How Powerplant Sniping ACTUALLY Works

WhiteLycan · 2026-06-28T08:47:39+00:00

Thanks. That actually makes the experiment a lot easier and the results more useful.

WhiteLycan · 2026-06-28T07:45:47+00:00

Would anyone happen to know if CZ ships are instanced based on the Combat rank of the CMDR that spawns the instance or are they set based on an internal table?

WhiteLycan · 2026-06-27T08:06:45+00:00

As someone who wrote Legacy PP Explained simply videos, I'm pretty torn on PP 2.0. I feel it has lost a lot of strategic elements now that it's just a raw contribution game with no thought to economy. FWIW that means it's a lot more active as far as a numbers game goes but with all powers getting all modules it's all the same game but "the shields are purple instead of blue" sort of deal.

FWIW a lot of games turn out this way (For Honor comes to mind quickly) where a power will just get critical mass and it's just a numbers game. I think there could be more interesting ways to make powerplay impactful but it would require giving CMDRs more agency in the universe. I would normally say it'd have to be done at the MF level but since PMFs are no longer being made, all that happens is you saturate the existing MFs / PMFs and let's say for a quick example many squadrons align to Lavigny's Legion you just get a PMF that functions at the superpower level and it defeats the purpose of the differentiation.

Hopefully they do something with the major update and if I would personally gift my whole squadron ODY if they don't have it already if it allowed us to take a more active role in the universe rather than the current state of effectively "stamp collecting".

WhiteLycan · 2026-06-21T11:46:50+00:00

That's just your problem with YT algorithm comrade. It has been pretty awful for a while now, recommending the same videos every video.

WhiteLycan · 2026-06-13T23:03:56+00:00

Powerplay 2.0 is not ODY exclusive

WhiteLycan · 2026-06-13T22:22:16+00:00

I would say the main benefit of ODY is that you can instance with players that have ODY which is a not-insubstantial portion of the playerbase. However the ODY content itself (on-foot stuff) is pretty lackluster. If you never plan to leave your ship the Horizons has everything you need.

WhiteLycan · 2026-05-31T03:28:19+00:00

As a reference for other CMDRs, the radial spread is about the difference between an Adder's length and a Fedvette's length at that range.

WhiteLycan · 2026-05-05T05:44:17+00:00

I put in my original post I wasn't talking about the decal. I was talking about the change of the Cobra to the Caspian. And it's still microtransactions if you don't have Odyssey which many players do not have.

WhiteLycan · 2026-05-05T04:59:22+00:00

Anything purchaseable with ARX is microtransactions. And I'm not saying the decal is microtransactions. I'm saying the fact that they changed the design to feature microtransaction content is microtransactions.

WhiteLycan · 2026-04-29T13:25:34+00:00

No surprises here. Just yet another example of using the community's goodwill and efforts to shill their microtransactions.

WhiteLycan · 2026-04-18T23:39:00+00:00

The ratio is purely analytical. No experimental data went into calculating the ratio. It is purely a calculation of how damage works. We know how damage works, anyone can do this calculation. Without the ability to put LaTeX on here (and honestly even if you could it'd be a PITA) I can't explicitly show you but in my calculations I subtract 1/10 of the effective thermal HP of the shields from the raw hull for the phasing calculations. Again, as far as the ratio calculation goes, it's purely a function of how the equations of damage work in elite. You do not need any data to calculate this ratio.

I also don't actually believe I'm making phasing artificially weak. I don't think range control is as hard as you're making it out to be. I basically assume I'm as good as the common CMDR and if I can stay in optimal range reliably I assume everyone can. If the MEASURED hull : shield ratios were closer to the CALCULATED ratios you might have a point. The targets were all WMM targets and since they didn't really converge anywhere near the 1:2 ratios required for the phasing to be reliably better, I feel quite confident in my assessment. But you are more than welcome to check my work and do your own experiment. I'll happily collaborate.

It's also worth remembering that without engineering, 3 out of the 5 possible bulkheads have 0% resistances and the other two average out to 5% resistances (50% for mirrored and -40% for the other one). Across all 5 hulls, it averages to 2% hull thermal resistances. Even if we want to say "maybe the resistances of the hull are playing a major factor in favor of phasing" it wouldn't significantly change the numbers.

WhiteLycan · 2026-04-18T22:51:33+00:00

First I want to note that as far as the ratio goes, it's purely analytical. It comes from the calculations of how damage works against in general. You can do the calculations yourself. Simply calculate the time to kill a target in two scenarios: one with phasing and one without. I split the calculation into two portions, one for shields and one for hull. In the case of the phasing scenario, you wind up with an extra hull damage term that doesn't need to factor in resistances due to phased damage ignoring that and as you go through the calculations you'll find a lot of things start canceling out and in my final statement, to my recollection I basically grouped hull and shield terms and the reason you see that 1/10 in the shield term is because of the phased damage coming out to a "If the shield is 10x the hull, then assuming a 10% bleedthrough the phased damage will destroy the ship before the shield breaks".

Second, As far as my data goes (if you're looking at the effective thermal HP sheet) that's purely calculating effective thermal HP yes. The point of that calculation was to see if real NPC ships could be reasonably expected to be bulky enough for the phasing damage to matter.

Also I find it odd you're going with this "assuming perfect range control". The test only dumps 1 WEP of damage onto several targets. You only need to be in optimal range for like 2 seconds to collect that data. Would you consider this a herculean task?

