Prismatics

[Neilski]

Of course, an explorer doesn't need a lot of shields, but just when you've been lulled into a false sense of security, a planet with high gravity appears in front of your nose. After you have hopefully survived the lithobraking, the shields can recharge on the surface.

Yeah I'm sure most explorers have that experience!
Happily I found out without actually losing my ship that a 3D shield gen with no boosters (171 MJ!) wasn't really appropriate for my Exploraconda. It now has a 6D (ELP, Hi-cap) and 3 0E boosters (HD/SC) for a grand total of 1155 MJ, or nearly 7 times as much. (I also added a HRP while I was at it, for a 50% boost to hull points.)

 

[Kzak]

I put prismatics on exploration ships. Together with G5 "enhanced low power" + "hi cap" or "stripped down" experimental, usually you'll get a better jump range / shield strength compromise than with other shield types. Of course, an explorer doesn't need a lot of shields, but just when you've been lulled into a false sense of security, a planet with high gravity appears in front of your nose. After you have hopefully survived the lithobraking, the shields can recharge on the surface.

Just to be sure, of course, if a crash is imminent, put four pips to shields/systems. That can really rescue the bacon out of the fire.

 

[Lhorndra]

Just to be sure, of course, if a crash is imminent, put four pips to shields. That can really rescue the bacon out of the fire.

If you are awake enough before the crash happens, yes!

 

[Pville_Piper]

If you are awake enough before the crash happens, yes!

Or sober enough!

 

[Stealthie]

equip the azure paint job because it goes well with the shield, boost away and reboot the ship (after coming to a stop) to recover 50% shield because you don't want to wait for it.
with a big enough shield even recharging at the station takes while.

See, this is something I've heard often but don't really see the point of.

You stick a huge Prismatic shield in your ship and then, instead of relying on SCBs to keep it fed, you just go and hide, reboot your ship and get half the capacity of your prismatic shield back, so you are, for example, running with a 6,000mj shield instead of a 12,000mj shield.
Which is plenty, right?

So, why not just fit a Bi-weave shield costs much, much less, gives you roughly half the capacity of a Prismatic shield, will recharge during lulls in combat and doesn't require the faff of having to reboot your ship?

 

[aardappelianen]

yes of course its bi weaves 99% of the time because choice is an illusion in this game, you just need have that one ship with the big shield to shlep around sometimes for reasons

 

[aRJay]

It is possibly something to do with why some amplifiers go up to 11.

 

[Three Stars]

See, this is something I've heard often but don't really see the point of.

You stick a huge Prismatic shield in your ship and then, instead of relying on SCBs to keep it fed, you just go and hide, reboot your ship and get half the capacity of your prismatic shield back, so you are, for example, running with a 6,000mj shield instead of a 12,000mj shield.
Which is plenty, right?

So, why not just fit a Bi-weave shield costs much, much less, gives you roughly half the capacity of a Prismatic shield, will recharge during lulls in combat and doesn't require the faff of having to reboot your ship?

I think part of the issue is that a lot of people don’t know how and when to use SCBs, or at least how to properly size them. An SCB that restores a couple of hundred MJ is not a helpful thing when your shields are a few thousand MJ.

The other problems are that not many ships have multiple high number optional slots, and it’s only really at class 6 and above that SCBs start pulling their weight.

An FDL has a class 5 shield slot, and the next best slot is class 4. Considering you can easily get prismatic FDL shields over 3000 MJ (reinforced), a specialized/boss cells class 4 SCB gives you…159 MJ per activation. By the time it’s finished spinning up, you’ve probably lost a lot more than 159 MJ from your shields.

So, anyone using SCBs to feed a prismatic either needs a large ship or a shield whose optional slots are big enough to matter. Otherwise, rebooting is definitely the way to go. Or, you just go biweave like you said, which it could be argued get more bang for buck out of SCBs anyway.

 

[JetsonRING]

After close to 10 years of playing I finally have access to prismatic shields. I normally run biweaves on most ships because I usually run fast, maneuvering ships, what's the typical strategy for using prismatics?

Something else I've never paid much attention to, I guess because I haven't done very much in the way of a dedicated combat ship or a sheild tank, is sheild sizing... But with some of my builds for mission running since I've pledged to a power limits my options if I just slap a sheild in the biggest slot available.

The way it was explained to me, bi-weaves are less powerful than Prismatic Imperium (PI) shields but charge quickly. They are for faster, more maneuverable ships that have the ability to boost out of a fight for a few seconds to allow their bi-weave shields to recharge quickly and get back into the fight, while PI shields take forever and a day to recharge, but are very strong and difficult for most ships to take down. They are for slower, less maneuverable ships that cannot run, ships that have to hang in there and take it while hopefully dealing out enough DPS to out-last their opponent(s).

 

[Tifu]

They are for slower, less maneuverable ships that cannot run, ships that have to hang in there and take it while hopefully dealing out enough DPS to out-last their opponent(s).

Or for slow, heavily laden merchant freighters that just need more shield time for your FSD to kick in. Biweaves won't help in this case because you won't get a second chance to get away (PvE scenario).

 

[Dillon Fallon]

See, this is something I've heard often but don't really see the point of.

You stick a huge Prismatic shield in your ship and then, instead of relying on SCBs to keep it fed, you just go and hide, reboot your ship and get half the capacity of your prismatic shield back, so you are, for example, running with a 6,000mj shield instead of a 12,000mj shield.
Which is plenty, right?

So, why not just fit a Bi-weave shield costs much, much less, gives you roughly half the capacity of a Prismatic shield, will recharge during lulls in combat and doesn't require the faff of having to reboot your ship?

Distro draw is another consideration here. Biweaves are very distributor hungry and can leave you without sys charge very quickly if you aren't careful. Prismatics are much kinder on your distributor, allowing you to focus more pips in engines and weapons - useful if you have a build full of things like short range plasma accelerators.

As I mentioned previously though. A biweave that takes over 2 minutes to recover may still be something you want to reboot too.

 

[Felix DiCestria]

They're apparently good for exploration ships where the high power to weight ratio is good for jump range.
Often claimed as good for trade ships, though as a smuggler I prefer a biweave and boosters to give me variable power shields with greater control of my heat signature.

 

[gorgofdoom]

something that is wildy overlooked is that SCB's recharge value is applied to the total shield capacity. This is after modifiers, from shield emitters. this means if you have a bigger shield value your SCB will recharge less % of the total shield value while still producing tons of heat, demanding heatsink usage, and ultimately weaker resistances when you have to trade utility slots for cooling.

Prismatics + SCB is not a good strategy for combat imo. It's far superior defensive strategy is to use guardian shield re-enforcements and reboot , as this doesn't demand ammo and increases the recovery during a reboot.

Otoh we have biweaves: a 7C with EP/fast charge regenerates 5.06 shield per second x1.7 (so about 8.6) with maximum emitter resistance. If they go down, that regeneration doubles to 17/s (or 14/s versus thermal resists). Combine this with a 6A SCB and you can recover ~80% of a 1.2k shield in 14 seconds while using thermal vent beams to manage the heat (instead of heatsinks); this SCB is really only to counter ridiculous player builds that use a ton of heatsinks to boost weapon damage temporarily. A side effect of using thermal vent for SCB heat is that the rest of the time you'll be fighting at 0% heat; a massive advantage on it's own.

anyway, yeah, prismatics are kinda boring for combat pilots. But i do like the green. Would be really cool if they made bi-weaves purple.