Ground based ship shield resistances

GraXXoR · Tuesday at 10:11 PM

Hi folks, I'm having trouble finding any definitive information on this.

I have an old Viper MK4 which I use with some advanced dumbfires for ground based missions and I want to maximize its resistance to personal sidearms. I have had my ship nearly destroyed several times by kids shooting at it while I'm busy and come back to my ship with <50% hull after about a minute.

I am wondering what shields/resistances and hull/resistances are best for ground weapons. Does absolute trump resistances? Do ground weapons suffer from penalties are are they all absolute damage?

My current meta has been standard fare:

Reactive + lightweight G5 hull
3D+2D Hull reinforcements with G5 Heavy Duty
4C Biweave + thermal resist G5 and fast charge
0D grade booster + G5 Resistance

Coriolis build is >>here<<

It's never suffered in PVE while spacebound, but would have died within 2 minutes on the ground to just four Threat Level 2 ground restore mission scavs.

So is ground based weaponry absolute in terms of damage or does it obey resistance mitigations? If absolute, should I be better just going for A grade/prismatic with HD shield booster.... Military grade hull with HD etc...

Any advice welcome.

alexzk · Tuesday at 10:26 PM

Probably, they shoot in %% of the base shield.
My Vetty with war shields gets -1% from single plasma snipper while docked (i.e. boosted regen?).
However, my Dolphin has 492 shield total, and 105 of it is guardian shield booster. This ships holds much longer, never lost it yet in long fights.

GraXXoR · Tuesday at 10:46 PM

alexzk said:
Probably, they shoot in %% of the base shield.
My Vetty with war shields gets -1% from single plasma snipper while docked (i.e. boosted regen?).
However, my Dolphin has 492 shield total, and 105 of it is guardian shield booster. This ships holds much longer, never lost it yet in long fights.

I’m honestly sorry, but I’m not entirely sure what you mean… imma gonna need that in layman’s terms.

alexzk · Tuesday at 10:51 PM

GraXXoR said:
I’m honestly sorry, but I’m not entirely sure what you mean… imma gonna need that in layman’s terms.

Just idea. Probably it cuts of percents of the shield. I.e. no matter what shield is it will take 100 hits for example. But guardian boosters basically doubles or triples small shields which means it would hold 200 or 300 hits instead.
But I wouldn't put a bet on it. Just observation. I was wondered today too why my war-Vetty holds worse than Dolphin when landed.

GraXXoR · Wednesday at 4:48 AM

alexzk said:
Just idea. Probably it cuts of percents of the shield. I.e. no matter what shield is it will take 100 hits for example. But guardian boosters basically doubles or triples small shields which means it would hold 200 or 300 hits instead.
But I wouldn't put a bet on it. Just observation. I was wondered today too why my war-Vetty holds worse than Dolphin when landed.

Gotcha...

That's interesting... I'm going to try replace the HRPs with GSRs and do a bit of experimenting... I like to fly over settlements and blow up the scavs with dumbfire missiles... the ship usually has plenty of opportunities to get hit and usually ends up down to about 30%~50% shields by the time they're all dead...

For the first time yesterday, I got my commander to stand on the top of the ship and take out as many scavs as possible by hand. The ship absorbed a lot of hits but I got worried because I couldn't see what % of shields were remaining.

TBH I'm really not impressed at the rate which pokey little pistols that take 20 shots to take down the shield of an NPC can have any appreciable effect on a ship.

Rocket launchers and pPasma, maybe but pistols... nah...

Screemonster · Wednesday at 6:15 AM

GraXXoR said:
My current meta has been standard fare:

Reactive + lightweight G5 hull

3D+2D Hull reinforcements with G5 Heavy Duty

4C Biweave + thermal resist G5 and fast charge

0D grade booster + G5 Resistance

Okay, so. The viper mk4 was my first combat ship, and became my main ship with Odyssey.
The reason I traded away from it before odyssey came out is because it has very thin shields and with only two utilities there's not a lot you can do about that. You've basically got the shields about as good as they're going to get. The thing is, foot weapons are really good at bringing down shields because of their high raw DPS, so a shieldtank doesn't have much of an advantage against them. What they're not good at is stripping hull thanks to their low AP value of 10 so any ship with any hull hardness at all will resist them.

Which is great for you, since where the mk4 really shines is hulltanking, and part of that is because the armour mass is the same as that of the MK3 despite the rest of the platform weighing four times as much - the armour already weighs basically nothing, so don't bother lightweighting it. Shove some extra HRPs in the spare slots and really crank it up. Shove thermal resistance on your smallest HRP to balance out the downside from the reactive. Since you're rarely up against explosive on the ground you could go with Funny Hull if you wanted, but that's probably overkill. The best thing to do is just dismiss your ship if you're in a situation where there's baddies around and you're not in a position to defend it.

Oh, and for stacking up foot missions you can get away without the FSD booster and scoop. 30ly is more than good enough for any odyssey mission and you'll be landing at settlements to refuel anyway, the stock tank will easily take you on a 150ly round trip.

Here's the build I was flying basically as a dedicated landing craft from shortly after Odyssey dropped right up until the cobra 5 released:

Coriolis EDCD Edition

A ship builder, outfitting and comparison tool for Elite Dangerous

s.orbis.zone

I had advanced missile racks and overload packhounds on it for a while until I got good with the classic rail/PA combo, adjust hardpoints to taste.

Morbad · Wednesday at 7:11 AM

Haven't done any systematic testing since the alpha, but I'm almost positive small arms works exactly the same way as vs. ship based weapons and that damage is demarcated in the same units. Damage types are what you expect them to be...lasers are thermic, bullets are kinetic, rockets are explosive, plasma a mix with a large absolute component, etc.

As Screemonster notes, AP value is low, so hull will often resist damage significantly better than shields.

GraXXoR · Wednesday at 2:16 PM

Might shift from lightweight reactive hull to heavy duty and see if it makes a difference.

geoffrey.hdt · Wednesday at 4:08 PM

All I can think is:

0 pips to SYS, hit the ground, let you shield recharge to 100% (may need to add 1 pip to SYS, but then back to 0).
Land, disembark.
Test your own weapons, see how long it takes to take down the shield.

As a remark, if you run out of ammo, go reload in the blue halo of the boarding area.

Please someone do this, taking I to account the grade of the guns. I'm not brave enough to do it...

metatheurgist · Wednesday at 4:51 PM

Pretty sure people have tested this stuff before with videos. Can't find them for the life of me though.

Screemonster · Wednesday at 5:49 PM

GraXXoR said:
Might shift from lightweight reactive hull to heavy duty and see if it makes a difference.

On its own? It'll give you a decent boost to raw hull and kinetic, but not as much improvement to thermal because of the resistance boost that lightweight gets (which is pretty significant at countering the negative resistance of reactive) - switching your smallest HRP to thermal resistant instead of heavy duty will balance things up a bit, but your build link has empty slots in it that can be used to significantly boost your health pool.