It all starts to make sense : Cosmoteer

Took me a while but I finally got a grasp on how to build more efficiently. All you have to do is lock the crew down to their sections and make sure they can't move around to much. That way you can punch far above your weight, well so far anyway. Took a while to go through all the building and design so we did not get to do enough shooting for my liking.
End Credit Song: Cosmoteer Title Track
/ francisjohn
/ discord

[@darwinian7974]

If u run modules without squad orders for EVERYONE you WILL get people jumping out airlocks at absurd moments (sometimes while the ship is moving) to move cargo about or loot another module’s batteries for no obvious reason

[@nickgrout2502]

Reactor supply orders matter for that too

[@adamthethird4753]

Some Rimworld player is wonder why Randy is having so much debris falling on their tile.

[@Komyets]

Lots of fallen ship chunks yay!

[@Faramant90]

Francis: "I think we've got to do something, that is called rail fanning, but..." **enemy ship disintegrates into atoms** Francis: "Oh. That was rather efficient."

[@tree_eats]

That was a thing of beauty.

[@MrJablis]

I just laughed

[@BotPiotr]

29:05

[@ThunderRahja]

@FrancisJohnYT The hotkey you're looking for is 'Z', which is for the strafe command. It orders your ship to move to a position without turning. You can press 'R' to rotate after giving movement orders to change the rotation you want your ship to be in when it reaches its destination.

[@danfr]

And there is a button for the strafe command right next to the rotation button he's using. Edit: Also consider holding down shift. Besides queing up commands you also get handles you can drag to alter the current position and rotation.

[@KaedysKor]

Strafing is vital for sundivers in particular. Move while keeping those layered shields pointed at the star

[@tree_eats]

That first railgun impact at 29:07 made me laugh like a madman. "I think we're going to do some things called rail fanning but-" BOOM! Ahahahaha.

[@DaFreak860]

crew can be left behind when they are outside due to moving from one airlock to another whilst you are moving across the system, so I recommend making sure no crew is unassigned and doing "everything" since they may try something unbelievably stupid and die if they find work in another, isolated, sector. Edit: I think you figured it out on your own, thought due it being inefficient rather then suddenly having fewer crew after a voyage then you had started with xD -- anyways, never have a crew unspecialised, just don't give them any reason to use the airlocks, make sure to remember to allow the crew to fight fire, they need to be told to use the extinguisher while you are at it, otherwise having extinguishers between those railguns won't do anything if the crew doesn't see it as "allowed". ( I may be wrong about the extinguishers, it's been a while since I played and I don't think I ever tested weather they use them even if I don't assign it to their quarters, I just assumed that they don't xD)

[@SephirothsBIade]

17:57 YUP, lots of fun little errors and problems to fix later. Efficiency is already much improved. I am loving watching how you learn, great process.

[@williamhess180]

love railguns too. If you want, you can move things around a little to connect the booster thrusters to the engine room that way they won't have to supply them individually. Also with the extra ppl you could add some missile launchers on the sides facing out. Check out the workshop if you haven't already. ppl have designed some crazy looking ships.

[@jamesimartin]

I can't wait to hear Francis when he loses a rail component. Those reactors are pretty close! Death Laser mechanics are interesting, but it seems when you combine two beams the most powerful one gets the penalty - so if you can't keep all powered you get a huge penalty to all the ones still working.

[@guyincognito1406]

I did the same except only 1 barrel, extended to use the maximum build length. It is truely overpowered, first shot the shields all go down, second shot goes out the back of the enemy. On those modular bunks it helps to also assign the batteries in the resource tab. So you know a battery can’t be delivered across the ship. Also make sure everyone gets access to the nearby firefighting. When assigned they will do their tasks and ONLY their tasks. Gotta get the hydrants set.

[@stevenwojtysiak6392]

Railguns are super fun. The two biggest drawbacks are asteroids and other railguns. The first time you back into an asteroid and come to a dead stop, you die. And fighting other railgun ships that are just trying to defend an area, makes it a 50/50 battle. If one was trying to play ironman mode, with no save scumming, railguns would not be the way to go. Or at least, you wouldn't want only one ship that is railgun. You'd want to have a much tankier ship that can take a beating while a railgun sits at the edge and does the damage. That's when you start to see why they added the 1/2, 1/4 and 1/8 time speeds.

