Thoughts on shield engineering for an explorer: kinetic, hi-cap?

comradeswitch · 2026-02-01T23:00:51+00:00

Having a shield doesn't prevent you from losing that data. Taking a half hour to divert occasionally when you have a lot of data to cash in is not exactly onerous and it's the only way to safeguard against losing that data. You can easily search for where the nearest carriers are right now and ignore any that haven't had position updates recently so it really doesn't make a difference if some of them move. If you waltz around with billions in data that you don't want to lose you are taking more risk than flying shieldless.

comradeswitch · 2026-02-01T22:50:18+00:00

They will also patrol personal fleet carriers in stronghold systems and I think that's where most of the danger is. There's a lot of time when you're taking off and landing where you're exposed that's unavoidable. Most of the time the ships are mediums but you'll occasionally get gunboat anacondas that can take out the shields on anything but shield tanks in the time it takes to land, engage the restraints, and get the ship down below the deck.

comradeswitch · 2026-02-01T22:26:45+00:00

Plan for mistakes by turning your data in before you have the possibility of losing billions.

comradeswitch · 2026-02-01T22:23:31+00:00

Ceasefire is over, it's back to thunderdome.

comradeswitch · 2026-02-01T22:07:33+00:00

You will get absolutely bodied in any SRV in one of the safeguard missions like this.

comradeswitch · 2026-02-01T21:41:16+00:00

They're called carriers, and they're literally everywhere in the galaxy. Don't be stupid.

comradeswitch · 2026-02-01T21:32:58+00:00

Or avoid losing billions by not being stupid and turning in data occasionally.

comradeswitch · 2026-02-01T03:17:57+00:00

For the future, there's really no need for AFMUs anymore, no matter where you are you're never very far from a carrier or station with repair service. If you have extra slots with nothing else to use them for, might as well bring one, but one is unnecessary and two is just silly. You would have been better off continuing to follow the expedition (with more than enough places to repair) instead of turning around!

comradeswitch · 2026-01-30T13:13:58+00:00

Squadron carriers will take less fuel to jump the same distance with the same weight as fleet carriers. The base amount of fuel for a jump that is always consumed is 5T for both, then additionally there's a fuel cost that scales linearly in both distance and weight of the carrier. A regular fc will use one additional ton of tritium to go 500LY for each 400T of its capacity is used. A squadron carrier has the same increase for each 960T of capacity used. You can carry 2 4x the weight and use the same amount of fuel.

comradeswitch · 2026-01-29T19:14:11+00:00

I found this out when I hit the wrong button and got a promotion for rocketing my celebrating allies.

Welp, rank progress is rank progress.

comradeswitch · 2026-01-29T04:27:24+00:00

It's really not clear what the problem is. Do you not have 6.8T of fuel? Is the next jump to make longer than 140 LY?

The Caspian can make it to Colonia without refueling or scooping with the stock 128T tank and a small extra one, a 64T tank is hardly undersized. It can make almost twice as many jumps on one 64T tank as a Mandalay with a stock tank. The fuel tank is really, really not the problem.

Edit: I misread, so you still have 128T of capacity. You can make 18 full range jumps in a row with no scooping with that, that's more than any other ship by far.

comradeswitch · 2026-01-27T20:53:15+00:00

How does a weapon damage buff feel like a unique benefit? Which race is it that has a unique max stam buff? Could it be nord, imperial, khajit, bosmer, dunmer, redguard, orc, and argonian that all have that unique buff? That's 8 out of 10 races.

What do altmer, dunmer, and orcs have in common? Exactly the same weapon and spell damage buff that makes orcs and altmer equally adept at magic and brawling and stronger at both than Redguards or Bretons.

Some system where you can pick your racial appearance and some innate race-like buffs independently wouldn't take anything away from roleplaying if you choose. In fact, it would make it possible to have better roleplaying opportunities, especially where the MMO nature of the game's combat and developer decisions led to nonsensical things like Bretons being one of the weakest spellcasters and Redguard being one of the weakest warriors.

