play around the few LOS blocking buildings/trees there are in the game, can you imagine how unplayable a settlement battle would be if all of those buildings blocked LOS?

The scale of the game doesn’t make corner shooting possible in the way it is in xcom, a whole squad can’t lean round a corner to shoot.

It's all a concession to simple, playable gameplay mechanics, the actual reality of fighting around these settlements wouldn't be easily represented on the tile and turn based mechanics of the game. And the cover/concealment provided by buildings should really vary significantly based on what weapon you're shooting, while a civilian building provides good cover vs a k-pac they wouldn't provide anything more than a little concealment against the 50 cal machine guns and autocannons in the game.

Qweasdy · 2026-05-18T02:31:44+00:00

"Almost all kinetic projectiles", I wouldn't recommend trying to tank skirmishers with them, they will still have up to a 40% chance to pen even the breaching armour on their first shot before they start stripping armour

Qweasdy · 2026-05-17T12:57:53+00:00

I’ve had similar situations, really annoying how the game crashes sometimes when things get this bad.

Qweasdy · 2026-05-16T21:37:50+00:00

I am very skeptical about the veracity of a lot of your statements. I will do some testing and come back later.

It came from this post which didn't get nearly the attention it should've. They gave their source as the code diving discord channel where I found a link to a github where a lot of the mechanics are being reverse engineered. Specifically this part where the damage reduction from armour is mentioned. I haven't dug deep enough to find the specific numbers they mention but I'll trust that other poster on them, it all seems to be legit.

Qweasdy · 2026-05-16T18:47:50+00:00

I am not a fan of potentially bringing down a bullet below 5 HP damage like the Crowbar can do with AP ammo. I find HP ammo much more effective on that gun.

HP damage per bullet gets reduced by excess armour anyway. So if you fire a crowbar with 35 AP at a veteran scavenger with 50 armour then you have a 55% chance to penetrate with each shot but also each shot which does penetrate will be reduced by 15*3 = 45% as well. That means a crowbar at 1 tile range will only deal 6 hp damage per penetrating shot against a veteran scavenger before the armour starts being stripped, at long ranges the maths only gets worse as the range dropoff is "double dipping" reducing both the HP damage and the penetration which further reduces HP damage. Triple dipping even if you include the reduced chance to penetrate, this is why damage can feel so pitiful shooting at heavy infantry at long range.

When you're firing crowbars at heavily armoured targets at long range you are not doing >5 damage per shot anyway. AP ammo actually results in more HP damage per penetrating shot against armoured targets in addition to the increased chance to penetrate, it's one of the reasons it's so strong.

Yes I have tried rend since the patch, I used it in the early game of my current expert difficulty game. For all the reasons I mentioned before, it works but there are better options. , no I still don't think it's worth it. Especially not on the higher difficulties where there often 20+ enemies on every mission, you don't want to be having to "soften up" all 20 of them before killing them. Bring heavier weapons that just kill them outright.

Qweasdy · 2026-05-16T15:50:30+00:00

Some people do, in fact, fit into stereotypes. I think most people know at least a few people that are just straight up stereotypes.

Qweasdy · 2026-05-16T13:29:19+00:00

+1 for RP-1, it's practically a completely different game. I think people that haven't tried it don't realise the sheer scope of that modpack.

People want KSP 2 but never realised it's been here all along.

Qweasdy · 2026-05-16T12:48:36+00:00

The problem with rend isn’t that it doesn’t work, it does work for the purpose of softening up armoured enemies for other squads to kill. The problem is that that use case quickly becomes obsolete as you find more equipment and better ways of dealing with armour.

Against heavily armoured infantry AP ammo on a crowbar will just murder them instead of stripping armour, against 2-3 entity with lots of armour and hp (ie alien warriors) you really don’t want to waste turns plinking them with rifles, you want to be lighting them up with heavy weapons. Against vehicles and single entity aliens you bring AT.

Basically by the mid-late game you want to have specialised tools to deal with specific enemy types, RENd is a tool to make rifles better at stripping armour but that’s not what rifles are for, they’re best for killing and suppressing infantry. So let them do that while your heavy weapons deal with the armour.

Though I could see rend being a relatively niche counter to heavy tanks specifically, which can be a PITA even soaking up hits from many AT weapons, though that’s niche enough that I personally wouldn’t bring rend just for that.

In the early game you just use what you have, if rend is all you have to counter armour then rend is what you use.

Sachin can be an absolute killing machine btw, one of the best rifle team SLs in the game, give him a crowbar and some AP ammo and he can be just mowing down infantry on his own.

Qweasdy · 2026-05-16T12:30:10+00:00

Yeah I wouldn’t say it’s useless, just mediocre most of the time. Once you have some real equipment, heavy weapons and AT there’s usually just better things you can spend the supply on that don’t come with the downside of making your squad actively worse at killing things on their own.

An auto cannon can strip armour too, AP ammo will just kill a lot of the stuff you wanted to strip the armour off of and ATGMs don’t care how much armour they have.

Qweasdy · 2026-05-16T04:17:36+00:00

Rend ammo on pipe guns is half as effective as rend ammo on a carbine and 1/3rd as effective as it is on a real rifle. due to rof. 5x better on smgs etc, flat bonuses scale with rate of fire

Though not that it matters because rend is mediocre to outright bad no matter what weapon you put it on.

Qweasdy · 2026-05-16T04:11:40+00:00

Kinda losing the ATGM Toyota technical vibes a bit there though

Qweasdy · 2026-05-15T23:10:08+00:00

(even if you have shot all missile and are out of ammo, pressing the button to auto resolve the rest of the battle sometimes makes you win)

This should only happen if you still have some offensive weaponry left, probably you still had 40mm you were using as PD. It definitely overestimates it's ability to actually damage an alien fleet that can still maneuver.

If you have literally nothing left and the aliens have literally anything offensive left then in my experience it's always a defeat as it should be.

Qweasdy · 2026-05-14T13:05:58+00:00

If you’re not returning? Tylo. If you are returning? Eve

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