[@Genesis8934]

No need to trap crew to get them to work on certain things though. You can use squad types and assign dorms to be a specific squad type. Each squad type lets you disable certain tasks - like you may not want your gunners working the factories, going out to deconstruct a wreck, etc. Squad types let you assign hiring priorities too, IIRC. So you can set gunners to be pulled hired first and pull from redshirts. Also, supply and operate are separate jobs when using squads (depends on the building - some only have supply jobs, most have both though). One improvement (aside from another commentor mentioning they loser power efficiency apparently!) for the laser ship is you could have two sets of squads: one assigned to operate the controls and another to re-supply power to them. (edit: 22:50 addresses this)

[@DanielCastielRiddjuheim]

Damn it, Francis. Got this yesterday as a casual game and now I have 15 hours played.

[@gogudelagaze1585]

This, Factorio, and ONI are probably the most addictive games I've ever played. It just erases time somehow.

[@KaedysKor]

That was my experience as well. Friend recommended it to me a few months back, picked it up on a lark, 60 hours later....

[@zranite2898]

Just figured i'd offer up this small tip for railfanning the rotation only happens properly once your ship reaches its red shadow so while reversing you can end up with the ship never actually hitting the rotate point if your unlucky, that is what was causing delays in your shots occassionally.

[@wethegamers870]

I would absolutely LOVE to see this game get a overhaul. More factions, able to join (or create your own faction), add more end game items/make current end game items way more costly, able to make your own space stations, set up trades with allies, defend random station raids/encounters and perhaps slow down time to kill//give everything more health OR make weapons do a little less damage to allow for proper raid combat. Expand on AI to let you allow 'AI orders' take care of some of your crafts (example: create a ship that is made to mine asteroids and collect minerals, have it be AI programmed to automatically go do that, flee to base if enemies within say 1-3km of you and send out a distress alert to your main ship/maybe AI attack ships you own to go 'rescue' it. Then when it reached a certain number of goods or certain time passed, that mining ship will drop off at a station you created which is processing all of the ores into ammo and other useful materials and have those materials be traded to a specific quota like "if over 500 processors, trade until at 250 processors" so you will always be between 250-500 at a station). There are SO many things you can do with a sandbox as cool as this. Definitely could take the colonizing and trading aspects from rimworld and the economical, faction style government/army build aspects from freeman guerilla warfare. I understand this is either A. a very tall order for an indie dev or B. possibly some of these are already planned/in the works. Though if there is ANY opportunity for it to be implemented, It would be beyond amazing.

[@Tyler-nh6op]

Just so you know. You could ALSO create different crew members and assign them each with different roles/role priorities so you can have an open core ship (ship where you can travel everywhere instead of being blocked off) instead of closing off segments. Sure, some people may argue this to be cost effective. Though in terms of crew availability for if a crewmate dies mid battle. That section is destroyed vs having say 24 crew mates who could take up that role.

[@guyincognito1406]

Symmetry mode when assigning crew and resources, saves you at least half the clicks

[@TheKevhill]

Amazing. It was like watching my own exp with this game in fast-forward - slowly build up a laser wall - experiment with plasma - railguns are so fun - oh, we need a factory/mining ship If you'd like to complete my journey in prob half the time, next up will be - oh wait, I can have 2 rail ships if I give it 80% reverse thrust but have it fly in reverse. - deck cannons are amazing. My end game big boy was what I called a "hammerhead". Massive armor + shields + deck cannons. Get up close and distract while the rails snipe from the sides.

[@ganashal]

It's my understanding that one other issue with the laser ship is that combining streams reduces the power significantly. It could be worth testing the total damage output of you had the same number of initial lasers firing but split into two output streams, then 4, then 8 (ie one laser per prism) and see how much damage it does. Harder to design a 'safe' ship of course, but for purposes of damage testing.

[@guyincognito1406]

Each additional beam adds less and less damage, refer to the drop off tooltip. That is also assuming each beam is equal damage, if not than the greater damage suffers the drop off. So ideally you never merge more than 2 beams at a time and always have even beam damage.

[@KainYusanagi]

@@guyincognito1406 Not quite correct. Each beam to a single prism adds less and less damage, but every prism is separate. So, two lasers shooting into a prism (giving you 175% damage) can fire into a third prism and you only get the first tier dropoff (-25% to the second beam); note that it IS -25%, and not subtract 25% from the damage value; so, 175*.75 = 131.25 + 175 = 306.25%.

