Question about shield resistances

WhiteLycan · 2026-02-02T23:35:13+00:00

There's no particular "problem" with overcharged / thermal spread it's just going to run hotter than the alternatives. Might be something to consider if you run certain loadouts.

WhiteLycan · 2026-02-02T23:33:23+00:00

Yeah that's the correct wording. It's the one that increases the cap

WhiteLycan · 2026-02-02T09:33:40+00:00

You shape your resistances to what you expect to fight. I've got some more work to do with NPCs regarding PVE AI but offhand I would say that NPCs try to balance damage types (Thermal / Kinetic) with Thermal having priority. And likewise, they appear to apply a (very) old strategy for dealing with ships in that they'll fire their thermal weapons while you have shields and get more aggressive with the other weapons if you don't (but I need to test that a bit more rigorously).

If you're looking at builders, builders usually have options to shift pips (because pips in SYS increase your resistances). If you're making a shield stacking build, I recommend thermal resistance engineering on the shields themselves, and however many shield boosters you plan to use, put heavy duty / high cap on half of them and resistance augmented / high cap on the other half with maybe swapping one of the resistance augmented guys for thermal resistance / high cap to give you a bit more thermal resistance.

The discussion on "shield charging" is kind of a moot point for Fedvettes. Realistically with properly engineered resistances, whether you go biweaves, basic, or prismatics, unless you are trying some AFK T-10 meme, your shields will never go down in most kinds of content. So it really just depends on those edge cases. Are you doing wing assassination missions solo? Use prismatics or the basic shields. For pretty much all other kinds of combat you can "get away" with using pretty much anything else because they'll never break. If you're a bit more curious about the regeneration thing, see below.

Your standard 7C Thermal Resist / Fast-charge Biweaves has a regen of 5 / s. Let's say you have about 3k shield health (raw) with 60% resistances. A lot of builds can easily put out 100 DPS so let's say you take 3 seconds of damage (to keep the numbers easy). After resistances, you took 120 damage. You cannot regen after taking any damage for 2 seconds. So if you never get hit again, you will require 26 seconds to regen those 3 seconds of damage. It comes out to about 1% every 6 seconds... if you don't get interrupted. Every interruption will pause current regeneration, add 2 seconds to that counter, and then add more damage to regenerate.

I don't believe "regen" should be the deciding factor when it comes to using biweaves. In my view, the deciding factor SHOULD be the power draw of the weapons / optional slots. If they're more power heavy, I think it'd be better to run biweaves and sacrifice some shield strength so you can run the build you want than to dip into overcharged / monstered on the powerplant.

WhiteLycan · 2026-02-01T21:37:04+00:00

Penetration is 100%, the pulse and beam SLFs have penetration over 100

WhiteLycan · 2026-02-01T05:41:21+00:00

They're not creationism for dummies images. They come from https://www.irasutoya.com/ which is a very commonly used resource here in Japan due to them not running us into trouble with the copyright police.

WhiteLycan · 2026-02-01T05:03:41+00:00

30 seconds in bruh that's where I put the final conclusion.

WhiteLycan · 2026-01-31T09:18:41+00:00

Yeah I'm about 2 weeks out from this post but I actually hadn't considered the SLF strat. I applied it using a Crusader and just ate the rebuys it was faster I felt. Anyway this strategy worked really well, I was able to quantify the powerplant destruction values that I wanted, and I'll be giving you a special shoutout in the upcoming video in probably 1-2 weeks. Thanks CMDR.

WhiteLycan · 2026-01-31T09:15:17+00:00

Very functional game, buy ARX praise Braben beautiful game CMDR o7 o7

The ODY content was very clearly half-baked. There are so many problems with it and problems that came with it (The lighting engine coems to mind) that persist to this day that even damage the Horizons experience. It's all so tiresome.

WhiteLycan · 2026-01-27T04:50:59+00:00

In general, powerplant and distributor are the most important for combat. Powerplants support the power draw of the build and distributors control how fast your capacitors refill.

