Why are mirrored/reactive bulkheads so expensive?

KayAitch

K
Military bulkheads cost about the same as your ship and add 95% to hull.

Mirrored/reactive cost about 3 times what your ship does, and add the same armour as miltary bulkheads, but reduce the damage done by one weapon type and increase the other 80%/120% - so mirrored composites take 80% damage from lasers and 120% damage from cannon.

I guess rails and plasmas even out as they do both damage types? I'm not sure.

On paper they sound like balanced options, with mirrored/military/reactive all basically being the same but with slightly different risks vs rewards balance.

If that's the case the why are they so insanely expensive? I mean these things double the cost of your ship and double your insurance, but only tweak the rock-paper-scissors of the enemy weapons that you face.

Am I missing some advantage? Were they originally more powerful and have a price that doesn't match them post-nerf? Do they confer some significant advantage over military bulkheads that isn't balanced by the same amount of weakness?
 

KayAitch

K
Windscreen Smudge said:
Because it's an easy way to give players an arbitrary goal to work for without having to provide any meaningful choices or variety.
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Wouldn't that progression be the next ship up? For the cost of mirrored in an Eagle you can A-kit a Viper, in a Viper that will fund an IC, in the IC that funds the Vulture, and mirrored in a Vulture would pay for a FAS, and so on.
 

Zeta Legion

Z
There is no logic to it as far as I can see. For what it's worth I believe Mirrored to be the best because most of what you're gonna run into is lasers.
 

Windscreen Smudge

W
KayAitch said:
Wouldn't that progression be the next ship up? For the cost of mirrored in an Eagle you can A-kit a Viper, in a Viper that will fund an IC, in the IC that funds the Vulture, and mirrored in a Vulture would pay for a FAS, and so on.
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No, because bigger ships are not progression.

You can afford a Viper and mirrored bulkheads. Great, now what about the rest of the ship? I'll take an A-fit Eagle over a D-fit Viper with bulkheads any day of the week.

Modules are the true progression track in ED, ships just allow you to advance further along those tracks in tiers of variety.

Edit: I read that backwards for some reason, but the point remains. Frontier didn't have anything to add to armor to continue that line of progression, so they took 2 variants of Military composite and made them more expensive.
 
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Don_Von_Hulio

Don_Von_Hulio
Because they work.... really well. I use Mirrored on my Vulture because if anything drops my shields its lasers. And the most commonly used weapons are lasers.
 
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defekt

defekt
Probably comes from the same logic that decided multi-purpose ships should end up being better than so-called 'dedicated' ships, and SCBs. Oh, and PP. ED logic is ED logic.
 

RidingTheFlow

RidingTheFlow
"it has extra stuff" (mirrored is shiny, reactive has layer of HE) = it costs more ;)
Huge markup will make sense if you consider that price of ship mostly actually price of insurance premium on this ship (look at insurance thread where it was discussed). Lifetime insurance of mirror-shiny or explosive things will tend to be expensive ;)
 
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KayAitch

K
Don_Von_Hulio said:
Because they work.... really well. I use Mirrored on my Vulture because if anything drops my shields its lasers. And the most commonly used weapons are lasers.
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What's that ship cost? 50 million or so? For that money you could almost A rate a FAS or Imperial Clipper.

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Flimley said:
Mirrored armour is expensive because it's shiny. And shiny things cost lots of money.
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Neither make any difference to the appearance of your ship.
 

RidingTheFlow

RidingTheFlow
KayAitch said:
Neither make any difference to the appearance of your ship.
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"its not implemented yet".

I still remember Frontier's early dev diaries where they shown how upgraded thrusters will change ship appearance, etc. One of things which was axed due to not enough dev resource.
 
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Gray Lensman

Gray Lensman
RidingTheFlow said:
"its not implemented yet".

I still remember Frontier's early dev diaries where they shown how upgraded thrusters will change ship appearance, etc. One of things which was axed due to not enough dev resource.
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I didn't know that and it's a real shame. That would add some interest to the visuals.
 

RidingTheFlow

RidingTheFlow
Gray Lensman said:
I didn't know that and it's a real shame. That would add some interest to the visuals.
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http://elite-dangerous.wikia.com/wiki/Elite_Dangerous?file=Engines.jpg

But I'd say its pretty high probability adding back (though unlikely soon, most likely quite after Horizons, maybe even as "third expansion"). There are strong indications better module system (+crafting?) is in plans, and such visual changes - when they will think that they made enough of adding different ships and can concentrate on customizing them.
 
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KayAitch

K
RidingTheFlow said:
"its not implemented yet".

I still remember Frontier's early dev diaries where they shown how upgraded thrusters will change ship appearance, etc. One of things which was axed due to not enough dev resource.
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That's a nice idea, but for thrusters alone you'd be looking at 5 models per ship. That's a lot of modelling work that most players are never going to notice. I'd rather have actual models for things like shield boosters and KWS that just use the heat sink model.
 

RidingTheFlow

RidingTheFlow
KayAitch said:
That's a nice idea, but for thrusters alone you'd be looking at 5 models per ship. That's a lot of modelling work that most players are never going to notice. I'd rather have actual models for things like shield boosters and KWS that just use the heat sink model.
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That's why I mentioned it was axed and current modelling resource goes into new ships. But when there would be enough different ship hulls, per-component customization can still make appearance.
 
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