Space Engineers - if you have enough creativity and patience everything is possible. Its amazing what the game can do without even really intending that. Would be lovely to see an ERA mod that is sort of a middle ground between the good old shields vs no shields discussion.
@@shanekhiu9884 not really the idea is essentially era minus the e (ie reactive armor) i cant think of anything more analogous irl Ill try it in the morning
I mean, I can’t imagine an impact mine would be too difficult to make in this game… especially since basically all weapons are projectile weapons. That is effectively what era is in this game, a mine set to detect a weapon projectile hitting a high speeds, right?
Spaced armor also works, I should know... I have been testing this for about 3 years in the game, it worked way before the warfare update... Just a shame that people first now discovers this... I mean, it's cool that others have found out but, shame that it has taken so long with me talking about it publicly on Keen's discord
I could see this being useful for spaced armour applications near sensitive/critical areas. Or if the ship is large enough, they could be used in internal chambers, similar to internal thruster rooms. I'm imagining a patchwork of ERA surrounding the reactor, for example.
I think it'd be possible to use it just on the front of your ship to cancel out alpha strike damage. You could have a large or small grid ship with layers of the bombs spaced out from eachother. This could allow you to close the gap with ships that have lots of range and alpha strike damage.
When a block is destroyed, it will drop metal panels, and I believe that it can trigger the sensor. Problem now is how fast does the panel spawn in and hence how far should the sensor be in front of the ERA for it to arm the warheads and to work.
So given variable Sim speed. I'd think a solution might be using the sensors to monitor decoy/armor blocks and activate the warheads once the decoys/armor are destroyed. Or get clever with your ai guns and have the ones near critical systems activate the armor on lock-on.
Made a "damage detector" the way you mentioned. A sensor monitors a subgrid and when the subgrid is destroyed, countermeasures like a rotating decoy was triggered. He could make the outer shell a subgrid und the sensors behind set off the ERA.
problem with that is that when they start shooting with smaller guns and destroy the warheads, you lose a big chunk of armor, it is kinda a double edged sword, on one hand it prevents large damage daelers from fully penetreting, yet it is a disadvantage against smaller calibres since for those more armor works better and blowing up part of your ship is probably thier goal anyways, by them aiming for h2 tanks or munition storage and then youre only helping them by disabeling chuncks of your armor.
@@patdbus you could double layer it so that the outer layer stops the internal from being damaged against small caliber, of course it's only to to a certain exent
Definitely good for protecting the CIC, same for Medbay. I can fit a few of these pads to my CIC itself to protect from railgun shots and its cheaper/lighter than making sure to have 3 layers of heavy armor on all sides of it too
This could possibly come into play in very tactical single railgun turret tank battles. I would actually really like to see that, and the reactive armour could save you from a shot that would tear through your critical systems
it wont. Because then the reactive plate is just a bomb attached to you. Remember unlike irl reactive armor, tyou cant direct the explosion outwards. Also with the space it takes in SE and the fact that a plate would also detonate any adjacent plate.... you can realistcally only have one plate per facing, so only one shot absorbed and you have to hold the plates far from your hull, making the design awkward. This is a proof of concept, but it doesnt work in any practical way with the currently available explosives who just annihilate everything around them way harder than if hit my any shot available thugh in game weapons and chain react with eachother. it would only likely matter as a possible answer to things like reaper missiles and other player-built weapons, by simply wrecking them harder on impact than if they just smashed on armor as intended.
@@thorveim1174 you actually can direct the explosion outwards as shown in this video th-cam.com/video/g0LX1R9DgXU/w-d-xo.html and I have had moderate success implementing a shaped charge missile as well.
I want to kinda of make a VR mech in this game(whenever there is a mod out) where you can grab on with landing gear on the hands and blast through and drive ships into walls of asteroids. I think ERA would be a good use for it if it even is possible
I wonder if you can take it down to 1 warhead, and the area damage by the weapons might set off the warhead, which would greatly decrease the cost of the armor
Oh wow, reactive armor is getting tested again in space engineers? I know they weren't great against large mass player weapons in earlier versions, but it's cool to see it experimented with.
