How does ship energy work? TShips TLaser TBullets

[Dougster]

I'm working on a mod, and now I've gotten to where I am fooling around with the guns trying to understand how they work. For instance:

Discoverer with 100MW generator, 1x 1MW Shield, and AIRE

TBullets: ROF 750 md/min Energy 30
TLasers: AIRE Energy 1000 Recharge 0.020
TShips: Power 100 MW

From testing, my gun drains itself in about 4 seconds of steady fire. It doesn't matter if I have one or 2 AIREs firing, still 4 seconds.

Likewise, recharge is about 25 seconds from empty to full. Again doesn't matter if there is one or 2 guns installed.

Changing the ship power from 100 to 50 didn't have any noticable effect on the guns. Still 4s to drain and 25s to charge.

I'm trying to figure out how the ship power, shields, laser power, and recharge rate all relate so I can calculate out how long a gun will fire if the trigger is constantly depressed, depending on the values above, and how long it will take to recharge fully.

Burianek probably knows this stuff since he did that massive laser rebalance, but if anybody has experience with knowing how this all works I'd appreciate some help. I'm good with math so I'm not afraid of formulas, just use something like computer formula syntax to explain if you can. I've been messing around in Excel trying to figure out how all these numbers interrelate, but its not making sense yet.

Changing the recharge rate to .04 did cause the gun to recharge in 12s, but it still drained in about 4s. Apparently a gun won't recharge while its being fired. If thats the case then its time to drain is just a function of the laser energy, bullet energy, and ROF.

Then whats the ship energy for if it doesn't have anything to do with the lasers?

[Harlock776]

Well after looking at my own types files it looks like I have the same exact settings but then again I never use alpha IRE for anything. I'm looking at all this info in doubleshadow's X2Editor and the only thing I can think of is your charge rate. Mine is 0.02 displayed in X2Editor that way what is yours?

[Red Spot]

are you sure you actually got the changed settings in game ?? ..



G

[Dougster]

Yeah I changed the recharge value using the X2 Editor from 0.02 to 0.04 and it did make the red energy bar shoot up twice as fast. Then I just set it back to 0.02 for now. How 0.02 turns into 25 seconds to fill up a 1000 energy reservoir is what I'm trying to learn. I'm just using the AIRE to experiment with until I learn how this all works.

I admit, I'm puzzled by the ship reactor in TShips now, because I'm not seeing any difference in fiddling around with it. Maybe it has something to do with shields recharge? Or perhaps your gun energy plus shields just has to be less than your reactor?

Example:
Nova with 150MW power plant
- 3x 25MW Shields = 75MW
--------------------------------
75MW Spare Capacity (what is this used for?)

Well, I'm off to fiddle around with values again and see what I can learn. Experimentation is one way to figure stuff out.

[ShadowX]

Ship generator setting in TShips does absolutely nothing(ships don't have energy) to weapons and weapons do not recharge while firing. If you want to make it last longer either add more laser energy in TLaser or decrease the amount of energy used in TBullets.

[Galaxy613]

Ship generator setting in TShips does absolutely nothing(ships don't have energy) to weapons and weapons do not recharge while firing. If you want to make it last longer either add more laser energy in TLaser or decrease the amount of energy used in TBullets.

Yep, it's just fluff. Though I think this is going to change in X3. But in X2 it just is a number.

[Burianek]

Yep, I'm not sure what the exact formulas are, you could figure them out through some tesing if you were really determined.
I can confirm that the power generator number does nothing in X2.
Cheers.

[Dougster]

I guess I'll get the stopwatch out and do some good old fashioned research. There's nothing wrong with an empirical formula as long as it fits the data.

Apparently I've learned enough to do what I want. I do have an alpha version of my mod uploaded on ShadowTek. It includes CWS Turrets, AutoDOCK, ships from RA's mod 08.1, and my own massive rework of TShips. I included all the original readme's from the extra mods, so I believe I did it in the proper way. I didn't see any kind of copyright notices in any of those mods, so I just credited the authors, included their original docs, and bundled it all up.

It's highly unbalanced, I think. I'm trying to play through my mod and its hard, to say the least, so I'm planning to tweak the lasers. End result is that it will probably be just like half a dozen other mods out there, but I'm having fun making it regardless.

link for the brave (registration required): DogStar 0.2a

I'm thinking that I will make the following laser mods:

IRE - they will become like primitive kyon emitters. "The Khaak based their Kyon emitters on captured Argon weapons".

PAC - might change them to be like stock IRE's but stronger, haven't decided yet. Probably faster bullets, slower refire, medium damage. Particle Accelerator Cannon to me sounds like some kind of railgun or something. Maybe fast shot speed, good damage, long range, slow refire.

MD - going to increase it to 50 or 100 hull damage, or maybe more and then possibly reduce the ROF. Ammo would last a lot longer that way for one thing. Cannons would be cool, massive hull damage but really slow refire. Since hull is increased a lot in my mod, the MD's might be just the ticket. I'm restricting them to Argon and Split ships only, and considering making them even for M5s.

And the rest I probably won't mess with much.