From the Depths - Laser Tutorial 103

[@OhmIsFutile]

Assuming I make another video before another 6 months, what would you like to see?

[@chillbuilder101]

6 months video club!

[@doubleddavid4968]

Heli's? since from what i recall theyre quite tricky, that'd be cool. Or air vehicles in general

[@kellymurphy1098]

Interesting points on destabilizers being better now. I would probably point out that 2 and 3Q are kind of pointless, since you're usually either wanting rapid fire, or high damage per shot, and those are generally 0Q and 1Q (With edge cases for 4Q). Also, while bread can indeed read custom axes now, ACBs cannot yet set or read them. Using complex controls as you're doing here, or using the extra drive axes (A, B, C, D, E) work, but have the drawback of being very finite (And if you're using complex controls for manual control of your ship that really limits things). What you can do instead for boolean yes/no inputs from your ACBs to bread, is set up ACBs that you want to be sending alerts to your breadboard to just take an action that doesn't really do anything, and then use the Generic Block Getter component in bread to monitor that ACB's "time since last activation", and if that time becomes higher than 2 frames, you know it's not activating. If it's lower than 2 frames, it's probably activating. Unfortunately even when delta time is stable, the time since last activation will bounce a bit between delta and 3ish. So you have to check for 2 frames rather than 1. Hopefully at some point they'll update ACBs to be able to read from and write to the new custom axes, but for now we have to use workarounds.

[@chillbuilder101]

Woah that sounds like a genius workaround but also very painful, I used ACB custom axes in one of my builds, you just put the custom axis name where normally you'd put block name.

[@kellymurphy1098]

@@chillbuilder101 Wow. If that's the case they really need to make that clear. Maybe you should do a tutorial on that.

[@tokeri4198]

wonder bread x_X getting back into ftd after a quite long break and even easy campaign is kicking my arse now that even the regular campaign crafts have more defenses then LH used to have thank you proffessor ohm im taking notes

[@OhmIsFutile]

Good luck!

[@chillbuilder101]

Nice tutorial, to the point and easy to understand; also nice trick. I did similar things with APS but found offensive lasers lackluster due to HA/smoke combo, did you ever find good ways to overcome smoke?

[@spinnirack3645]

A burst laser can get its damage out before the smoke builds up and then by the time it's ready to fire again the smoke has generally dissipated

[@atesz7636]

Ungodly amounts of doublers can raise the lasers AP to a point where smoke doesn't block it, or just do what the other comment says

[@OhmIsFutile]

Overcoming smoke can be problematic, stacking doublers works but is very, very expensive if they have enough smoke. Burst fire can work but you'll have a huge downtime between shots if you wait for smoke to dissipate... not to mention there's ways to set things up so smoke doesn't stop until the fight ends. This video is mostly about getting more use out of a laser that would be for AA first against more heavily armoured targets.

[@dr.robertnick9599]

Did you think of staggering the pump rows, so you can have every pump connect to a single input cavity? Trade all normal cavities for single input cavities and 1 dead space per row of pumps. What i mean is a chain of: something -> single input pointing up with pump -> single input pointing down with pump -> repeat Only other downside I can see is that this way you must have 1 non cavity per 2 cavities. In your example there is another doubler or destabilizer instead of a single input cavity, which is not possible with my idea, without giving the row a 1x1 tail. The tail would be much shorter though and you could still use the space for batteries or material storage. Maybe with my idea, an L shape, shifting each other row 1 block forward and tesselating, it might be possible to squeeze that fourth Q-switch into the gap close to the coupler, while still staying super compact.

[@dr.robertnick9599]

Nah. That L shaped shifted idea does not tesselate well at all. It kinda works bout you still need to cennect the rows awkwardly, because you must use the front face for a Q switch.

[@dr.robertnick9599]

I dont get lasers... It has 0.2 less AP, almost twice the capacity, but apart from Cost/volume, every stat is slightly worse. Only difference in blocks is 10 single input cavities, instead of 4 single and 5 normal. The amount of doublers and destabilizers is the same (4 and 2). It is the same with double the capacity and nothing else changed, but the numbers say it is slightly worse. At least for 60 material per row more and 0.2 less sustained AP, you get better alpha strike. Once the cavities are empty, it performs like your design. I always thought more storage = more damage. What keeps me from just doing 3x3 pumps without storage cavities, if sustained damage is all that counts? Storage does not improve sustained damage. You dont see reasons to stack APS clips either, which would be equivalent to using storage cavities, as I see it now. Is storage on offensive lasers really just for that sweet alpha strike? I totally get why you would need it for LAMS though. If you emptied the cavities and then halted fire until they are recharged, would you do more dps, than continous fire could? I guess it could if AP is dependent on the energy used per pulse. The game is not really clear if this is the case.

[@OhmIsFutile]

Single-input cavity tetris exists, but it's more difficult to get a good pump to storage ratio and/or AP because you just don't get as many connections to put pumps. It's not bad though, just different.