1:28 I felt like I was watching the Slow Mo Guys for a minute there. LOL Would be cool af to see a railgun penetrate armor in real life at hundreds of thousands/millions of frames a second.
My idea for activation would be to encase warhead in pressurized section with size of blast radius of said warhead, than have a air vent detect when the section is breached (depressurized) to activate warhead. Physics calculation however would have to be insane for this to work !!!
just create a grid of these spaced out enough that the explosions never trigger each other sorta like futuristic chainmail. yes it's possible that a stray shot might make it through the thin gap but that is less likely if you're moving. you could set up a grid of welders underneath to automatically rebuild the small ships that make up the armor as well. alternately you could set up a bunch of them on a spinning ring so that when 1 gets destroyed another will spin up to block the next shot sorta like a Starfox boss battle, this would allow you to have significantly fewer welders since the ring will bring the damaged parts to it instead of there needing to be a welder ready for each individual armor piece, it would also deter ramming attacks since any ship that tries to hit you would be charging into a giant space blender, especially if you alternate the spin of each ring.
ERA is cool, but I don't really think it's viable-- for one, you need to find a way to separate the warheads so they don't do a chain reaction. It's also resource intensive, but most importantly ERA is designed, in principle, to go against one slow firing main gun-- not the kind of battery you find is space engineers. As we saw with the assault cannon, a volly of fire will set off the era-- and at that point, it's really not worth much.
I could see this useful for protecting a shielded storage area or entry for a ground base. Anything in a ship would need to be a much larger design and even then its only protection from one hit.
Have you seen the ways the target dummies are effected by the projector blocks? They seem to have some interesting properties you might want to consider testing...
One application for ERA is to launch these with landing pads and attach them to enemy ships in front of their weapons. If they detonate it, they lose their weapon as well.
I wish they properly modeled physics in this game, composite armour would work extremely well against weapons like railguns. We've seen this proven by composite screens on satellites meant to protect from space debris. When the debris moving at 25 thousand kph hits the composite screen, the force penetrates the primary layer of armour but also turns the projectile into harmless dust which is stopped by the secondary layer.
There must be code in the game that can detect projectiles, turrets can target missiles after all. However i think you would need to make a mod to be able to make sensors detect artillery rounds and railgun sabots, because currently it cant be done, probably even with scripts. That being said, you could have a custom turret on each face of the ship, set to only activate the ERA warheads on the side of the ship facing the enemy
Warhead surrounded with enough of armor to not set up chain reaction explosion. These Warhead + armor setup in grid pattern with multiple layers to cover up holes between warheads. Something like pool full of medium sized balls.
I think this could be deployed as a quickly printed waffle shield along whichever axis needs to be protected from the rail gun. Something free-floating that allows a ship to drift along a single vector to an asteroid or some other place of safety. The arc that the rail-gun would need to travel to get around the shield is time that the defending ship could use to either print up another shield or maneuver to make the rail gun ship have a more difficult firing solution.
set them to the smallest possible radius, and have it in a square grid formation with just enough distance of non warheads for different plates to not trigger each other. have these plates be wider and taller than the separating lines. then add a second layer of plates of the same size and shape, offset so that the middle of each plate on the outer layer is centered where the middle of 4 plates would be, and where their separating borders intersect
Now I want an oficial Space Engineers defense block with this feature lol... I really love this game and the community!!! I just wish 50 people did not raided my base and took everything even the simplest blocks from my base :P
Perhaps you could have a array of RA panels set up to controls. And somehow activate those set of panels when facing the enemy ship. Like if your ship could in a sense, active and deactive panels depending solely on where the enemy ship is compared to your ship. Than you can sort of get away with it not being able to detect the round. Since those panels are already actived towards the enemy warship.
