PAC vs Laser (Canoes)! ⚡🔥 From the Depths

[@alfa-hf7lp]

As a PAC enthusiast I'm glad you're doing these experiments. PACs advantage is that they are effective against anything and everything anywhere and everywhere. There was nothing stopping you from putting those PAC turrets on the bottom of your craft so the lasers couldn't target them, for example. You need this sort of outside the box thinking to make PACs good due to their high cost. Here are a few things I found to make them more cost-effective. 1. Steam turbines. As you said, energy weapons are only as effective as your energy producers. Turbines have two big advantages over pistons: They're easier to make and more efficient. Their disadvantage is that they can only make energy which is usually not as important as power. 2. Longer charge times give more damage per energy. If you want a faster fire rate without sacrificing that efficiency you can have multiple smaller PACs with staggered fire. The best way I've found to stagger the fire is to set them to only fire when the battery is full. This ensures they don't fire without max energy and also allows you to get away with a smaller battery vs. one huge shot. 3. The vertical lens doubles the vertical focus while halving the horizontal focus. Because most things you shoot at are more wide than they are tall you can use this to get away with lower focus values even if you don't need the higher firing arc. 4. EMP is EMP and will destroy anything EMP destroys but is otherwise useless. Explosive is hot garbage use impact instead. Piercing is probably the best quick build against large craft but it's hard to balance as you want enough damage to get to the good bits but not go clean through with 80% of your damage left. Impact does the most damage but it usually only shaves armor when shooting big things. Impact can be made much better by building multiples lenses very close and staggering their fire to shoot with a split-second delay allowing you to make a sort of AP hollow-point hit-scan weapon that can be truly terrifying. 5. The best use I've found for PACs on a standard ship is as a secondary AA gun. Making an advanced cannon or missiles focused on hitting small fliers is fine, but they don't do much against a large ship. PACs can have breadboard to make it fire fast impact shots for fliers and long piercing ones in their absence.

[@BorderWise12]

Cheers! Very helpful! 😁

[@scorpion563]

Nice overview of PACs.

[@Airdown]

Ok, maybe this ended up way longer than I intended.. A few things: 1. When using PACs, you can change the damage type using ACB's and possibly bread. For example, I like to have my PACs set to EMP until the enemy drops to 99% health, then switch to piercing. You can also change charge times to change fire rate/energy consumption (as you adressed.) If you get real good at it maybe you could make a "do it all" PAC that changes intelligently during fights. 1a. Feel free to shield the lenses on the sides. It's the vertical that needs to be more open. You can also try to make a cone using inverted ramps. 2. When you design your own death lasers, you can add AP blocks to combiners without any laser cavities, and on all sides of a combiner. This allows much greater AP per volume. 3. Learning basic steam engines is easy! > Spawn in a test dummy and make it invincible > Have some temp lasers/pac on your craft to dump energy into the dummy (this will put the engines under load and give you real power numbers.) > Build the the steam engine of your choice minus boilers > Slowly add boilers till the input pressure of all cylinders reaches 10. Make sure to let it equalize first! > Take note of the engine power, and add/remove cylinders/boilers until you have the output you want. > That's it for the basics! You can add ACB's/bread to give different on/off conditions and tune the output levels Something to note is that larger class steam engines are supposedly (idk) more efficient per resource. A note about this fight: it's kind of unfair to the PACs. The craft are low slung and the lasers target above water, meaning the PAC lenses would be more likely to be targetted. If you design a purely PAC craft, you actually do want more blocks above water. Also, in the same way as lasers you might try putting the body of the weapon as close to the bottom as possible with long necks up to the turrets

[@hypernovamkvi715]

Also make the pac tubes go up and down helps avoid self damage when the Guns get hit

[@haydenlummus8838]

Replying to this so I may reference it later, thank you for the information.

[@boblarry5524]

I've used particle cannons a lot in my time on from the depths. From my experience explosive PACs are never the play compared to the other modes. EMP can 1 shot medium to small craft if the charge and tube length is big enough, even with good EMP protection. Piercing is hit or miss, more often than not it will over penetrate and hit useless parts. But i have found that a lot of small PACS on the same turret with smaller tubes with short range lenses on 10 second charge and low focus, its kinda good with piercing. Because of the spread/low focus, the PAC "shotgun" makes a ton of holes in the craft. Lastly, impact PACs are mid. While they do a lot of damage technically, they tend not to do much else other than make redundant blocks fall off. IMO that's not worth the energy and cost of the the PAC when an APS hollow point can do the same. However, you can do a cheeky thing with impact PACs. If you setup a PAC turret with more than one lens, you can set them both to impact and have one lens synced to the other with a delay. This does two things, the 1st shot opens a hole in the armor and the second shoots the internals of the craft(usually want 100% focus to be consistent). Or better yet, set the second PAC to explosive. Secondly, because PACs are hits scan, i have noticed that multiple lenses with impact hitting the same spot seems to just delete the damage if they were shot at the same time.

