Ship Builds & Load Outs Shield booster / SCB priority mechanics

[Chaplain Livius]

Hello CMDRs,

In primis sorry for my bad english.

Now to the topic.
In my eternal struggle to manage that tiny powerplant on the vulture I came up with a thought (i'm sure someone else already thinked about this).
How can I have 2 BFGuns A thruster, and decent shielding, also having a reserve of SCB? of course priority.

The method I actually used was the "decreasing priority"
So i kept all active, but when a SCB was out of ammo, let's say with priority 2, simply disabled it and the one with priority 3 automatically came up.

I was thinking about this today, since in combat you will never have 100%shields, maybe is more convenient to have all SCB disabled and enter combat with shield booster?
Let's say you enter combat with 450 mj shield instead of the 370 you would enter with the first way.
When you are on the second shield ring, you could simply activate the first SCB, let's say with priority 4 and it disables the shield booster, so now you have not 450 mj of maximum shield but 350...but you actually have SCB to use.
Now my doubt about this tactic is this:
if i have 450 mj maximum and i have 50% shield remaning, what would happen if i activate SCB disabling shield boosters and having a shield power of 350?
i would have 50% of 450MJ or 50% of 350MJ?

What do you think? is a good idea?


I don't know if I explained myself...

 

[TruffleSnout]

if i have 450 mj maximum and i have 50% shield remaning, what would happen if i activate SCB disabling shield boosters and having a shield power of 350?
i would have 50% of 450MJ or 50% of 350MJ?

I would think that the booster addition is taken out from underneath.

i.e. 450 @ 50% means you have 225 left (and took 225 damage). When you turn off shield boosters, your base is 350, but the 225 damage is still applied, so now you have (350-225) or 125, which is less than 50% strength of your 350.

Note: I have no actual documentation or evidence to support this hypothesis. It's just my gut assumptions of how SB's work.

 

[bitstorm]

You would have 50% of 350MJ, SCB restore a specific MJ amount rather than a percentage.

 

[-SOVEREIGN-]

[...]
if i have 450 mj maximum and i have 50% shield remaning, what would happen if i activate SCB disabling shield boosters and having a shield power of 350?
i would have 50% of 450MJ or 50% of 350MJ?
[...]

The shield strength is an absolute number. So if you have a 450MJ maxium and you get 50% damage (which is just a representation method to show us these blue bars), you in fact got 225MJ of damage as the weapons do not do percentage based damage and have 225MJ left. If you shut down the booster (after the damage is already done) and lower your shield to a maxium of 350MJ, you will still have 225MJ left.

The boosters are not connected to your actual shield strength in a percentage-based way, they only raise your maximum shield strength. You can see this if you turn off your shield boosters having full shields: assume we have maximum shield of 450MJ and turning off all boosters lowers our maximum to 350MJ. We would still have 100% shields because our actual strength would also be 350MJ. But turning the boosters on again will leave you with 350/450MJ, not 450/450MJ (as the initial idea of 50% of 350 would suggest, it's just the other way around)

So: 50% of 450 is correct.

 

[Chaplain Livius]

This would mean that, to maximize MJ amount, I should have full shields with booster when I enter combat and eventually power on SC disabling shield boosters.
So the tactic I have seen also on another video would be the one on "ascendant priority" where all SCB are disabled and have increasing higher priority.
Basically:
- FDS, FDS interdictor are 5
- Life support (A) and SB are 4
- The disabled SCB are 3 and have 3,2,1 priority

when weapons are deployed, only priority 5 systems are disabled.
when you need SCB and you activate the first and more power hungry one, also the priority 4 one are disabled.