Perhaps a mechanism that detects the lack of a block may activate ERA, like let's say railgun destroys a block a sensor is detecting, or the sensor itself... Basically a tripwire armor bomb
You could stagger the pannels so they don’t activate each other in a chain reaction when hit. There’s still a small chance you could shoot inbetween the pannels. But you’re most likely going to hit one. Does hitting the armor block next to a warhead trigger the warhead? If so you might be able to have ”gaps” of regular armor which only act to trigger the closest reactive part. If the gap is far enough to not cause a chain reaction but close enough to always trigger when hit by a railgun it might work :)
In fact the right use might be to create a "spreader of reactive armors", like some gravity canon. But at the end, what is more effective: use reactive armor as a weapon or a defence ? Maybe both
I think the best application of this is going to be like in IRL tanks, just small independent patches that cover a large flat area. It's going to come at the cost of not being able to place Weapons or major decorations in there. Also seein ERA work makes me wonder if shaped charges might be possible
I wonder if you could use spherical gravity generators to keep an artificial mass moving in formation with the ship, using a large field to attract it, and 3 or more smaller repelling fields to nudge it around. I figure with a bit of scripting or timers you could make an undulating field that could move your reactive armour plate around a ship.
Cool that it works it has one big flaw tho you cannot place any turrets nearby... You could make it like spaced armor but them the turrets view is blocked... with this kind of armor i think its only viable to use bow weapons/ramming
looked a little like explosive reactive spaced armor at first, but that was just to make the penetration after the blast more obvious. I like it. I don't play Space engineers, but I wonder if spaced armour would be useful at all.
I feel like this could be useful but its a huge tradeoff because with railguns and artillery its awesome but if you were doing it with a gattling gun, you would do more damage than without it, I also think if you dont space it out enough it could start a whole chain reaction and it will be one time use for your whole ship
i do think that the sensor cannot detect the bullet fired because the engine is not fast enough to catch it its not that it doesent see it its that the sensor cannot read objects moving that fast ( and possibly that small passes undetected because nothing is smaller in the game than bullets ) only answer would be to set the sensor so it detects block damage in some way but i do not know if its possible
Alternatively, use it as spaced armor /inside/ your ship, specifically protecting hydrogen tanks/reactors/etc., with welders and projectors reapplying it. That way, railguns can't core your ship.
I can't justify the costs of installing warhead reactive armor at strategic location of my ship. Not at 100 PCU per warhead. Decoys are much better and effective at increasing your ships survival. Couple that with double redundant conveyors to dispersed systems in your ship and you have a much more survivable ship. When you play on a server that places severe restriction on your PCU allotment, it forces you to be very pragmatic on what survivability measure are part of a good ship design. The best ship designs tend to be under 10,000 PCU
... what about small grid cargo containers with ammo inside? Or small gas tanks? Because those are cheap enough you could drop a bunch in your wake like chaff. Might take the edge off a railgun volley or two in those precious few seconds while you reload or use your jump drive.
could a small hydrogen tank (filled ofc) be a viable budget-conscious alternative to a warhead? just a thought. The thought of my ship being surrounded in warheads makes me nervous.
hypothesis, experiment, conclusion. nah i really don't think this qualifies as useless. a little light on repeat confirmation maybe but in simulation the results are unlikely to change much. se isnt exactly including quantum foam induced random variances in observed energy levels. its cool though, gave me a new idea for a homeworld 2 destroyer style with twin layer reactive outer hull armour to blunt broadsides.
Why would you not want the warheads permanently in the armed state? As long as it's attached it should have been put in a position where it exploding won't backfire. Yes, you can still loose the warheads to accidents or enemy Gatling fire, but that's what they are there for. The only real danger is when they get knocked loose and explode near other parts of your craft. But that can be mitigated by a sensor that detects when it approaches friendly blocks, which self-destructs the warheads before you come into that 5m radius. You'll probably still want a single disarm button so that your ERA doesn't sacrifice itself any time you attempt a docking maneuver or come in with a welder ship to repair damage. For triggering I would imagine that you could use some easily destructible blocks to transfer the damage from anywhere in that 5m radius to the warheads. There's bound to be some unwelded block that's suitable for that purpose.