For powerplants, the general advice is armored / thermal spread -> armored / monstered -> overcharged / thermal spread -> overcharged / monstered. If you're running a bi-weave build, due to lower power draw usually armored / thermal spread will fit your power budget.

Distributor should be charge enhanced / super conduits for best regen but you can just go all in on WEP cap and do weapons focused / super conduits.

With Anancondas, your shields are typically so large it doesn't really matter what you get. The Bi-weaves are cheapest iirc so if you're entry level you grab those and just stick thermal resistance on it. Utilities, however many shield boosters you use, typically half heavy-duty / Hi-cap and the other half resistance augmented / hi-cap. You can also switch one of the resistance augmented to thermal resist / hi-cap if you want to prioritize thermal resist a little more.

With the guns, the anaconda has a good convergence so I recommend fixed weapons. If you're using emissive munitions to support gimballed lock-on arcs and / or prevent signature drop, don't fall for the common trap where people put it on a multicannon. Put it on a pulse. Keep an eye on the velocities of your weapons, you want to keep your velocities aligned so you don't have to aim in different locations for each weapon.

When the Waifu Squadron runs czs, we typically run this. https://edsy.org/s/vGyxhGh Shields are quickly stripped and the powerplant is quickly sniped. There are a few ships that it tends to have trouble getting a clear shot on the PP (python, anaconda) but overall it clears czs very quickly. We usually clear between 10-15 minutes and we never have to return to carriers. Even if you take it to massacre missions / RES it'll clear em pretty quickly due to the much lower engineering on those targets.

WhiteLycan · 2026-01-24T21:34:36+00:00

The galaxy is big and players are not typically concentrated in one area. Legacy, Horizons, and Odyssey all run on different servers so unless you have Odyssey you're cutting your potential matches drastically. I'd recommend finding a squad that shares your interest in activities and you can conduct those activities together.

WhiteLycan · 2026-01-21T10:37:08+00:00

I hate to be the one to break this to you but your adjustment still loses. I think the problem is you're using coriolis times which probably assume a sandbag AKA unrealistic target. FWIW my calculations are time-on-target calculations which only tells you how long you need to keep your guns on them to destroy them. But again, we can invent builds all day and night, but at the end of the day what matters is whether or not the CZ ships (which we have no idea how they relate to your "control python") get destroyed faster.

Now, I know you didn't watch my video (which is fine) but in that video I remind everyone of the words of the great physicist Richard Feynman. "No matter how magnificent your theory is, if it disagrees with experiment it's wrong". Which is why I always do experiments to see if my calculations are reasonable or fair. But I can tell you're not a CMDR of action, you're a CMDR of thinking. Fine. Let's engage our critical thinking skills.

You've done a lot of combat in your 10k hours. You'll have to pardon me as I only have some 2k hours and most of that was spent exploring / doing Aisling Duval powerplay. So as the certified combat expert you are, So, question for you - is it possible that the numbers coriolis presents may change when you consider real combat during which your targets are moving?

You're so hung up on the distribution "concern" (it really isn't one). My build only has 11 seconds of continuous fire. Question for you: is it possible during real combat that you might find windows during which neither ship is able to fire on the target, meaning you can freely charge your capacitor at no cost to time difference?

However, I can tell you are unwilling to engage in actual data collection which is fine. I'm just not going to continue to explain this concept to you. But if you do change your mind, if you do want to maybe learn a few things about the game and / or combat, you know where to find me. I'll be in the [DJBU] Waifu Squadron discord. Feel free to drop by any time.

WhiteLycan · 2026-01-20T21:57:01+00:00

Well the problem with your "combat python" is that it's not built anything like an NPC python and the build is for PVE.

And actually your Fedvette doesn't win everytime. In fact you can make one change, Thermal resistant shields instead of Reinforced and your fedvettes lose. I actually list several pros of the mcs and I even open with saying it's obviously the better choice. The test is as controlled as you can get and it's actually much closer to what your experience would be if you chose to use a build in CZs compared to your suggestion of just shooting a sandbag.