[@KaedysKor]

Yep. So to clarify, if you have 8 ion emitters, each firing into prisms in pairs, and keep combining them in equal pairs, your total damage is 1.75 ^ 3 = 5.359375x, or 67% of the damage output of all 8 in isolation. The benefit is that all of that damage is concentrated into a single beam (multiple beams can hit different portions of the ship), and you need a _single_ exposed prism doing the targeting, rather than 8.

[@KainYusanagi]

@@KaedysKor And if the firing port is on a diagonal, you can pack it with armor triangles so densely that there's basically not even a pixel's width in variance to get down the line, making it overall very safe.

[@hquest]

You should had added some capacitors near your railguns. They are faster to reload, and you can fill them while cruising to next stage. Makes a railgun ship much meaner than it already is.

[@bruhder5854]

I feel capacitors would be an amazing tool if they just gave power to the adjacent buildings automatically and it acted like a central energy dumping building, similar to how engine room is.

[@nommy8599]

Unless you mean for the ammo factories what you say is incorrect as small reactors have instant power pickup like capacitors. Only the med and large reactors have a delay.

[@KaedysKor]

Rather than closing airlocks, you can simply _forbid_ certain activities. Once I start using mining lasers and such, I typically mark mining and gathering loot as forbidden activities, and only let them happen using the facilities on the ship instead. You can do the same with squad roles, so for example, no one else will try to supply the scanning station with power (and thus, won't leave their airlock and head to another section of the ship). Edit: also, rather than changing flight direction, use the Strafe command. It moves while retaining current rotation, or if you click and hold at the target location, you can set the rotation (which it'll rotate to as it moves). That's also the trick to dealing with sundiving, you strafe to ensure your layered shields stay in the correct direction.

[@jodiac]

Gosh I love this game! Or rather I love watching you play this game!!!

[@GazeboPelt]

The strafe button should be your best friend, instead of changing your flight direction every time :)

[@nommy8599]

Just pressing Z is so much easier he'll fall asleep (Z Z Z)!

[@deredware9442]

Big thing about railguns is that you don't usually care about the actual dps. Its all about the alpha strike. Then enemy is dead in 1, 2 shots max.

[@bruhder5854]

This is a 100% the case. Railguns are essentially snipers. They're not made for sustained damage, they're made for quick, precise and decisive victory. For best dps, I don't think anything beats ion beams at close range. 8 of those at close range shreds through the armor in a sec

[@bruhder5854]

Crew is by far the biggest limitation in this game

[@JohnMeinel]

I was looking forward for when Francis discovers rails. That day has come. Love the glee that is demonstrated

[@AegisPupus]

The optimal beam is 2 2-man bunks connected to a small reactor connected to beam. set one bunk role to occupy, and the other to supply. The sensor array blinking out is because you use the same crew to occupy and supply... It's worst if it happens on a command module, because you lose control of the ship.

[@nommy8599]

I've found that beams adjacent to large reactors can be continuously run with just 3 crew each (1pwr 2op). I think this is the way to go when crew is the limitation.

[@SephirothsBIade]

You can change the difficulty settings in career mode at any time. Settings -> Current Game. In case you wanted another way to spice up the content. I found Grand Admiral Starwright difficulties to make progression far more difficult. Also, even though I love them, personally banned railguns so I cant kill things at max range

[@Metaz]

I for one love these long videos :D

[@spyke1890]

FJ has made the space equivalent of a full choked double barrel shotgun loaded with AP slugs

[@gothicpando]

You can double click the airlocks and disable them to stop crew from flying out during travel.

[@bruhder5854]

Pirate bases have a max fame cap of 440 which means they're best not claimed whilst you still have missions that can push you to around that threshold. Otherwise you miss out on fame you could've gained by doing lesser missions.

[@moomanseven]

It takes more people to operate the shield when the shield is under fire

[@rasheedeqbal7573]

New ship Idea, A Rail gun spine with lots of smaller guns/missiles on the side. Start battle with a long distance short, and finish while closing in.

[@aronfohn857]

Hansolo on a mission to screw with the death star

[@Brand-eo8gv]

For reference a kilonewton is the amount of force it requires to hold 100kgs on earth, most relatively fit adults could bench press that amount and would be exerting about 1kN of force.