Its all good and fun until one shot chain reacts all your ERA armor at once. You would have to have spot without era otherwise all of it would go off at once
OKay, covering a ship with this won't work good, *BUT* making a gundam with a shield made out of reactive armor would work great! Bonus points if you can make it articulate in a quick and easy to use way. What brave engineer amongst you will take on this quest to build this?
do computer blocks have a "block 'xyz' destroyed" event ? if yes you could make an outer layer which, if it is damaged / loses a block, will instantly trigger the corresponding ERA panel. i've only done a bit of coding in this game so i dont know the limitations of the API, but it could be interesting. if you dont have events and instead would have to check for the existence for every block this might fall flat though...
This isn’t about this video. But One of your factions in your server tours (like a year ago) had some unicorn ships. Does anyone have a schematic for those? I want to build some
Seeing your assault cannon on the normal block test, could small grid (non reactive) armor be more effective than large armor within the same area a large block would take up? Because small blocks could be placed on top of a large grid as additional plating without causing too many size issues.
Hi, is there a Discord server to discuss ship and base making? I would like very much to talk to other fellow Space Engineers, I'm too basic, I cannot create any creative stuff, nor functional designs...
There is no projectile.. Just a visualisation and a damage calculation.. The inclusion of universal weapons and damage was a mistake. The combination of PCU Limits means build a weapon brick, or accept outlining 😮
im gonna use this video's comment section to vent. a week of work in survival to build a large grid rover is now a flaming pile of junk at the base of a mountain i want craggies gone. deleted erased i want that rover killing terrain generation out. i had done so much only to end up back at nothing.
Space Engineers - if you have enough creativity and patience everything is possible. Its amazing what the game can do without even really intending that. Would be lovely to see an ERA mod that is sort of a middle ground between the good old shields vs no shields discussion.
Directional shields
I have an idea what if you put a storage crate there that would release a bunch of small stone stacks that would be hit instead of your armor?
That's a great idea for an experiment. Would an artillery or rail gun shot even impact stone?
he already made a video on thing a long time ago
@@RustyIv Yeah but the bullet physics were redone
Ah like APS? 😂
@@shanekhiu9884 not really the idea is essentially era minus the e (ie reactive armor) i cant think of anything more analogous irl
Ill try it in the morning
Kinda crazy that ERA is possible in this game...
so worth the extra effort to have a proper physics engine
Be cool if there where actually 1era plates
I mean, I can’t imagine an impact mine would be too difficult to make in this game… especially since basically all weapons are projectile weapons.
That is effectively what era is in this game, a mine set to detect a weapon projectile hitting a high speeds, right?
I wonder how easy and effective NERA is….
Spaced armor also works, I should know... I have been testing this for about 3 years in the game, it worked way before the warfare update... Just a shame that people first now discovers this... I mean, it's cool that others have found out but, shame that it has taken so long with me talking about it publicly on Keen's discord
I could see this being useful for spaced armour applications near sensitive/critical areas.
Or if the ship is large enough, they could be used in internal chambers, similar to internal thruster rooms. I'm imagining a patchwork of ERA surrounding the reactor, for example.
I think it'd be possible to use it just on the front of your ship to cancel out alpha strike damage. You could have a large or small grid ship with layers of the bombs spaced out from eachother. This could allow you to close the gap with ships that have lots of range and alpha strike damage.
When a block is destroyed, it will drop metal panels, and I believe that it can trigger the sensor.
Problem now is how fast does the panel spawn in and hence how far should the sensor be in front of the ERA for it to arm the warheads and to work.
Nothing like lining your space ships with volatile explosives to protect yourself
So given variable Sim speed. I'd think a solution might be using the sensors to monitor decoy/armor blocks and activate the warheads once the decoys/armor are destroyed. Or get clever with your ai guns and have the ones near critical systems activate the armor on lock-on.
