Understanding the maths behind shield recharging and rebuilding, also: Bi-Weaves

[Helmut Grokenberger]

Eventually you have to go top up your drink.

...or... do something... else.

 

[Surprize960]

A short practice report with large Bi-Weaves:

I stacked some 50 pirate missions over the last 5 days (to fill up materials and to get from Combat Elite to Combat Elite 1: progress increase was a giant 2 %!) with my Corvette. Shield is a 7C Reinforced Fast-Charge Bi-Weave and 3735 MJs with 3 ResAug and 4 HD Boosters. Distro is a weapons focused 8A, as the ship is a Beam-Build with a Corrosive MC in the nose.

Whenever the guns are not pointed at the target, I switch the Pips to 4-0-2, when firing to 2-0-4. I play with the X-Box-(Starfield Edition )controller, so pip-management is very handy.

I also did a lot of ramming, because, as you may know, the Alliance Cs in the signal sources and the pirate Lord‘s Corvettes tend to loiter around very close to you. So a short boost and…bam.

I would say, that the permanent recharge helped a lot and was clearly noticable. When there were only 1 or 2 Pirates left in the signal sources, they were hardly able do weaken the shield significantly. And as the signal sources were usually some 5 to 10kls away, it was usually possible to recharge the shields to 100%, sometimes with a reboot before. On top, I had a 7B SCB with the same amount of MJ as the shield as backup (I banked sometimes when pirate lords dropped in).

 

[V'larr]

Recharge rate becomes more complicated with large bi-weaves beyond just recharge range when the health pool to be restored is larger than a full cap load. Look at it in EDSY, take a large (in terms of MJ) bi-weave and see it change with PIPs. It's not as simple as taking the draw from the shields and substracting the recharge rate of the distro, and then subtracting that from the capacity, I've done that, and it doesn't work out with the resulting rebuild times. I've done my homework before posting the OP.

It's that edge scenario I am interested in, maths wise. I guess I will have a look at the github and see what EDSY does calculate.

And yeah, the amount of erronous or misinterpreted information out there is difficult to comb through.

I'm confident the reason you're seeing it change with pips in EDSY is because your distro is not supporting the regen rate of your shield under that pip configuration. The distro recharge rate is linear - like I mentioned already, each one is 1/4th of your 'total' recharge rate. That's the reason behind the rebuild times (which again are NOT the same thing as recharge rate, which is confusing me a little here).

I don't know what situation would call for worrying about "a full cap load"? You'd have to be deliberately letting your shields restore on 0 pips for chunks at a time for that to mean anything. It's not a mining laser "time to drain a rock of fragments" kind of situation

 

[Helmut Grokenberger]

I'm confident the reason you're seeing it change with pips in EDSY is because your distro is not supporting the regen rate of your shield under that pip configuration. The distro recharge rate is linear - like I mentioned already, each one is 1/4th of your 'total' recharge rate. That's the reason behind the rebuild times (which again are NOT the same thing as recharge rate, which is confusing me a little here).

Yes, and that is exactly the interaction between the distro and the recharge I am talking about.

I don't know what situation would call for worrying about "a full cap load"? You'd have to be deliberately letting your shields restore on 0 pips for chunks at a time for that to mean anything. It's not a mining laser "time to drain a rock of fragments" kind of situation

If the recharge rate of the shields is greater than the recharge rate of the sys cap, you drain it. If it is empty, the recharge rate of shields is drastically reduced and depends on the recharge of the cap and therefore PIPs. Set them to 0 and your shields will never recharge. But it is not as easy as "your shields recharge with the cap's recharge rate instead". That does not add up, the recharge time calculated with that doesn't match, even if you consider the 16s recharge delay.

 

[V'larr]

That's not my issue. Of course recharge time goes up when you enlarge the health pool. My primary issue with the internet opinions is that, even when you drain the cap and your recharge time actually increases for the same amount of shield capacity, bi-weaves with the same capacity as normal shields are still much faster to recharge and don't lose that advantage completely. Yet the internet says "that's wrong, you're stupid, large bi-weaves are bad, mkay". I already found out during this discussion that for my applications, Prismatics would have the advantage of being able to downsize the module and reduce the boosters for the same shield capacity, at the price of vastly increased recharged. And vastly increased recharge for me means either reduced staying power or increased delays between engagements in a HazRes, for example. A large Bi-Weave works very well in that application.

I'll try it out the Prismatics, but I am unsure I'll be totally happy with that. In fact, I've engineered my very first Prismatic shield generator last night and am now test flying it.


Bringing the shields back from offline is mostly what I am talking about, but for the aforementioned engagement interval in, for example a haz res, the 50-100 rate still matters, and can take the fun out of it if it takes like 8 minutes to recharge a 1200 MJ shield from 50 to 100, versus charging the same shield capacity in two and a half minutes.