[@5rjoud]

All I took away from this was: "tiny exit hole"

[@shadowwardan]

🤣🤣🤣🤣 "let's just set the target to that"BOOM 😶🤣🤣🤣🤣 that's was beautiful

[@Beregorn88]

"let's start plinking away at it from distance" Ship immediately vaporize "that was quite efficient..."

[@jonathans.972]

54:32 man pulled a Luke to Death Star maneuver.

[@NelsonGuedes]

12 I do that in Rimworld, ONI, and other games too. Everything is designed around how close pawns are to the functions they play within the system.

[@impyre2513]

Love the voyager reference at 55:28

[@FuLou1988]

You did opt for all the fire rate, i know you wanne leave some scrap, but couldnt you set the railguns to perma fire, after first alignment, for one enemy just to see the possible destruction power. Instead of the wiggle stuff.

[@danfr]

A thought, what if you swapped the locations of your forward and reverse thrusters and added a small stockpile for ammo. I understand that the ammo production is fast so you don't need it. However when in combat you fire a couple rounds and the fight is over. You spend more time flying around with the crew focused on the railgun doing nothing. If you had a small ammo stockpile you could have crew fire off the railguns during combat then work on ammo production while you're flying around. I do understand you probably can't assign the railgun operators to actually do this without them leaving during combat. Which brings me to your engine crew. Currently in reverse your rear crew is doing nothing but feeding ammo and the boosters and your front crew is streched thin supplying your engines and shields. However you likely don't fire fast enough for those ammo feeders to be necessary. And while flying forwards your rear crew is focused on supplying engines instead of ammo while your front crew doesn't need to supply engines and has free time. However this seems counter productive as if you are flying forwards, the enemy is likely retreating and you don't need shields as much. While in reverse you are likely kiteing while your front crew is trying to both supply shields and engines while your rear crew gets a break. However swapping the location of engines, so the rear crew does reverse thrust and the front crew handles reverse thrust, could possibly work better. While flying forwards your front crew would be supplying engines while your rear crew is re-stocking ammo. And then in reverse your rear crew is supplying engines while your front crew can focus almost entirely on supplying power to the shields. You might even be able to add another shield back or add point defense to deal with those EMP missiles. Though I will also admit. It might be better to put both the front and rear thrusters on one end of the ship. So you have one pair of engine crew that handle both forward and reverse thrust instead of taking breaks when you're flying the other direction.

[@SephirothsBIade]

There are some fun difficulty settings if you find the game too easy and still want more. Currently trying to work my way through a grand admiral shipwright run while banning the use of railguns so I cant just outrange things.

[@nommy8599]

There's also a mod that adds many more difficulty settings for different challenges.

[@joshuafaramir3569]

Lmao. Francis does not believe in human rights! Efficiency above all!!

[@enire8477]

Yep longer rails and then a pair of extra ones, and the only counter is the same ship.

[@williamlai29]

Just wait till Francis goto lvl 16 area.

[@peterthemeh153]

Can opener? Well ya definitely can open 'er

[@zaidounazzam7288]

How about you try to make a "Gatling Rail Gun Ship", you strap 4 or 8 rail guns on the 4 sides of the ship, 1 or 2 on each side, you target and then start rotating the ship. PS: i never touched this game, so i don't know what's possible and what's not.

[@ethanchristensen4094]

In pvp, that kind of ship would be known as a rail spinner. Interestingly, since they keep spinning indefinitely, it becomes difficult for enemy ships to concentrate any damage in one place, so they can be surprisingly tanky. Movement is a bit of a problem though.

[@BrianC1664]

Surely having 4 or 5 rails would be better than lengthening the 2 existing ones, then you get a proper volley when you rotate

[@nemesisnick66]

Only 2 railguns? Who are you what did you do with francis

[@custume]

well rail gun is nice because you have a huge range, but precision is a problem if you have to adjust position all the time, also flak will be a problem

[@kelmor11]

I've always wondered if there's a reason to not point the rails backwards so you don't have to spend so much weight on reverse thrust.

[@bruhder5854]

You're actually right on that. The most effective and efficient rail design I've encountered were all some weird contraptions. Like there was this one that 2 sets of railguns setup in parallel and the ship only relied on rotational thrust while with massive heaps of armor on the outside. This made so that it became hard for enemies to target those railguns whilst having one set shoot while the other gets ready to shoot again.