[@ainumahtar]

Sync delay for thump or thump/explosive is actually a cool idea, I'll try that on some of my twin (currently pierce) pac turrets. I love thump because you see a giant number of blocks fall off but as you say, it's normally a ton of armor blocks rather than vital bits

[@boblarry5524]

@@ainumahtar I’m sure I’m not the first to figure out thump delay with pacs. Happen to figure it out when messing around with PACs and found it to be really effective against the pyre to drill holes in armor.

[@theusa2317]

wait, if impact makes a bunch of armor block fall off, could you use them to "Skin" enemy ships making EMP and Explosive weapons more effective?

[@elecbaguette]

Impact is kind of worthless, because you can use scatter lenses at higher charge times to spread out the damage of penetration PACs meaning you get a similar effect to impact PACs but with much much more AP.

[@mechastophiles2118]

Takeaways: 1. Superior numbers with superior dakka is good 2. Lasers need to be mounted high enough to not shoot through waves constantly 3. PACs are dubstep 4. Now I want to see a Packing Duck refit into a PACing Duck

[@user-nk2cu1zq3p]

12:30 Bordergroan

[@tarikan]

You can actually do a rotational symmetry thing with PACs to utilize all the available space

[@CrayvenCarnage]

Sometimes quantity is a quality of it's own. So laser= more efficient, great against anything not underwater, but has counters that can drastically reduce effectiveness. It is also convenient because you can transport the laser. PACs= more power for it's space, great against anything with no real counters, but is EXPENSIVE in basically every way. Also a bit of a risk if it gets damaged. Edit/note: I think should have done a test with the PAC turrets on the bottom rather than the top.

[@OmicronMkI]

One thing I would like to point out is that the lasers are only using about half of their potential sustained DPS. Since each laser had a listed damage of their next shot of 34, if you multiply that by 40, you get a DPS of 1,360. This wouldn't be a problem if the lasers shared combiners on a single turret, but as evidenced by the laser on one side of a turret losing power, they don't. The main thing to remember is that the sustained DPS of a laser system show in the UI is based on the pumping rate, while the "damage of next shot" is based on the amount of cavity energy available in that instant for a single shot used by a single combiner or LAMS node. If the "damage of next shot" multiplied by the fire rate of a laser system (40 for continuous) is less than the sustained DPS, then you should connect more combiners, storage, or destabilizers to the system. In this specific scenario, having too many Multipurpose Laser blocks is actually detrimental to your damage output, and you would be better off having all of the laser blocks connected together, at least in a single turret. Networking your lasers together also helps with redundancy, in case one turret loses its pumps and the other one loses its combiners. Whether your engines can handle the additional energy draw is another matter, I'm just pointing out that the lasers themselves are suboptimal and could have their true DPS doubled quite easily. A shortcut for comparing theoretical "sustained DPS" to the true DPS is by adding one Q-switch and seeing if the "Sustained DPS" is higher or lower than the "Damage of Next Shot". Edit: I would also like to note that while the PAC canoes won once by a technicality, they also started with more total materials than the laser canoes did, probably due to the laser canoes not having enough storage to receive the allotted 500,000 materials per team.

[@BorderWise12]

Yup. The completely separate laser systems in this case is mainly for redundancy, so that DPS doesn't drop if one side gets damaged or if one combiner gets destroyed. Doing the math is great, but I've been reminded a lot recently that perfect math doesn't always mean best combat results. Have a second separate shooty thing, it's worth it. 😛

[@OmicronMkI]

@@BorderWise12 My main point in my last comment was that you could get more out of your lasers without necessarily sacrificing redundancy. Each side of your turrets appear to have their own multipurpose laser block, but are also balanced with twice as many pumps as they can use. If you want to keep the redundancy of each side being separate, you might instead add another pair of combiners. Even more shooty things for redundancy. Yes, having perfect math does mean that if/when your turret gets damaged you will be losing DPS, but having imperfect math means that you are sacrificing DPS even before the turret gets damaged (not factoring in engine output in this example, I don't know how you balanced your engine output). I am also familiar with some of the damage that laser turrets can take in combat, I did combat test the Photonslang refit that I did to your Titanslang, and from that I learned that having transceivers mixed into the connector tetris around the couplers is actually a good idea, even if it is more expensive. Networking laser turrets together is optimal, self-contained laser turrets can still be good if they're balanced properly and if you're concerned about losing Multipurpose Laser Blocks, and one thing I haven't tested much is the idea of having multiple Multipurpose Laser Blocks on separate but networked Laser Turrets, placed in such a sequence that only one is active at a time, but another will take over if one gets destroyed. If that can work, you'd be able to use the full output of your laser pumps split between all of the combiners on your ship, and still have redundancy if you lose part of a turret. Lost a turret cap? No problem, the cavity lines are still contributing to the other turrets on your ship. Lost some cavities? No problem, the combiners are still getting power from other turrets. It might be the best of both worlds, if you're willing to take the time to line up some transceivers. Even if the transceivers get destroyed, if each turret still has its own Multipurpose Laser Block, it should then be able to continue firing independently from the rest of the system. I think the key to this system working is that the redundant Multipurpose Laser Blocks need to be added after the rest of the system is complete, if it works at all.

