Engineers Meta Discussion Force Shell - Stacking & Deminishing Returns

[Morbad]

Originally, force shell and other impulse attacks stacked completely linearly and had no caps on ultimate effectiveness. Back in the Engineers beta through the first half of 2.1 some of my favorite loadouts utilized several force shell cannon to great effect, but this was short lived. With the 2.1.03 update these notable changes were implemented:

• Changes to impulse attacks (force shell and impulse mine), aiming to prevent stacking from being extremely unpleasant (and sickness inducing in VR) while not making single guns ineffective.
• Torque generated by impulse attacks is clamped to a multiple of the ships mass, so large weapons cannot induce unrecoverable spins in small ships.

While undoubtedly good for balance, it did cause me to neglect force shell for a while and when I picked them up again, I was generally dissatisfied with the effects of stacking force shell weapons. Since then, I've had a handful of ships that carried one force shell weapon as token defense for use against FA Off hitscan users, and have toyed with larger ones, but I hadn't taken another serious look at them until recently.

Hearing reports that some people were still finding that they stacked acceptably, I wanted to get some actual measurements.

A preliminary test:

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuRJBJhc2DI


In this test I used a pair of fixed huge short-range blaster G5 (maxed out rolls) force-shell cannon against a ~515 ton Mamba and measuring the velocity induced. I was attempting to eliminate torsional losses as much as possible by firing at a perpendicular angle into the ship's center of mass (which I did a pretty good job of, except at one point where I had my cannons on the wrong triggers).

Both cannon hitting simultaneously resulted in the Mamba being pushed away at ~301m/s, while striking with only a single cannon resulted in ~184m/s. This implies that the additional force shell effect had it's magnitude reduced to about 2/3rds of baseline.

Staggered/sequential hits each imparted their full effect, up to the point where the flight model's auto-breaking kicked in.

TLDR - Force shell does indeed stack, but there are diminishing returns.

In future tests I hope to discover if the pattern of diminishing returns holds true past two cannon, as well as test the limits of the torque (the precise muliple of ship mass, in degrees per second, if possible) that can be delivered by them. No real ETA on these, however.

If this is all redundant and I've missed other recent tests that have been conducted, please let me know.

Oh yeah, thanks goes to CMDR Rybo for taking the time to get shot.

 

[Melanthes]

In future tests I hope to discover if the pattern of diminishing returns holds true past two cannon, as well as test the limits of the torque (the precise muliple of ship mass, in degrees per second, if possible) that can be delivered by them. No real ETA on these, however.

This is very interesting. Thanks for sharing your tests.
This would be a lot more useful if the different cannon sizes would share the same projectile velocity.
As it is now, the amount of simultaneous usable cannons is quite low. What comes to mind are the hardpoints of the Krait Mk II, which might offer a good convergence and three large short range cannons are comparable in damage to the huge cannons. So similar imparted velocity might be expected.
The few times I had force shells used against my ships it was mostly a minor inconvenience, although I prefer rather heavy builds, which might hard counter force shells. Although I only have anecdotal evidence for this assumption.

 

[Morbad]

This would be a lot more useful if the different cannon sizes would share the same projectile velocity.

Part of one of the 'buffs' to them in the past gave smaller cannon higher velocity, then another buff gave fixed cannon higher velocity. Then Engineering came along and gave one mod and one special that could change velocity. There are now no less than twenty four distinct possible cannon projectile velocities, and this is only counting maxed out G5 for the long range mod.

This definitely makes pairing them together, or with other projectile weapons, tricky. There are a couple of good synergies though, with the most common being the C2 fixed force shell, which is the same velocity as a PA.

As it is now, the amount of simultaneous usable cannons is quite low.

For fixed ones, yes.

What comes to mind are the hardpoints of the Krait Mk II, which might offer a good convergence and three large short range cannons are comparable in damage to the huge cannons. So similar imparted velocity might be expected.

Yes, I also hope to test the relationship of damage to impulse delivered.

The few times I had force shells used against my ships it was mostly a minor inconvenience, although I prefer rather heavy builds, which might hard counter force shells. Although I only have anecdotal evidence for this assumption.

Mass, FA On vs. Off, and point of impact relative to center of mass are all important factors.

Even a fixed medium force shell cannon can cause a Vulture to do a 360 if it hits right...I've had them used on mine.