[@Hedning1390]

There's no direction in space, so if you shoot backwards it is the same but everything in reverse. You can certainly build a kite ship with only reverse thrust, and then have normal flight direction be backwards, however that means you have to turn the ship around every time you want to engage, and that means you'll change direction slower.

[@bruhder5854]

@@Hedning1390 you could do it as you're reaching the enemy though and have them enter your range rather than you enter their range.

[@gogudelagaze1585]

That's what I do on my all-in-one ship. Downside is you have to reverse flight direction all the time, so you need good rotational thrust, though that's rarely a problem. Then another downside is that when you're turned around to fight your forward thrust is limited, assuming you don't have equal forward/rear thrust - which defeats the point of rear rails.

[@Hedning1390]

@@bruhder5854 Yes, hence why I said "You can certainly build a kite ship with only reverse thrust". Having to turn is still a problem worth mentioning, because if the enemy closes faster than you thought you are a sitting duck.

[@joshkindy4826]

love this series, i bought the game after episode one and also am loving the game.

[@deathdealer646]

Shame i wanted to see you optimise the ion beams into a ship. It gets crazy to do large scale. Enjoy the video either way.

[@elmayo1665]

I like the rails, but not the hugest fan of the "rail fanning". Curious if there is a way to build/position them so that it's less micro-managey

[@deredware9442]

You don't need to look at your ship while rotating. Its easier to look at the enemy I think.

[@BeardoPNW]

2 other possible names for the new ship. I said I have a big STICK that's an iain m banks reference. Speak Softly And Carry Big Rails a bit more literal, both have no other connotations where you could be misunderstood. /s

[@wookie-zh7go]

wondering if you just aimed at the ship in general not a specific component will reduce the fanning

[@Hedning1390]

It would have been much faster, yes.

[@danfr]

Also perhaps Fire At Will would be better. Since theoretically Fire At Target means it would wait to fire till it's perfectly lined up, even if it's good a good shot that'll destroy a good part of the ship.

[@KaedysKor]

The core problem with railguns atm is that they have essentially zero firing arc, and won't fire unless their target is in that arc. As a result, even with his two railguns nearly right next to each other, a single target module will generally not be in both of their firing arcs at the same time, and thus the rails won't fire. And the ship, by default, will try to point precisely the forwards direction at the target, which _usually_ results in _neither_ railgun being in the firing arc. Fanning fixes that by sweeping the firing arcs back and forth across the target, ensuring that the target module is within each railgun's firing arc at some point in the back-and-forth sweep. One of the first mods I installed for this game was one that expanded the railgun firing arc to, iirc, ~3 degrees, which essentially completely eliminated the need for fanning like this, while still keeping railguns definitively as a "you need to point your entire ship at the target" weapon. Edit: oh, also, if you don't select a module target at all, the railguns _may_ fire (I'm not sure, they may instead fire at center mass and still have arc issues), but you lose the precision of hitting the modules that are going to disable them quickly. Not worth it, imo.

[@Hedning1390]

@@KaedysKor You don't have to have pinpoint accuracy with all weapon types. Fanning is a method to increase accuracy, but that is the way it should be seen. It should not be seen as the default. Not all weapons have to be played with 100% accuracy. A weapon like missiles can't be accurate no matter how hard you try. Fanning gets more important as you get more rails, so him having only 2 is already almost useless. Him being new to the game and bad at controlling the ship makes it even worse. He should just point the ship towards the enemy and let the guns free fire.

[@KaedysKor]

@@Hedning1390They literally _won't_ fire. You can see that the couple of times in the vid before he starts fanning. When he hits R to rotate, the two thin red lines are the valid firing arcs for the railguns. If the target module isn't in that arc, they won't fire. Accuracy has nothing to do with it, tbh, and fanning doesn't do anything for accuracy. If your guns are inaccurate, you're just as likely to miss with fanning as without. If your gun has a random accuracy arc, it doesn't really matter where your target is within that arc, you have the same probability to hit them (and _less_ probability if it's a Gaussian distribution rather than equal probability at all angles). The fanning for railguns is _precisely_ because of their super limited firing arc. Any ship with more than one railgun, it's generally impossible to have a target be in the firing arc for more than one at once, so you fan to ensure all of the railguns get a chance to fire.