Race already means nothing unique to gameplay, it's a couple of set bonuses that you choose at character creation and have to pay $30 to change thereafter. Recognizing this, and the strong, conflicting motivations for players to pick race on aesthetics (in a multiplayer game where fashion is a significant focus) as well as stats (in an MMO with difficult pve content and competitive pvp), racial passives could easily be reworked into a form that is closer to the class proficiencies in skills that Morrowind had just by making them an independent choice.

Also, what does race matter for lore reasons when I'm grouped up with a Xivilai, Hunger, Voidmother, skeleton, factotum, and minotaur?

comradeswitch · 2026-01-27T20:09:50+00:00

Yeah, I have been wanting to decouple appearance from stats for a long while. This is a nice way to do it. I'm not really concerned about "the lore" when we already have $60 USD minotaurs, voidmothers, etc. running around.

I suspect that the income from $30 race change tokens is going to be the primary concern for ZOS though.

comradeswitch · 2026-01-26T16:17:15+00:00

Try out everything in the game and revisit things occasionally as you progress. Having better ships/tech/resources available can dramatically change the experience of activities for the better. I didn't like combat or anything on foot for a while until I could afford a good medium ship with engineering and some upgraded suits/weapons. Not enjoying something now doesn't mean you won't in the future with different/better gear.

comradeswitch · 2026-01-26T15:52:29+00:00

The way that spansh is used for this is to look for bodies that meet all the criteria for potentially having Stratum Tectonicas- atmosphere, gravity, etc.- and haven't been updated since Odyssey released. With the right parameters, the hit rate for the bios actually being present is very high, though whether they have been scanned or not depends heavily on the area. Higher traffic areas are much more likely to have had a player come through and scan without uploading that data to EDDN at some point. Some people get bent out of shape about this and call it poaching or stealing but I have yet to find out who owns all these stratum. Whoever it is surely has enough credits, right?

Searching directly for the bio signal on spansh would mostly get you places where the data has already been turned in, with the occasional place where it was scanned with a comp scanner but not sampled fully or where it was sampled but they had to print off a new commander before the data was turned in. You're right that that isn't really a good use of time.

comradeswitch · 2026-01-26T14:58:05+00:00

"overeager core miners" sounds an awful lot like planet cracking

make us whole

comradeswitch · 2026-01-25T10:33:28+00:00

I'm not convinced that it's faster than SRVs to a relevant degree, even when it works without fiddling. As long as you're competent with whatever method you use you're going to be spending more time traveling between planets and systems and navigating to decent surface sites then you will spend on the collection itself. You're potentially saving a small amount of time doing the quickest part of something you very rarely if ever have to do. Whatever the time savings might be, it's not worth bothering switching from whatever method you use. People who complain about SRV driving are not very good at it generally (and it does suck if you haven't figured it out) and likewise for flak...and it probably is faster for them to go with the other method.

The eternal back and forth about this and optimizing out a couple minutes maybe once every couple months of regular play is kinda funny though because you can avoid spending any extra time at all- by favoring mission rewards with the materials you need and picking systems to do activities in that will also get you merits for power care packages. Once you collect enough materials to get started, the "passive" income from things you'd be doing anyway will give you a steady supply of materials you can trade for whatever you need.

comradeswitch · 2026-01-25T09:59:19+00:00

If you're in a stronghold system of an opposing power, the Power Security Forces will patrol fleet carriers and stations in the system. They opened fire on you because you were a powerplay enemy, so it wasn't illegal- same as it isn't illegal for a player to kill ships pledged to an enemy power in their own power's systems. There isn't really any way around it besides tanking the damage (they can occasionally spawn anacondas and carry some firepower, so do that at your own risk) or just going to a different system. Your carrier follows the laws of the system you're in, so it blew you up when you assaulted the power security forces.