Made a "damage detector" the way you mentioned. A sensor monitors a subgrid and when the subgrid is destroyed, countermeasures like a rotating decoy was triggered.
He could make the outer shell a subgrid und the sensors behind set off the ERA.
problem with that is that when they start shooting with smaller guns and destroy the warheads, you lose a big chunk of armor, it is kinda a double edged sword, on one hand it prevents large damage daelers from fully penetreting, yet it is a disadvantage against smaller calibres since for those more armor works better and blowing up part of your ship is probably thier goal anyways, by them aiming for h2 tanks or munition storage and then youre only helping them by disabeling chuncks of your armor.
@@patdbus you could double layer it so that the outer layer stops the internal from being damaged against small caliber, of course it's only to to a certain exent
Definitely good for protecting the CIC, same for Medbay.
I can fit a few of these pads to my CIC itself to protect from railgun shots and its cheaper/lighter than making sure to have 3 layers of heavy armor on all sides of it too
This is so impractical... I love it!
Even with thousands of hours logged in SE I'm still continually surprised by what is possible. Excellent LSG!
This could possibly come into play in very tactical single railgun turret tank battles. I would actually really like to see that, and the reactive armour could save you from a shot that would tear through your critical systems
it wont. Because then the reactive plate is just a bomb attached to you. Remember unlike irl reactive armor, tyou cant direct the explosion outwards. Also with the space it takes in SE and the fact that a plate would also detonate any adjacent plate.... you can realistcally only have one plate per facing, so only one shot absorbed and you have to hold the plates far from your hull, making the design awkward.
This is a proof of concept, but it doesnt work in any practical way with the currently available explosives who just annihilate everything around them way harder than if hit my any shot available thugh in game weapons and chain react with eachother. it would only likely matter as a possible answer to things like reaper missiles and other player-built weapons, by simply wrecking them harder on impact than if they just smashed on armor as intended.
@@thorveim1174 you actually can direct the explosion outwards as shown in this video
th-cam.com/video/g0LX1R9DgXU/w-d-xo.html
and I have had moderate success implementing a shaped charge missile as well.
I want to kinda of make a VR mech in this game(whenever there is a mod out) where you can grab on with landing gear on the hands and blast through and drive ships into walls of asteroids. I think ERA would be a good use for it if it even is possible
Crazy;
I have been contemplating how I would create reactive armor in-game and have come up empty. The timing of this video was incredible.
I wonder if you can take it down to 1 warhead, and the area damage by the weapons might set off the warhead, which would greatly decrease the cost of the armor
Oh wow, reactive armor is getting tested again in space engineers? I know they weren't great against large mass player weapons in earlier versions, but it's cool to see it experimented with.
One thing that worked real well in older times was hv armor + tyres + heavy armor. Against todays guns who knows lol.
Maybe put decoy blocks near the explosives than activate the decoy and the explosives in an attempt to draw the fire to specific locations
1:28 I felt like I was watching the Slow Mo Guys for a minute there. LOL Would be cool af to see a railgun penetrate armor in real life at hundreds of thousands/millions of frames a second.
lucky you cause theres videos of railguns hitting armor in slow motion
My idea for activation would be to encase warhead in pressurized section with size of blast radius of said warhead, than have a air vent detect when the section is breached (depressurized) to activate warhead. Physics calculation however would have to be insane for this to work !!!
Even with a script the railgun round would go too fast for the air vent to even realize the area is depressurized
Experimenting is one of my favorite activities in this game!
just create a grid of these spaced out enough that the explosions never trigger each other sorta like futuristic chainmail. yes it's possible that a stray shot might make it through the thin gap but that is less likely if you're moving. you could set up a grid of welders underneath to automatically rebuild the small ships that make up the armor as well. alternately you could set up a bunch of them on a spinning ring so that when 1 gets destroyed another will spin up to block the next shot sorta like a Starfox boss battle, this would allow you to have significantly fewer welders since the ring will bring the damaged parts to it instead of there needing to be a welder ready for each individual armor piece, it would also deter ramming attacks since any ship that tries to hit you would be charging into a giant space blender, especially if you alternate the spin of each ring.
