I keep seeing people recommend G3 thrusters over G5, why is that? Its the only Engineer mod that is talked about like this. I stopped playing Elite shortly after Engineers released, but now i am back and having a ball with the Engineers as im currently building a fully modded G5 Anaconda. Do the G3 thrusters have an advantage over the G5? Are there other Engineer mods like this? Sorry for my ignorance, but im not up to date with everything yet. Any and all advice for Engineers is appreciated.
I think one of the reasons is, that Palin isn't easy to unlock and to rank. The other reason is the huge drawbacks at grade 5 for just medium increase of performance. Not every ship is able to take these drawbacks of a grade 5 upgrade, but the ones from grade 3 can be taken.
Otherwise i see no reasons. My Python got a huge Buff after upgrading to grade 5 dirty drives.
Maybe there are some professionals calculating the advantages of optimal multiplier and optimal mass in such exact way, that they can tell you that it doesn't matter if you have 15% increased value or 30% increased value because the ship doesn't get better at a certain level. But who knows.......someone will tell if it is like this
Otherwise i see no reasons. My Python got a huge Buff after upgrading to grade 5 dirty drives.
Maybe there are some professionals calculating the advantages of optimal multiplier and optimal mass in such exact way, that they can tell you that it doesn't matter if you have 15% increased value or 30% increased value because the ship doesn't get better at a certain level. But who knows.......someone will tell if it is like this
The path from Qwent through PAlin wasnt as difficult as imagined it would be. I had the 5k exploring in the can which helped. Neither the CSD nor the UF caused me too many probs and i quite enjoyed the gameplay. G5 dirty is very nice on an annie and G5 clean on an aspx. Probably not strictly necessary but just because we can!
Not allowed to say that you are enjoying engineers by the way... there will be tantrums from the other end of the playground!
Not allowed to say that you are enjoying engineers by the way... there will be tantrums from the other end of the playground!
thermal load is the main draw back of G5 against G3, combined with the additional powerdraw it will produce a lot more of heat.
also the hit on optimal mass ... very much depending on ship (thrustersize compared to total mass), but you might end up with a very "good" roll, but you only gain 3-5% speed above a G3 because of that optimal mass hit.
and than - for me personally - i only do the travel to palin for ships i fly most often. for my carrier keelback or trading cutter i'm totally fine with a G3 thruster upgrade.
also the hit on optimal mass ... very much depending on ship (thrustersize compared to total mass), but you might end up with a very "good" roll, but you only gain 3-5% speed above a G3 because of that optimal mass hit.
and than - for me personally - i only do the travel to palin for ships i fly most often. for my carrier keelback or trading cutter i'm totally fine with a G3 thruster upgrade.
I put grade 3 dirty drives on almost all of my ships, with the exception of the stealth builds that I put grade 5 clean drive mods on (which basically end up giving similar performance to a grade 3 dirty drive tune with lower heat but tend to consume quite a bit more power). The main advantages of going with grade 3 are that they are much easier to get the mats for (other than then RNG-dependent cooling hoses) and you can make many more grade 3 rolls than you can with grade 5 mods. This means that in practice you are really comparing a high-end grade 3 roll to an "average" grade 5 roll which is not usually as large an upgrade as it might seem just from looking at the blueprint ranges. As other have mentioned the power/heat balance is another issue, I've found that grade 3 is easy to fit into most builds and it's not hard to get an 18-20% roll out of them which is all I've needed so far. If Thargoids show up with super-maneuverable ships I might finally upgrade to grade 5 dirty drives but at the moment any spare power I have will be going toward the A-grade sensors I'll need to keep my gimbal-mounted weapons useful when 2.2.03 hits so I don't really have the spare power to upgrade to grade 5 drives anyways.
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I have Grade 5's on all of my ships (15 engineered i think?). I'd be interested on seeing some data to help better understand what kind of rolls are needed to justify a Grade 5 drive over a Grade 3 drive in terms of optimal mass. The multiplier is transparent in what it means; the optimal mass is opaque. I feel it's bad game design when you can't simply eyeball changes and determine if it's better or worse.
At minimum there should be some way to see how a part will impact your ship before agreeing to a mod. One of many things FDev dropped the ball on imo. Given how long it can take to get these mats, you'd think they want to make sure we know exactly what we're going to get.
At minimum there should be some way to see how a part will impact your ship before agreeing to a mod. One of many things FDev dropped the ball on imo. Given how long it can take to get these mats, you'd think they want to make sure we know exactly what we're going to get.
here is a thread giving you all infos on optimal thrsuter mass:
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...plained-in-one-simple-table-(Rating-and-Mass)
for the sake of argument let us assume you are running a viper mkIII with 3A thrusters (optimal mass 120T).
your viper weighs 100T including fuel (that's already a lightweight build).