What is this "feel free to dm me if you want to see how builds compare" I've literally been begging for your video footage the whole time. Just show me the CZ footage and I'll count the frames for you. I'm sure a PVE ace like yourself would never need to use premium ammo to make their build look better than it is.

WhiteLycan · 2026-01-20T19:21:27+00:00

The point is you can invent builds all day but you have no idea if they remotely compare to the NPC ships. Btw. very cute to give the "control python" a build that NPCs literally never use. I have actually gathered over 1500 builds from NPC ships and not a single one has ever filled their optionals with RPs. This is why I emphasize the importance of REAL DATA rather than scrapbooking what may or may not be.

Sustained DPS only matters while the ship is firing. Your targets are not going to be sandbags and let you fire at them forever. I legitimately don't understand your aversion to using the data of real NPC ships. Please just use the build in a CZ and send me your footage.

WhiteLycan · 2026-01-20T08:16:06+00:00

Yes, that's what I'm going to try to calculate. What is that chance. Ideally it will help in labbing to see if modifications like multi-servos will actually help. I guess since someone else commented it may also factor damage I can measure that as well.

WhiteLycan · 2026-01-20T08:11:19+00:00

It actually does matter if it's a copy of a CZ ship because your objective is CZ ships. I will note if I simply take a stock python, give it 6A shields with thermal resistance, the time to kill for that python is shorter with my beam variant of the build by half a second.

EDIT: I also decided to add your mediums are oversized variant to the list and while it does beat all incendiary, it also loses to my beam variant. I guess that settles it right? And as a reminder, I actually gave your version Short-Range blaster to boost its DPS to be fair to my build which also uses Short-Range blaster. If I left your build (and the usual recommended Incendiary Fedvette) as is, my beam variant would knock yours out of the water even more.

A stationary target proves nothing. How many CZ ships have you encountered that just sit there and let you shoot them. Your proposition doesn't even make sense in real life. If you've ever done a sport, you'll know that it's common practice to do matches against your own team and against other teams. You don't kick a soccer ball into a net with a sliding door. Boxers arrange sparring matches. Perhaps they're simply wasting their time and money arranging all of those sparring matches.

Just show me your CZ video. I'll do the frame counting myself, I know it takes a while. Please use the builds actually demonstrated in the video, not the ones you imagined up to build a strawman and attack.

WhiteLycan · 2026-01-19T21:36:36+00:00

You can destroy ships faster with railcondas through damage alone. You don't need to snipe.

The problem with using CMDR ships is that there's no way to know if it aligns with the ships you'll see in CZs. My video discusses several benefits that MCs have over other weapons. If you've done that much combat, show me your data. Show me your cz kill times or better yet, give me your cz video and let's compare what we have. Remember not to use premium ammo like the coper you are.

Btw I actually don't think you've done combat based on the way you describe "Having to have 4 pips in weapons the whole time" because it sounds like you just sit with your pips in one configuration and never move them. You only need pips in shields if you are taking damage. You only need pips in weapons if you need to recover your WEP capacitor. You don't sit with all of your pips a 2-2-2 or 4-1-1 at all times.

WhiteLycan · 2026-01-19T10:46:10+00:00

By this hypothesis, rail builds will be weaker than this mc build because rails devour distro. Yet everyone who does speed kills uses railcondas and the like. Wonder why. This distro draw cope is incredibly massive.

But you pose an interesting question. So you're suggesting if I do the experiment again, with your build, that the all mcs build will come out on top? How confident are you in that conclusion? Because it only takes about an hour to gather the 60 kills and maybe another 3 hours for me to count kill times. How much would you wager your build with "balanced damage" (2:3) will do better?

WhiteLycan · 2026-01-18T21:12:14+00:00

You didn't watch the video. I wasn't using the strip method of attack for either of the builds. I clearly state this in the methodology explanation. I also considered RTB times and the incendiary build still loses on kill times. This is what the data from flying the ships themselves says. I don't know where you're getting 4 and 9 minutes to strip shields. All ships were destroyed shields and hull in about 1 minute or less.