So ... build armor out of small cargo containers full of Explosive components?
ERA is cool, but I don't really think it's viable-- for one, you need to find a way to separate the warheads so they don't do a chain reaction. It's also resource intensive, but most importantly ERA is designed, in principle, to go against one slow firing main gun-- not the kind of battery you find is space engineers. As we saw with the assault cannon, a volly of fire will set off the era-- and at that point, it's really not worth much.
I could see this useful for protecting a shielded storage area or entry for a ground base. Anything in a ship would need to be a much larger design and even then its only protection from one hit.
Have you seen the ways the target dummies are effected by the projector blocks? They seem to have some interesting properties you might want to consider testing...
This is a Bug that has been reported and will be getting fixed, its already in the works for an up coming patch note.
"Can you stop a bullet?"
"Sure! ONCE!"
Could these armor spikes possibly be shingled at different lengths to keep them out of each other's blast radius perhaps? Kind of like scale armor?
One application for ERA is to launch these with landing pads and attach them to enemy ships in front of their weapons. If they detonate it, they lose their weapon as well.
Wow I never would have guessed that worked! Very cool.
I wish they properly modeled physics in this game, composite armour would work extremely well against weapons like railguns. We've seen this proven by composite screens on satellites meant to protect from space debris. When the debris moving at 25 thousand kph hits the composite screen, the force penetrates the primary layer of armour but also turns the projectile into harmless dust which is stopped by the secondary layer.
There must be code in the game that can detect projectiles, turrets can target missiles after all. However i think you would need to make a mod to be able to make sensors detect artillery rounds and railgun sabots, because currently it cant be done, probably even with scripts. That being said, you could have a custom turret on each face of the ship, set to only activate the ERA warheads on the side of the ship facing the enemy
Bullets may be coded differently from missiles. It may be impossible
Neat, time to upgrade our Composite Sloped Armor builds into Composite Sloped Reactive Armor !!!
Warhead surrounded with enough of armor to not set up chain reaction explosion. These Warhead + armor setup in grid pattern with multiple layers to cover up holes between warheads. Something like pool full of medium sized balls.
I think this could be deployed as a quickly printed waffle shield along whichever axis needs to be protected from the rail gun. Something free-floating that allows a ship to drift along a single vector to an asteroid or some other place of safety. The arc that the rail-gun would need to travel to get around the shield is time that the defending ship could use to either print up another shield or maneuver to make the rail gun ship have a more difficult firing solution.
set them to the smallest possible radius, and have it in a square grid formation with just enough distance of non warheads for different plates to not trigger each other. have these plates be wider and taller than the separating lines. then add a second layer of plates of the same size and shape, offset so that the middle of each plate on the outer layer is centered where the middle of 4 plates would be, and where their separating borders intersect
Now I want an oficial Space Engineers defense block with this feature lol... I really love this game and the community!!! I just wish 50 people did not raided my base and took everything even the simplest blocks from my base :P
The fact that the corner armour blocks on the thumbnail aren't filled in hurts...
But cool concept anyway.
you could use an event controller to check if blocks get damaged in front of the era and use that to arm the warheads
Perhaps you could have a array of RA panels set up to controls. And somehow activate those set of panels when facing the enemy ship. Like if your ship could in a sense, active and deactive panels depending solely on where the enemy ship is compared to your ship.
Than you can sort of get away with it not being able to detect the round. Since those panels are already actived towards the enemy warship.
Probably easiest to make a RPG net like they had on old tanks. Just put another set of armour panels on stilts away from the main hull
Perhaps a mechanism that detects the lack of a block may activate ERA, like let's say railgun destroys a block a sensor is detecting, or the sensor itself... Basically a tripwire armor bomb
Decoy and warhead would work against an incoming drone/ ship that has a railgun set up on a custom turret.