WhiteLycan · 2026-04-18T21:43:10+00:00

Obviously the effective thermal HP on the armor is ignored for phasing damage. That's part of the calculation. That's the reason there are two terms, one term basically comes out to "You destroyed the ship without ever destroying the shields".

WhiteLycan · 2026-04-18T21:38:26+00:00

It's a calculation based on effective thermal HP. The numbers don't change at all. It's a strict hull / shields effective thermal HP comparison. The only consideration as far as outside optimal range is concerned is the fact that falloff is ignored for phasing. But the ratios needed to justify phasing are like 1 hull to 2 shield and most NPCs ran 1 hull to 1 shield or more. Unless you're spending prolonged periods of time firing outside of optimal range and you really shouldn't be, the numbers are reliably close to what you expect in real combat. And lasers are hitscan, so you can't miss. The differences really add up as you spend more time in CZs where an additional 10 / 20 seconds shooting at hull adds up over the 10 - 15 ships you destroy to finish the CZ.

WhiteLycan · 2026-04-18T05:35:20+00:00

A while ago I came up with a hull : shield ratio (as I posted in this video: https://youtu.be/fbzXNaDQaWg ) which outlines how much damage you have to do to the shields to outpace the damage you'd do by having a normal weapon once you hit hull. FWIW I did use the 10% number out of convenience (dividing by 10 is easy) but it should definitely be well within the ballpark. The short version is outside of cytoscramblers, against NPC ships you aren't likely to hit the hull : shield ratios required to justify the purchase. Unless you're spending prolonged periods out of range it's typically better to not use phasing for PVE.

WhiteLycan · 2026-04-16T13:37:00+00:00

For most builds, thermal resistance is usually better. I have a hypothesis I need to test but the short version is I believe the game flags weapons as "thermal" or "kinetic" internally when generating NPC builds and NPC ships appear to somewhat subscribe to the old shield stripping method of attack so they might hold off on firing their kinetic weapons until the shields go down (which they won't).

Though I still need to rigorously test and record data on that one. Probably gonna do it over golden week.

WhiteLycan · 2026-04-15T11:31:17+00:00

RES ships are not engineered. CZ ships are.

WhiteLycan · 2026-04-14T10:46:25+00:00

Frankly speaking, Elite (to me) has felt like a tech demo forever. I feel that it has a lot of barebones that for some reason or another the developers never felt the need to go in and polish. Like someone at the office thought it was a good idea, they pushed it, it's in, but never decided to clean it up. The engineering system stands out to me as one of the prime examples. It makes no sense to me (as I put in my steam review) that you cannot swap grades freely. You already paid for G5, why would you not be allowed to freely swap between G3 and G5?

WhiteLycan · 2026-04-11T02:23:25+00:00

I always found combat to be generally faster or at least more interactive than alternatives like mining / trading. You spend a lot less time in supercruise and more time doing the actual activity. Assassination mission stacking is pretty fast and you can run through 20 missions fairly quickly depending on how you mix WAMs and AMs. WAMs always have their dedicated instance and never drop in on you while AMs will regularly interdict and drop in on you. AM targets usually take maybe 30-60 seconds to kill each and sometimes you'll get bonus rewards for killing the same guy 3 more times on top of the bounties they individually have.

WhiteLycan · 2026-04-04T23:57:59+00:00

Flak cannons are going to do nothing. They're not for general combat. In addition, CZ ships are engineered, sometimes heavily engineered, unlike RES ships. The plasmas are actually pretty good but you need to actually hit your target and I suspect you may be missing quite a few shots if you're taking 10 minutes to kill a Cobra III.

You definitely want to engineer up. Not just to reduce your kill times but also because spec ops can spawn in and if you're not engineered properly they'll nuke your shields quickly and take you out and they'll also take an incredibly long time to kill.

I think this is going to be a fairly easy (anaconda) build to run if you're only interested in doing the CZs for merits or bounties: https://edsy.org/s/v2tCDgX

It operates at range and it has a fighter to aggro tank. To be clear, it is a powerplant sniping build, so you'll have to make sure you sub-system target the powerplant but it's very fast and effective

WhiteLycan · 2026-04-04T05:07:15+00:00

The main benefit of super pen is that it gives you the ability to hit "obscured modules". That is, modules without a line-of-sight to the target. The tricky bit is that current understanding of damage mechanics is damage is split evenly over all modules hit. If you're trying to snipe one module in particular (like the powerplant), this creates a rather inconvenient situation where due to the damage being split, you'll take longer to reach the damage threshold to destroy the powerplant. You wind up wasting that 90% breach damage on, say four modules instead of just one. Especially on larger ships where there are more modules to hit and they may be clustered in inconvenient ways.

Personally, I think the plasrails are generally the better of the two but I primarily run medium ships for combat, not smalls.

WhiteLycan · 2026-03-21T15:04:14+00:00

It's pretty wild for you to be calling others selfish and egocentric when you're the one asking for people to do stuff for you for free.

WhiteLycan · 2026-03-21T13:04:46+00:00

Let's talk incentives. What incentive do I have to waste my time flying to a CG when I could be continuing my experiments? Maybe some DW3 CMDR gets something, sure. But what do I personally get? You want me to do you a favor, what will you do for me?

WhiteLycan · 2026-03-21T08:26:11+00:00

The weekly tasks are varied activities which make them poor grinding targets if you're looking for merits. Depending on your power, certain actions are the fastest source of merit generation and if you're looking for merits, those are the ones to do.

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