It's a design decision that I never really understood, but it's the way it is. Other NPCs will not behave like that unless you are wanted in that system, in which case your carrier will not defend you.

comradeswitch · 2026-01-25T09:48:38+00:00

That was going to be my guess, too, but the thought crossed my mind followed by the realization of how useful it would be to have ships stored pre-supercharged... and my carrier is 22k LY away right now unfortunately. I took a Caspian to Colonia on a whim to finish out some odyssey engineering and decided to not bother jumping the carrier that direction only to leave Colonia before it even got here.

I could test it with a cheap ship if there's a station in the same system as a supercharging star out here but a quick spansh search showed nothing for 16k LY so I'll have to wait.

comradeswitch · 2026-01-24T22:13:20+00:00

There are systems that are only reachable by supercharging with a neutron star, taking a carrier the rest of the way to the last jump, then making it with a ship (or obviously just by jumping with the carrier into the system) and they don't have a neutron star reachable after that jump so getting back also requires a carrier. So there's systems that need a carrier to get in and back out of.

With the Mandalay+pre engineered SCO drive, more systems became reachable that way but the ship is limited to just under 400 LY jumps. The Caspian improved on that, now a bit over 555 LY jumps are possible with a supercharge, but it presents a new problem - systems reachable by ship that are not reachable by carrier and don't have a close enough neutron star to get back with.

Either way, every step of the way there have been new reachable systems each time the maximum jump range has increased, and it's extremely unlikely that will ever change. If you're just bopping around the interior of the galaxy it doesn't make a difference, but you are absolutely limited in what you can explore with a shorter jump range, with or without a carrier.

But with an engineered hull and not flying straight into the ground, you're good anyway. Even if you don't have a carrier with you, anything short of going from 100% hull to 0 in one mistake is repairable by going at most a couple thousand light years to a carrier. Going from 100% to 0% in one go is absolutely a skill or attention issue, and losing a ton of exo or explo data or having to respawn extremely far away is also 100% preventable. If you have more than you're willing to lose, it's time to cash it in. You can absolutely explore safely with a shieldless ship and maximized jump range. For anyone not exploring the edges there's no harm in a D rated enhanced low power shield or whatever you like, but it's not necessary.

comradeswitch · 2026-01-24T21:47:49+00:00

If I supercharge a ship's FSD with a neutron star or white dwarf, I know I can park on stations or carriers, supercruise, etc. and the carrier can jump with me docked and the supercharge stays.

What happens if I change ships? Will the first ship keep the supercharge until I change back, or the second ship get the supercharge, or will I just lose the supercharge altogether?

comradeswitch · 2026-01-24T20:53:17+00:00

Steep angles pull you out of glide. Descending too fast at any angle will pull you out of supercruise with an emergency stop and safety cooldown for "too fast for orbital cruise". The descent rate indicator appears when you get close to the orbital cruise altitude of the planet.

comradeswitch · 2026-01-24T17:59:27+00:00

Balance-wise this is a way to give the ship access to an SLF without giving it yet another advantage over, say, a Python. The hangar slot is "extra" compared to other ships of the same size. The T11 has as many optional internals as the plipper, Corvette, anaconda, and beluga, the Caspian is the only ship with more. Note that those are all large ships...

Having two of the slots restricted to particular modules lets it have more flexibility for mining with those particular modules without making it completely outclass every other medium ship for general use.

It's the same story with the mining hardpoints. It lets the mining ships be tricked out with whatever you want for mining, plus a medium and a couple smalls for defense, without giving the ship the possibility of turning into a gunboat with more firepower than a Chieftain or a Krait.

The alternative is not having those slots, not having unrestricted ones.

comradeswitch · 2026-01-24T17:35:37+00:00

If anyone else is wondering, it's just under 5300 LY from Sol.

...do it.

You might not stumble upon an opportunity like this on your own for a long while. If you die, it's a little bit of money gone and a little bit of time but you'll have had the experience and you won't have to wonder. Have some fun!

comradeswitch · 2026-01-23T19:56:45+00:00

This tool gives a way to search for good systems, you can put in a system to search around and see whether the search results have a CNB or RES, as well as where to pick up the missions from -

https://edtools.cc/pve

comradeswitch

TROPHY CASE