You could stagger the pannels so they don’t activate each other in a chain reaction when hit. There’s still a small chance you could shoot inbetween the pannels. But you’re most likely going to hit one.
Does hitting the armor block next to a warhead trigger the warhead? If so you might be able to have ”gaps” of regular armor which only act to trigger the closest reactive part. If the gap is far enough to not cause a chain reaction but close enough to always trigger when hit by a railgun it might work :)
In fact the right use might be to create a "spreader of reactive armors", like some gravity canon. But at the end, what is more effective: use reactive armor as a weapon or a defence ?
Maybe both
You could use this as the front of a small/long ramming vessel to get close then rip a hole into a ship while eating railgun rounds
I think using reactive armor over an engine skirt is the way to go if you can't get a form of detection to work.
I think the best application of this is going to be like in IRL tanks, just small independent patches that cover a large flat area.
It's going to come at the cost of not being able to place Weapons or major decorations in there.
Also seein ERA work makes me wonder if shaped charges might be possible
I wonder if you could use spherical gravity generators to keep an artificial mass moving in formation with the ship, using a large field to attract it, and 3 or more smaller repelling fields to nudge it around.
I figure with a bit of scripting or timers you could make an undulating field that could move your reactive armour plate around a ship.
I literally suggested this in a VC the other day as a joke
Cool that it works it has one big flaw tho you cannot place any turrets nearby... You could make it like spaced armor but them the turrets view is blocked... with this kind of armor i think its only viable to use bow weapons/ramming
looked a little like explosive reactive spaced armor at first, but that was just to make the penetration after the blast more obvious. I like it. I don't play Space engineers, but I wonder if spaced armour would be useful at all.
Spaced armor is meta in space engineers ur totally right.
I wonder if this would still work with small, small grid H2 tanks since they are square
to use them, you just need to make sure the other ERA packs aren't in each other's radius.
I feel like this could be useful but its a huge tradeoff because with railguns and artillery its awesome but if you were doing it with a gattling gun, you would do more damage than without it, I also think if you dont space it out enough it could start a whole chain reaction and it will be one time use for your whole ship
Citadel protection around thruster packs, jump drives and anything that can go boom when shot ie hydro tanks
It's weird how people first now have found this out... I have known this for about 3 years now
"6 warheads or so"
lsg are you ok there?
Use small areas over critical areas like hydrogen tanks. Having them attached by connectors so you can say when to arm them or not.
I wonder if theres a way to reset the armour automatically or use mutli layers of explosive armour so you can withstand such shots more often
rotor with small head. maybe make a group of warheads for each side of your ship, so you can arm or disarm which ever side you want.🤷♂️
maybe its posible to detect destroyed blocks in the area activating the warheads, but that might be to long of a delay.
Staggered armour like a checkerboard pattern or some other better pattern
reactive armor in space engineers sounds a bit like a death wish
i do think that the sensor cannot detect the bullet fired because the engine is not fast enough to catch it its not that it doesent see it its that the sensor cannot read objects moving that fast ( and possibly that small passes undetected because nothing is smaller in the game than bullets ) only answer would be to set the sensor so it detects block damage in some way but i do not know if its possible
Use it as spaced armor with welders and projectors behind it for armor-reapplication
Alternatively, use it as spaced armor /inside/ your ship, specifically protecting hydrogen tanks/reactors/etc., with welders and projectors reapplying it. That way, railguns can't core your ship.
Of course ERA is possible, what next, composite armor?
Really Really cool
Railgun projectiles are called slugs :)
i think the new update might have something to make this more practical 🤔
I can't justify the costs of installing warhead reactive armor at strategic location of my ship. Not at 100 PCU per warhead. Decoys are much better and effective at increasing your ships survival. Couple that with double redundant conveyors to dispersed systems in your ship and you have a much more survivable ship. When you play on a server that places severe restriction on your PCU allotment, it forces you to be very pragmatic on what survivability measure are part of a good ship design. The best ship designs tend to be under 10,000 PCU
... what about small grid cargo containers with ammo inside?