[@loho6894]

Top quality video.

[@Megeanu4991]

Hey John! Have you considered Stardeus until now?

[@kirosun]

57:08 the hot key is Z

[@AussieAwesome]

29:00 How to delete a pirate in 0.5 seconds.

[@marknorton586]

A rebuilt mining ship and asteroid hawler please

[@Booby855]

29:07 LMAO HOLY SHIT!

[@rodbonner7370]

I don't necessarily agree with range limits on projectiles in the vacuum of space. Accelerating said projectile however should be more and more expensive the higher the mass of the projectile.

[@guyincognito1406]

The round has a limited time until the energy put into it burns it up since it’s in a vacuum and has no way to conduct?

[@RaukGorth]

Whats the hotkey for this? ORE!

[@davidsalisbury1688]

29:07 made me laugh so hard.

[@Altair565]

Fire extinguishers...how optimistic of you. 😂

[@truezulu]

Yey!

[@custume]

7 of 9, shame on you, hehehehehehhehehehe

[@suborbitalprocess]

First edit: drat

[@ivannestorovic4495]

Pause left,pause right,pause this,pause this,pause that,pause,pause,pause....ffs,rail guns are dumb.

[@kelmor11]

Oh also, do a third gun rather than longer, more shots should deal with flak better

[@bruhder5854]

Ammo cost is huge though, that's the only issue

[@jjripps1]

First

[@killmethennnow]

Worrying about rail gun max fire rate when everything dies in 4 hits max

[@NickAndriadze]

On the older prototype railgun ship (One with walkways *7:18**)* you explained at the start, the crew bunks having a door placed on the direction of the walkway opposite to them, meaning they have to take 8 times as long exiting the bunk as they could (travelling the opposite of a walkway slows the crew down to 25% their regular walkway speed. You could've made it more efficient by simply mirroring the bunks and having the door on the right hand side so the crew get a 200% boost when they travel off and in fact, have a harder time entering their bunks, meaning they get to their job/destination quicker. Also for railfanning, *30:00* I would much recommend going to the gameplay part of settings and turning on ''show command handles.'' It turns on four arrows and a rotation thingy around your ship, with which you can quickly and reliably rotate and strafe your ships.

[@MafiaCow01]

The comparison between your old ship's cannons eating away at an enemy to this ship's railguns obliterating it instantly is incredible

[@CaptainJackStudios]

I think your videos are going to be a lot more interesting now that you have figured out that this is really a crew pathing efficiency game with a space-battle theme, since it fits exactly into what you like to focus on. I started playing after you started this series, and the game got a lot more fun too when I started to understand that. I still see a lot of little inefficiencies in your ships that could be improved on, but now that you know what the game really is I'm sure you're going to be able to fully optimize them. One tool that you are missing is that you can connect resource supply to demand (e.g. this power plant is the one supplying these weapons) in the same way that you can with crew, it is in the tab with the box. When using either of these tools, it doesn't merely prioritize these rooms, it says that they will ONLY interact with those rooms. At one point in the video you set the connections so that the hyperdrive will never be recharged, I made that mistake too. One simple thing that I noticed is that on your mining ship, you built it to optimize engine-powering efficiency rather than mining laser or resource collector, but it should be the other way around. You are always doing either resource extraction or you are running the engine, never both, and the former is more crew intensive than the latter. So if you optimize for bringing power to the mining lasers and resource extractors, then those crew should be able to manage engine power when travelling even if that is not completely efficient, at least that has been my mining ship experience. I found that a mining laser directly connected to a medium power plant can be powered with one pip that is running back and forth maybe 95% of the time, only occasionally running back to the bedroom. So I think it makes sense to have one pip completely dedicated to mining laser power, with engine power as a secondary and resource collector power disabled (but then this is inefficient when you are not mining but only collecting, so it is up to you, but if you want 100% utilization when simultaneously mining and collecting then this seems to me like the way), and in a bedroom directly connected to the power plant and adjacent to the mining laser which is also directly connected to the power plant. This way she will spend most of their time just walking back and forth between the rooms, very occasionally taking a detour to the bedroom but that is very close anyway. If he is also tasked with powering the resource collectors, then occasionally he will rush off to do that which I think can be inefficient. Maybe he can be tasked with bringing power to only an adjacent resource extractor but not more distant ones. I haven't yet figured out what ratios I need for resource collector power suppliers, but I would do a similar thing: their only job is to bring power to the resource collector, with a secondary as engine power. Mining laser operator should stay in their seat 100% of the time, but the resource collector operators can maybe have resource collector power as a secondary depending on how much you want to skimp on crew. I think a lot of the time when you thought you needed to fan, you were actually fine without fanning you just weren't being patient enough. But the more rails you have in parallel, the more you will need to fan, just because lots of adjacent parallel lines can't all simultaneously intersect a small object, if one of them lines up then the others inevitably will not. But with only two rails, as long as the target ship is wider than the distance between your rails and they are set to fire at will then they should be able to simultaneously keep firing without fanning, even if they can't both target exactly the same module. Since you are faster in 'reverse' than 'forward', you are actually going slower than you can by flying forward on long distance travel. It might make more sense to think of the shooty end as your rear end from which you dump on your opponents. But then it can be tedious to keep switching the flying direction as you showed at the end, I haven't yet found a hotkey for it. I think that once you have discovered crew optimization and railguns, then the career mode becomes very easy on normal difficulty, especially if you overfarm the noob systems. But I would still like to see you go to the highest level system with your current ship and see what happens. I saw a video someone made of a 1-crew ship with only a point defense gun take out the largest ships in the game, it could maybe take out yours too if it was commanded by a human, assuming it has the speed. Also, I think that this would be a great game for some base lovin' content, reviewing different people's ship designs. You can test shields by having a friendly ship fire on your test ship. Larger batteries are good for max per-pip efficiency, but it leads to a fragile shield. Small batteries with 6 dedicated pips per small shield generator is the best possible option for maximum durability. Medium batteries are a good middle ground and can support 3 pips powering the shield under sustained fire. The formula is simply 6/(battery size).