[@kaddenwoodall2506]

Yo so ur saying my damage from my pumps needs to maych my damage on next shot with 1 q switch? ​@OmicronMkI

[@OmicronMkI]

@@kaddenwoodall2506 Yes*. The math should look something like this: Sustained DPS = Damage of next shot * shots per second * number of combiners (or LAMS nodes) that can fire at the target. You can have less sustained DPS if you want a "charge" laser to deal more damage when it first starts firing, but you probably shouldn't have much more sustained DPS than you can realistically use.

[@trk20.]

One of the major disadvantages of lasers is their easy counterability (via smoke, shields) which isn't a thing for PACS, I think that should be factored in to any comparison between them, especially with the prevalence of at least moderate laser defense.

[@nocturnalpulse6720]

There are couple of that set up the PAC team for failure from the start... which others have already pointed out.

[@no3ironman11100]

If you don't mind I think you could have used pierce lasers, have designed the laser so it transceives to the turret so you'd be fine losing some turrets, with a long lens you can fire through water pretty fine too. The pacs need smart damage switching and 30sec reload, and maybe better armored turrets. You'll see pacs perform better in very short range battle, but even smoked if you fight at at least 4km piercing lasers outperform them.

[@addisonchow9798]

Borderwise, do you think that nukes should be reworked as a overpowered weapon while being super expensive with emp over kilometres if detonated in space and some factions have nukes and if you use nukes, they will use nukes like in highfleet but you will lose tons of reputation for starting nuclear war and if the other faction starts nuclear war, they will lose reputation with other factions and would require you to have long range lasers for nuke defense.

[@nwordpass5960]

They would have to cost millions to Not OP... I mean one hitting a Meg would be broken

[@BorderWise12]

Nope. That would be pretty broken. 😅

[@no3ironman11100]

The problem and why we don't have 50m sized blasts is it's easy to make such a thing unbalanced. And no matter what you do it'd then end up very extreme "it works very good" or "it works very bad". Hard to make massive AOE weapons fair.

[@trazyntheinfinite9895]

I am a huge fan of both weapon types because they are so versatile.

[@alexanderalexander7380]

Smoke takes time to deploy. Having a 1Q system with 10 combiners at 10% output or 5 combiners at 20% will make the laser work like a piercing PAC, ignoring smoke unless the smoke is permanently on. Give it a recharge rate of ~50 seconds and any (non permanent) smoke will become useless. Need to spread the damage? Put as many combiners as possible on the ship, make sure they all amount to 100% cavity usage per alpha-strike, BOOM, laser shotgun. PAC work best in my experience as energy CRAM cannons. Max charge time, 0 focus, and add as many lenses as possible on the ship. Want a fun experiment? Take the Marauder, replace all broadside cannons with shotgun PACs or Short range lenses and add just enough tubing to break 1 4m-HeavyArmor beam on each shot. BorderWise was REALLY wise when he said redundancy is the name of the game in FTD. Frontsiders like the Snig are overrated. Meta PAC and Railguns will simply ignore armor, no matter how much you have. And because frontsiders are long, narrow targets, any meta shot hitting them will destroy a huge amount of internals. So by contrast, in my opinion the most meta craft would be a giant, flat waffle pointing its broad side (full of tiny, redundant PACs) at the enemy. No matter where you shoot all the millions of pierce damage, you will only ever take out a few blocks at a time. Explosive and Thump would be your only enemies. But thump can be countered with smart design and Explosive minimised by HA. Also 2 other thoughts: 1. Possibly uncommon opinion: CRAM at 300m/s are completely useless, only when set at 600m/s in the config did they become APS competitive, I'd never use them otherwise. Missiles are also way too slow when made longer to catch up to some huge but fast craft, so thrust x2 on them makes them Railgun level threats if they are not spoofed with decoys. So Missiles at 450m/s, CRAM at 600m/s, APS at anything above 600m/s and energy weapons at lightspeed to me seems like a good balance. 2. Why is detection a thing in the game? Even with autodetect on 0 and the best stealth characteristics, all enemies will see and hit you 90% of the time. IRL stealth + ECM make you harder to lock on to, reducing chances of getting fired upon or hit (forcing combatants to close distance until sensors are strong enough to burn through the stealth+ECM combo). In FTD, Smoke makes you more visible to cameras at range, and Chaff barely has an impact. It would be cool if detection would be set up so that past a certain range, craft are practically impossible to hit, depending on sensor power(sensors would be scalable like lasers) vs stealth+ECM and very stealthy or ECM centric craft would be able to get close without fearing retaliation from an enemy with poor sensors and stealth. I'm not saying this should necessarily be in the game(even if I love the idea of a faction made entirely out of stealthy f22s and EA18Gs dabbing on low tech enemies). I'm sure many would hate to detract from the "brawl" style gameplay, but then why have detection in the game in the first place? With or without it, the game still feels like it has autodetect set to 1, regardless of config. It feels incomplete! Sorry for the rant guys, it's 6am where I'm at and I've been doing university papers for the last 6-8 hours. By this point I classify as being legally drunk. Anyways, BorderWise is AMAZING, I love ALL the videos, I never skip one when it pops into my feed, and I hope you all have a wonderful day!

