Yep, I genuinely thought all the clean drive ranting was just forum noise. They are in fact useful only as a stopgap upgrade whilst you gather mats for a dirty drive.
Engineers Clean Drive Tuning is useless, and needs a fix. (Math inside!)
- Thread starter GoStu
- Start date
Yep, I genuinely thought all the clean drive ranting was just forum noise. They are in fact useful only as a stopgap upgrade whilst you gather mats for a dirty drive.
... and if you like to explore higher G surfaces, or places with a higher ambient temperature ...
I'm quite familiar with exploration; I'm the owner of a nebula somewhere south and west of Sgr A*. I just think the appeal of landing on tire-melting planets is pretty niche. Besides, where do I draw the line for "hot" or "high gravity?". Many worlds could be safely explored with either drive tuning (or none at all) and the actual in game rewards for landing on a crusher or a ship-melter are currently nil. There's nothing there you can't get on other planets and it's extremely unlikely you'd ever be forced into a landing. (Out of jumponium at a dwarf star and the only place to get more is somewhere as hot as Skardee 1?). My serious advice to anyone about visiting those worlds is "Don't bother", not "go get Clean Drives".
I'll make a second edit that if you're one of the rare few that really want to try landing on those extreme worlds, Clean Drives could be a help.
Even in light of all this, I still think that Clean drives underperform and overcost too badly to recommend to anyone.
True but to be honest that's quite a niche activity. Landing or taking off quickly, being able to outrun a bad guy and just good old flying quickly in an asteroid belt or surface skimming/canyon running is more important to most.
The telling point might be to ask FD if they had to remove anyone's G5 clean drives in the exploit cleanup. I bet that there wasn't a single PvP exploiter who bothered even to cheat to get a god-roll clean drive.
Not Efficient? I highly recommend Efficient - it's an amazing blueprint for plasma (and other energy weapons). Lower heat per shot, lower power draw (lower passive heat!), lower capacitor draw, and improved damage. The heat reduction on G5 efficient is between -50% and -60%, vs -20% to -30% for G5 Sturdy.
Think he means railguns with plasma slug special. Rails don't have efficient.
Yep I could have made that clearer, the only mod you can get for rail-guns that reduces heat is the sturdy one. Plasma slug railgun effect lets them run on fuel. If you like rails and can cope with the extra weight they are worth a laugh. They are also good for people like me who miss a lot and benefit from limitless scoopable ammo.
The efficient mod is great for other energy weapons.
you may get a good heat reduction with long range mods on rails with the random secondary.
dunno if that was a byproduct of g1-god roll exploit, or if its just normal for g1 rolls
I generally keep the best of three with engineers and never go beyond a few extra rolls on top (except when I'm raising rep by discarding with easy mats), so waiting for a lucky secondary would be pointless for me. Buying special effects for rep is (I think) much more conducive to having fun than grinding at it. Long range rails don't really tempt me as I tend to keep them as a close range thing, other than for hitting fleeing targets. But I use long range cannons as I like the increased shot speed.
You get it with normal g1 rolls. Actually you get it with all of the grades. Doing it at g5 would be too much because you want like 50 rolls per rail gun to get the good secondary.
I've done it with g1 and g4. g4 mats aren't too bad.