[@gavinhewitt351]

Hey Francis. Not sure if possible, but should you add one of those warp-to-ship modules on your strike fighter. Then you can smack the enemy and warp your salvage ship directly to site to mop up?

[@danfr]

I haven't checked, but I see no reason why that wouldn't be possible. That's actually how I was planning on handling my slow storage/scrapping ship. No need for speed if it can just jump to another ship.

[@johnarmitage3452]

The people who made creeper world also made a game called "particle fleet emergence", i think it may not be great for the channel, but you would absolutely love that game.

[@justneb1995]

"I'm not the brightest spark" says the guy that uses every game's mechanics against itself...

[@LilithSnider]

Could you explain?

[@justneb1995]

@@LilithSnider He is basically claiming he is dumb. But in every series he plays, he finds exploits, in-game mechanics, bugs, etc that make him far more efficient than even the devs of the game. FJ pretty much has a video game super power that puts me in a constant state of awe

[@LilithSnider]

@@justneb1995Thanks for the explanation.

[@callum.dokkodo]

And an absolute monster with a spreadsheet, calculator, and stopwatch.

[@justneb1995]

@@callum.dokkodo I love the "now don't panic" line right before showing any spreadsheet

[@bruhder5854]

Aim for the armor in front in the direction in which enemy is moving so your railguns can compensate for the bullet travel time

[@ShawFujikawa]

You have successfully found the secret to breaking career mode in half lol. AI ships just aren’t designed to deal with railkites so they’re a bit of a joke, AND you mostly preserve the ship so you maximise your loot from every encounter. I think spicing it up with another combat ship for brawling will help spice up the videos should you want to finish a full career mode playthrough, I think railfanning everything would not make for fantastic content.

[@pkassies]

“Slightly inefficient design…”You can almost hear FJ’s entire brain going in shutdown.

[@Hedning1390]

Instead of changing flight direction, just target and change the distance. You don't have to fan all the time to hit the exact thing you are targeting when you are this overpowered. Just let the guns shoot. (also with only 2 rails faning them is not very useful anyway)

[@TheEJackUK]

could you just switch your rails to auto fire? Then point yourself vaguely towards the target? Better than fanning.

[@Xahaka1986]

Issue with that is they shoot as soon as they have a hit on anything from the enemy, including just their armor. So each rail will almost always hit a different part of the ship. If that ship has multiple shields you are hitting on different sides that makes it a lot worse. Its much better to focus your fire, which mean you need to fan.