[@BorderWise12]

Cheers! Great to hear I managed to be wise for once! 😊

[@no3ironman11100]

Not gonna agree with anything but the first paragraph but yes.

[@scorpion563]

Spawn smoke is a thing and I've seen it used on several craft, but yes if it doesn't have it that strategy shreds craft. Going to disagree with he and thump being the only enemies. Sandblasters with fast retargetting will shread craft like that apart from volume of DPS, and them usually being sabot kinetics (see new kobold for example) there's no stopping them. Additionally, crams are actually quite good IF used right, as if you stick them on a rush down craft they use all the crafts speed and they get to fire from close range, where crams outperform most other weapons pound for pound.

[@comet.x]

see the snig and other frontsiders in the ftd campaign often aren't meta ships, because the devs don't want truly meta ships in the ftd campaign, as it just wouldn't be fun (or beatable) for the majority of players. Especially considering how much the majority of players already struggle with the current frontsiders There's nothing stopping you from making a redundant frontsider either. Also, crams are useless? What are you on? Crams are pretty much only beaten by rams as the most material efficient weapon in the game, ESPECIALLY with 3d tetris. The current weapon balance in ftd when all weapons are being fully optimized is honestly shockingly good, especially for a vehicle building game. If they aren't hitting, sounds like you either aren't close enough, or that detection isn't as useless as you seem to think it is. Although if you're really that bothered by 300m/s crams and can't get them to hit, I recommend you try out cram mortars. Especially ones launched from orbit. Orbital cram mortars are terrifying.

[@ashleyjamiel7129]

Honestly could you not setup the lasers to fire every ten seconds or are they better at consistent damage

[@drkreuzer670]

PAC works like cram (but better)

[@goodstormsgames9744]

Uh so 100 percent accurate pacs. Is not the play. Focus lowers the dammage. And for scatter it's better to have higher charge times and low focus. But you can set up abcs or bread to control the charge and focus for range to make them more efficient. Reducing the pac accuracy to 10% will double the fire power per energy. If you want the most impact for scatter lenses it's best to just drop accuracy increase charge time and hope 1 of the many shots hit the target and have it aim at clusters of blocks. Using radar most likely. Also I always use the partical import port for primary pacs. Since you get less dammage drop off. For the long range lenses same applies. And if you use pacs for melee they really shine since you only use energy when the beam makes contact. Even a small one can be fairly devastating. Also the most efficient. 6 dammage per energy is average. I don't know if melee pacs can dammage shells otherwise they would make awesome ciws.

[@skepticofdoom7486]

Just kinda wandering through your content and had a thought. Perhaps build a small, ineffiecient version, a medium, kinda optimized and a BIG Super-minmaxed version of whatever you are using then do a "best of three" combined arms fight? Breaks up the one on one a bit, gives you an excuse to build shit and more content. In case you were looking for ideas.

[@RevanRA]

The Canoes will always be a proven design!

[@hypernovamkvi715]

PAC only neter Please

[@BorderWise12]

Eventually! :D

[@scorpion563]

Dew it.

[@WaYRt]

First

[@eane7238]

Nobody cares, my nigga.

[@WaYRt]

👍

[@eane7238]

Your technical knowledge of the game is up to par but these ships are pretty rough to look at lol.