I don't know where you found on the internet that "large bi-weaves are bad" (not that it surprises me that it exists somewhere), but they are grossly mistaken - probably because they failed to understand the significance of the distributor draw?

I try to be comprehensive in my responses just in case anyone else reading discovers something they hadn't already.

Time to build shields back from offline is not an important figure in the vast majority of situations, albeit that is the constraint of Prismatics. You can use reboot/rearm to instantly restore them to 50% (and then use SCBs, if you have them & it makes sense on the ship) if you are keen on not leaving your instance, or else you'd just be going to supercruise or visiting a station rather than wait. Sitting and waiting those 8 minutes ought to be the last thing you opt to do.

 

[V'larr]

With plasma slugs, now your fuel is ammo and you're limited by this. I have used full plasma slug PA setup on both PII and Krait Phantom, both tend to run out of fuel surprisingly fast, even the Phantom with just 4 guns and a whopping 32 tons of fuel

I always use a rule of thumb of 16t of fuel per plasma slug weapon, as it lines up nicely for me in practice with corrosive MC ammo duration, either HC large-or-smaller or OC/SR huge, running out just before I get low on fuel.

So I'd definitely take extra fuel for 4!

 

[Helmut Grokenberger]

I don't know where you found on the internet that "large bi-weaves are bad" (not that it surprises me that it exists somewhere), but they are grossly mistaken - probably because they failed to understand the significance of the distributor draw?

I found miltiple occurences, but I can't be bothered to look them up again. What triggered me a bit to have a look behind the maths was one YT video where the creator demonstrated that large Bi-Weaves are bad because... they drain the cap. That one rubbed me wrong especially. Duh, engineered Bi-Weaves have a broken regen rate almost double that of a charge enhanced distro, or course they will drain the capacitor. The stuff I found mostly on YT and reddit presented small bi-weaves as the only viable and smart choice. That triggered me, as you can see .

 

[V'larr]

Yes, and that is exactly the interaction between the distro and the recharge I am talking about.

If the recharge rate of the shields is greater than the recharge rate of the sys cap, you drain it. If it is empty, the recharge rate of shields is drastically reduced and depends on the recharge of the cap and therefore PIPs. Set them to 0 and your shields will never recharge. But it is not as easy as "your shields recharge with the cap's recharge rate instead". That does not add up, the recharge time calculated with that doesn't match, even if you consider the 16s recharge delay.

I mean, it's a straightforward interaction, unless what you're talking about is not recharge rate, but your recharge time - which I've already mentioned is dependent upon whether you are sustaining the distro draw the whole time.

It is not that "if it is empty, the recharge rate is drastically reduced" - there is no modifying property of having an empty SYS. If you are empty, you don't recharge at all. SYS capacity units are required to recharge a unit of shielding. This is why edsy displays an "infinity" symbol for your build/regen time with 0 pips in SYS. But yes, as you say, it depends on your PIPs, which is what determines the quarter-fractions of your recharge rate applied.

I think the reason you are seeing discrepancies is because edsy is taking account your shield regen from your SYS capacity, which will occur at a 'full' rate, before it reaches "empty" at which point you are indeed subject to what your recharge rate is with your current pips. There are no hidden ship variables or modifiers at play here, that I am aware of.

edit: And to be clear - if you've somehow configured your ship that your distributor can't sustain your shield's passive regen even with 4 pips, as opposed to only 2, you've made some mistakes elsewhere, quite possibly with your choice of distributor & engineering, as well as whether you are making use of that lo-draw shield special.

 

[Helmut Grokenberger]

I mean, it's a straightforward interaction, unless what you're talking about is not recharge rate, but your recharge time - which I've already mentioned is dependent upon whether you are sustaining the distro draw the whole time.

It is not that "if it is empty, the recharge rate is drastically reduced" - there is no modifying property of having an empty SYS. If you are empty, you don't recharge at all. SYS capacity units are required to recharge a unit of shielding. This is why edsy displays an "infinity" symbol for your build/regen time with 0 pips in SYS. But yes, as you say, it depends on your PIPs, which is what determines the quarter-fractions of your recharge rate applied.

I think the reason you are seeing discrepancies is because edsy is taking account your shield regen from your SYS capacity, which will occur at a 'full' rate, before it reaches "empty" at which point you are indeed subject to what your recharge rate is with your current pips. There are no hidden ship variables or modifiers at play here, that I am aware of.

I am not really sure we are talking about the same thing. If the cap is empty and you have any PIPs set, the recharge is kind of shared between the shields and the cap. That's the only way I can describe it. It doesn't help that there are wrong units in the game (distro capacity in MW, which should be MJ, but is that really just a typo?) and that there seems to be an additional obfuscation layer between the recharge rate of the shields (given in "units per second"), the distro draw again being in MW but the distro recharge then being MJ/s... it's a mess. I am sure it works out all fine, but it is terribly represented in game.