[@KaedysKor]

His rails _are_ on auto-fire. The issue is that railguns have essentially no firing arc. So if your _ship_ is pointed directly at the target, railguns that are only 3 tiles apart will _not_ have that target in their firing arc. It's quite annoying. The fanning ensures that the target enters each railgun's firing arc at some point in the sweep. Honestly, one of the first mods I added was one that gave railguns a ~3 degree firing arc to eliminate that issue without negating their core mechanic of aiming by turning your entire ship.

[@TheMalT75]

Another great video and another addictive game I try my hardest not to buy! You should get a commision by Game Dev studios... Not having played the game, I have some questions/suggestions: 1) For sniping, why not build a "rocket" with 1 direction of main thrust and the railguns pointing out the back? You could do a "hyperbolic" fly-by of enemy positions to grab aggro and let inertia carry you to a safe stop. Increasing the distance while decelerating has your guns already pointing in the right direction and if you are chased, your main thrust is aligned correctly to open more distance. As you usually don't want to chase but be chased when sniping, reverse thrust can be kept low and you can put the mass you save into perpendicular "turning" rate thrusters. 2) I get that overkill single-shot damage is desirable, but against flak I could imagine that "sacrificial" railgun bullets with almost no barrel or distracting missiles that do not require so many people would improve your killing power. I'm a little bit reminded of your Redcon video (which explains why you seem to enjoy Cosmoteer so much). Thanks for sharing your gaming experiences with us. Even though you clearly enjoy your profession (to an enviable degree) it is still hard work and appreciated.

[@willbordy]

Remember when I was first playing this game, and they released the mining laser and factory/dismantling stuff instead of only having money and spawning resources from thin air with the power of capitalism, Made a ship called the Scrapper, a gigantic C shaped ship with a Jaw made of Mining lasers and shield, and almost only forward thrusters, I hug the ship and mine her to death, Now that the game buff the mining lasers and also created the resources collectors. TO be honest not the strongest ship in late game, but in the early I could only imagine the terror of being in space and see a gigantic wall coming towards you, they enclosed your ship in walls and then start stealing your ship, the wires start getting rip and torn out of the walls before the metal start to be torn apart, the floors and mechanical component being suck to outer space when laser start to cut to pieces everything around you while you are still firing

[@jimbo5071]

For looting enemy ships I tend to do this 1 attack ship 1 salvage + minor logistics ship 1 mining and storage ship Endgame I have a couple attackers, a huge storage Block that is essentially immobile, logistics + crafting mothershup that holds extra crew for attackers and a dedicated salvage ship with medium amounts of storage

[@MarcCastellsBallesta]

I may be late but I think having the scrap gathering ship shaped like a crab would be awesome. Gathers with both arms, processes and stores at the bulk. I don't know, it may be worth copying nature.

[@jslocomb]

That thing is less spaceship and more horrendously terrifying slightly mobile platform of DEATH

[@DasPanoptikum]

I don't know this game, but your rail gun ship feels like too much micromanaging for a fight. It does pull zero punches though.

[@ExtraRaven_]

well the thing about using rails in career is that they are too easy. you just outrange everything and never have to take a real fight, as you've seen already. so if you're looking for more exciting fights you might wanna try using a different weapon type, like the chaingun or the deck cannon.

[@TENGILL]

How about trying fleet tactics? Make a face tank ship with two single rail attack crafts. Line them up on the side of the enemy while the face tank... well tanks in the middle.

[@krandeloy]

Yar, one of the things you're missing (so far as I can tell) is that smaller thrusters react faster. So you if you need to change direction quickly from 0% to 100% the smaller the thruster the more thrust it generates faster up to a cap. So the Huge thrusters have the most Cap, but the slowest ramp up.

[@bruhder5854]

This I thought was true but turned out not so much. It's ramp up speed but since it's about reaching full thrust, even on 1/4 the thrust, the huge thrusters still give you more raw thrust power than a small thruster.

[@Laf-Adventures]

Bro, put your battery crew next to the generator. You’re using so much crew time to just pick up the battery.

[@Swordphobic]

Why not increase the number of rails instead of the length, just in case of more flak.

[@JuanSoloPlays]

It is really great seeing you advancing in your optimisations of ship designs. There definitely is still ways to go but you're on a pretty good track! Love the effciency calculations