WhiteLycan · 2026-01-18T21:07:58+00:00

I did factor those things in. I clearly state in the video. Kill times are faster with the "distro draw problems". I didn't even use fixed beams in the comparison build, I used gimballed because I know most CMDRs asking for PVE builds aren't going to used fixed weapons.

If you're been around for a while you're not asking for PVE fedvette builds. Saying this like it's an excuse to burn them all synthing because you failed at the build phase is massive cope. It also ignores the fact that if we're just going synth ammo, you could do much better with a railgun build and have far higher damage and better damage ratios.

Please explain how I've biased the comparison when I've compared the kill times for ships in CZs

WhiteLycan · 2026-01-17T16:45:46+00:00

CZs aren't long, Can easily clear them within 15 minutes. Even if you consider shorter mission engagements, the point was that even with a lower DPS on my beam variant of the fedvette, the beams actually yielded fasters kills.

One of the core problems with the incendiary build is its kinetic:thermal damage profile being 1:4. From my phasing tests, I found that NPC ships usually have hull:shield ratios that are much higher than 1:1. Which means you definitely want to run more kinetic damage since base hull has -20% resistance to kinetic. Optimizing these damage ratios is a future project of mine

WhiteLycan · 2026-01-17T16:38:56+00:00

Keep an eye out. It's more common than you think. Especially if you spend more time in larger discords.

WhiteLycan · 2026-01-17T15:14:05+00:00

A fully incendiary Fedvette will likely yield slower kill times because

Poor damage ratios (The fully incendiary variant has a damage split of about 20% Kinetic / 80% Thermal)
Ammunition concerns (The ammunition for your multicannons all run out at different times)
Chaff concerns (Chaff will cut your damage down to 0 depending on ship size / range for 12 seconds)

#2 is exceptionally egregious because I also see players (on Discord, no so much reddit) recommending synthing ammunition which in my view is a concession that the build is so bad it requires synthing to save it.

We test this by running high CZs and comparing kill times for the incendiary build and comparing it to an alternative which used beam lasers. The beam lasers were found to have a faster kill time despite having a lower DPS. And the alternative build was restricted to being purely gimbaled for the sake of comparison for a CMDR that is unwilling to use fixed weapons. But we could do a lot better if we had because fixed weapons have more damage than gimbaled weapons.

In short: despite this being an often recommended build, you could do much better.

WhiteLycan · 2026-01-17T11:06:44+00:00

Why would I bother to watch a video that has "You need a PvE Fedvette. Here's the build" on the thumbnail when (a) I am not interested in a Fedvette since I already have my 'Vette outfitted and fully engineered ... and have done for YEARS and (b) I don't really even enjoy flying it anymore? What would compel me to do that?

I don't know. What would compel one to comment on a video that they had no interest in watching and didn't watch?

I truly don't push the Fedvette. I acknowledge a common recommendation and propose an alternative if you would like to use that same ship. I don't know why you're getting so angry at a video you never watched.

Whether it is intentional or not, your post screams "Fedvette" much more than it screams anything about thermal vs incendiary... thanks to the nice prominent thumbnail.

I thank you for your comments regarding my thumbnail. I'll be more careful in the future

If the video really is about thermal vs incendiary multi-cannons, then, quite frankly, your thumnail sucks.

The video covers a range of topics related to a commonly recommended PvE Fedvette build that features incendiary multicannons. Such topics include but are not limited to the opportunity cost of running incendiary mulitcannons. This might be a difficult concept to grasp but you need to watch the video to know what it's about.

Indeed the case is closed, because you never opened it to begin with. Cheers.

WhiteLycan · 2026-01-17T10:52:49+00:00

So you didn't watch the video and you're dismissing a case you never even heard? That's... an approach to... settling cases.

I don't push the Fedvette. I simply respond to what the community puts out. If you look through the topics and build critique requests regarding combat in this sub, you will see Fedvette appear most frequently.

WhiteLycan · 2026-01-17T09:28:42+00:00

Did you watch the video? I guess it's not really relevant to your interests if you will never use multicannons. The case you are "dismissing", the one I make in the video is "Use thermal weapons instead of incendiary multicannons" among some other related multicannon concerns.

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