I literally timed it with a stop watch, just using the distro recharge instead of the shield regen and the shield distro draw doesn't add up. If the cap is drained, the shield recharge rate isn't simply the capacitor recharge rate after PIPs. Neither according to EDSY not my stopwatch.

 

[V'larr]

I found miltiple occurences, but I can't be bothered to look them up again. What triggered me a bit to have a look behind the maths was one YT video where the creator demonstrated that large Bi-Weaves are bad because... they drain the cap. That one rubbed me wrong especially. Duh, engineered Bi-Weaves have a broken regen rate almost double that of a charge enhanced distro, or course they will drain the capacitor. The stuff I found mostly on YT and reddit presented small bi-weaves as the only viable and smart choice. That triggered me, as you can see .

Yeaaaaah... that's just a case of "content creator" fiat, I'm afraid. It grinds my gears too! Far too many youtubers try to jump on the algorithm money-making trickle and push out "content" that either regurgitates easily visible information already shown in a given game, or make unfounded claims with no research to back it up besides 1-time anecdotal experiences. Makes the site so challenging to use. I digress. I hope those are old threads/videos!

 

[V'larr]

I am not really sure we are talking about the same thing. If the cap is empty and you have any PIPs set, the recharge is kind of shared between the shields and the cap. That's the only way I can describe it. It doesn't help that there are wrong units in the game (distro capacity in MW, which should be MJ, but is that really just a typo?) and that there seems to be an additional obfuscation layer between the recharge rate of the shields (given in "units per second"), the distro draw again being in MW but the distro recharge then being MJ/s... it's a mess. I am sure it works out all fine, but it is terribly represented in game.

I literally timed it with a stop watch, just using the distro recharge instead of the shield regen and the shield distro draw doesn't add up. If the cap is drained, the shield recharge rate isn't simply the capacitor recharge rate after PIPs. Neither according to EDSY not my stopwatch.

I think I get what you're after? But the math is a little complex for me. I think it's distro recharge rate (at one of those 1/4 fractions determined by pip setting) then factored against shield distro draw to get a ratio you then apply to the shield regen rate to get your true regen rate? Math isn't my strong suit. I just know that there's nothing being "shared" between shields and distributor (as it's rather shielding regen pulling from distributor capacity, at a unit per second rate determined by shield generator regen rate * distro draw, and the distro capacity being refilled by the distro regarge rate), and that every time I've questioned numbercrunching on edsy, it's edsy that is correct. I've come to have high faith in CMDR taleden. There is the EDCD discord where you could try perusing the #edsy channel, or you could find the forum thread for it here? Often the math for various things have been laid out in those places in answer to questions posted.

The unit discrepancy is definitely an issue, I've seen one or two CMDRs get unbelievably triggered by it on discord. #justFdevthings, it's easiest to just call them "units".

 

[Helmut Grokenberger]

I think I get what you're after? But the math is a little complex for me. I think it's distro recharge rate (at one of those 1/4 fractions determined by pip setting) then factored against shield distro draw to get a ratio you then apply to the shield regen rate to get your true regen rate? Math isn't my strong suit. I just know that there's nothing being "shared" between shields and distributor (as it's rather shielding regen pulling from distributor capacity, at a unit per second rate determined by shield generator regen rate * distro draw, and the distro capacity being refilled by the distro regarge rate), and that every time I've questioned numbercrunching on edsy, it's edsy that is correct. I've come to have high faith in CMDR taleden. There is the EDCD discord where you could try perusing the #edsy channel, or you could find the forum thread for it here? Often the math for various things have been laid out in those places in answer to questions posted.

The unit discrepancy is definitely an issue, I've seen one or two CMDRs get unbelievably triggered by it on discord. #justFdevthings, it's easiest to just call them "units".

Yes, that is exactly what I am looking for. Seems like whatever energy goes to the cap is gobbled up buy the shields, but not at the recharge rate of the cap. Maybe there is some kind of throttle or limit when the cap draw is being saturated. I find that fascinating and would like to understand the maths. And yes, the unit discrepancy triggers me. A lot .

 

[Morbad]

Nothing wrong with large bi-weaves, or with a large up-front capacity of bi-weave shielding. That said, the Reinforced mod is usually a poor choice for a bi-weave shield generator, because it makes each MJ of shielding (and SYS capacitor) less efficient. Won't say there are no uses for it, but if we're talking about scenarios where they aren't a handicap vs. other options Reinforced Hi-cap bi-weaves are ultra niche.

Generally, you want the largest class bi-weave shield generator you can fit, because that maxes out regen rate and capacity. Then, if you have capacitor contention issues, you would use the Lo-draw experimental.

Once resistances are well into diminishing returns, using Heavy Duty boosters is wise, provided they don't replace a more useful utility, but one will probably want to toggle them off after SCBs are depleted, as shielding is worn down, and leave them off if one intends to fight through a shield collapse.