1. without engineering, your viper gets a speed and manouverability bonus of 3% (between 2-4,5 % according to the table linked above) for its 3A thrusters being at 83% optimal mass
2a. you do G3 dd tuning, with the following roll: optimal multiplier +20%, optimal mass -9% (e.g. both sides maxed).
2b. new optimal mass of your 3A G3 thrusters is 110T. you are now at 91% optimal thruster mass. you get ~2% from being below optimal thruster mass, and 20% from the new optimum multiplier = your viper is 22% faster.
3a. G5 dd tuning, roll: +27% optimum multiplier, -16% optimal mass (average increase on multiplier and heavy hit on optimal mass). new optimal mass 101 T.
3b. your viper sits at the optimal mass, so you loose any speed increase from that. you still gain 27% from the new optimum multiplier. in effect your ship is 5% faster compared to G3 tuning, and 24% faster than without tuning.
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this exampel differs widely depending on thruster size (thrusters optimal mass compared to ship mass). a ship like a vulture, which will sit below 50% optimal thruster mass before engineering, will gain more of the G5 multiplier (probably all), while a ship like a corvette (with that crippling class 7 thrsuters) while gain less - at least if it fits bulkheads etc.
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the maximum gain of speed/manouverability of a-class thrusters is +16% at 50% optimal thruster mass. with a heavy hit on optimal mass, this can be reduced to +12% with the same mass. the difference of 4% will be deducted from your G5 optimal multiplier gain. you will always gain speed manouverability, but you might gain less than expected.
But if you roll it enough times you can get strange results... like optimal mass increase... which is iirc more probable with G5 because of more positive secondary effects (or am i wrong?)...
Got +33% multiplier and +2.2% optimal mass for corvette after something like 20-25 rolls (thankfully materials are easy to get now).
Got +33% multiplier and +2.2% optimal mass for corvette after something like 20-25 rolls (thankfully materials are easy to get now).
easy? I'm getting mad after Cracked Industrial Firmwares... I was only able to do 3 rolls of G5 DD. And I have kinda 30-40 units for each one of the other needed components.
.Many here are gender assuming Dirty Drives... I think Clean Tuning G5 is best
I have played around with clean and dirty drive tuning on my iCourier. After all there still is no "final" info on how hard the reduced optimal mass would hit the ship. (At least with the enhanced drives, which i use. The info Goemon posted above is helpful, but enhanced drives somehow behave "a bit different" in some aspects, i was told. ) Also the iCourier is one of the most heat sensitive ships in the game. Due to these two factors, i considered it possible that clean drives grade five would be the better choice.
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After trying both clean and dirty drives, though, i found that dirty drives give me not only more speed but also more agility, and heat is not as big a problem as i thought it would be with these modifiers. I mean yes, i can actually pull my iCourier into overheat by just staying in a tight turn for a prolonged time, but even in an actual fight i don't use my thrusters as excessively as in that test and i don't have problems. The only thing where i actually have to be careful with dirty grade five is when landing on really high G planets. Staying in a high G environment where the thrusters constantly have to deliver a lot of power produces significant heat, but that is still manageable.
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So dirty grade five beats the clean counterpart even on the iCourier. And if it's the better choice on even that ship, then i am hard pressed to come up with a setup where clean drives are actually the better choice.
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Personally, if I have any spare modular terminals left over when I finally unlock Qwent (it has been months now), I will ram it up FD's...
Z...
Firmwares are easy, just use the thread about MEF (those you need for G5 overcharged weapons) and you will have A LOT of different ones, including Cracked Industrial. And now that you get 3 for finding 1... you can easily get 9 from a single base, which requires like ~5 minutes.
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well... I tried 4 bases which were supposed to give CIF and none of them gave one. :/
4 isn't enough. i think i did ~20 for 3*3 CIF.
I did about 12 bases and got nothing.
Very annoying. Will have to try again at some point.
Back to the main point, i always got for rank 5 in DD or CD depending on what the ship is for and how heat and power sensitive it is.
Ideally i want to get more CIF so i can make new DD rolls on my Gunship and Cobra.... i want to roll and roll and roll until i get the perfect mods for them
Very annoying. Will have to try again at some point.
Back to the main point, i always got for rank 5 in DD or CD depending on what the ship is for and how heat and power sensitive it is.
Ideally i want to get more CIF so i can make new DD rolls on my Gunship and Cobra.... i want to roll and roll and roll until i get the perfect mods for them