Or small gas tanks?
Because those are cheap enough you could drop a bunch in your wake like chaff. Might take the edge off a railgun volley or two in those precious few seconds while you reload or use your jump drive.
Energy cancellation by upplying same or more energy in opposite direction
Hmm I think you could add it in large sections or built onto of rotors maybe
a dropeble shild something
could a small hydrogen tank (filled ofc) be a viable budget-conscious alternative to a warhead? just a thought. The thought of my ship being surrounded in warheads makes me nervous.
hypothesis, experiment, conclusion.
nah i really don't think this qualifies as useless.
a little light on repeat confirmation maybe but in simulation the results are unlikely to change much. se isnt exactly including quantum foam induced random variances in observed energy levels.
its cool though, gave me a new idea for a homeworld 2 destroyer style with twin layer reactive outer hull armour to blunt broadsides.
Why would you not want the warheads permanently in the armed state?
As long as it's attached it should have been put in a position where it exploding won't backfire. Yes, you can still loose the warheads to accidents or enemy Gatling fire, but that's what they are there for. The only real danger is when they get knocked loose and explode near other parts of your craft. But that can be mitigated by a sensor that detects when it approaches friendly blocks, which self-destructs the warheads before you come into that 5m radius.
You'll probably still want a single disarm button so that your ERA doesn't sacrifice itself any time you attempt a docking maneuver or come in with a welder ship to repair damage.
For triggering I would imagine that you could use some easily destructible blocks to transfer the damage from anywhere in that 5m radius to the warheads. There's bound to be some unwelded block that's suitable for that purpose.
Its all good and fun until one shot chain reacts all your ERA armor at once. You would have to have spot without era otherwise all of it would go off at once
Still won't stop Klang cannon :D
Can the floating scrap trigger the era in time to destroy the shot?
Now when can we reach the point where firing said railgun doesn't lag the server
OKay, covering a ship with this won't work good, *BUT* making a gundam with a shield made out of reactive armor would work great!
Bonus points if you can make it articulate in a quick and easy to use way.
What brave engineer amongst you will take on this quest to build this?
do computer blocks have a "block 'xyz' destroyed" event ? if yes you could make an outer layer which, if it is damaged / loses a block, will instantly trigger the corresponding ERA panel. i've only done a bit of coding in this game so i dont know the limitations of the API, but it could be interesting. if you dont have events and instead would have to check for the existence for every block this might fall flat though...
is it possible to fill the reactive armour with egg cartons?
Please repeat the test with a larger target area?
This isn’t about this video. But One of your factions in your server tours (like a year ago) had some unicorn ships. Does anyone have a schematic for those? I want to build some
Have you tried Small Hydrogen tanks as RE for small grids?
Seeing your assault cannon on the normal block test, could small grid (non reactive) armor be more effective than large armor within the same area a large block would take up?
Because small blocks could be placed on top of a large grid as additional plating without causing too many size issues.
What? A Laserpointer? is it on the Railgun itself?
I’ve always wanted to make era
Hi, is there a Discord server to discuss ship and base making? I would like very much to talk to other fellow Space Engineers, I'm too basic, I cannot create any creative stuff, nor functional designs...
There is no projectile..
Just a visualisation and a damage calculation..
The inclusion of universal weapons and damage was a mistake.
The combination of PCU Limits means build a weapon brick, or accept outlining 😮
Kinda cool, but it's a single use defense. Rapis fire or staggered fire, kinda negates it.
How do you build it
But I still only have one question.
Henry MK3 when?
With the new weapons it would be hard to make a small design like henry last in a battle.
im gonna use this video's comment section to vent.
a week of work in survival to build a large grid rover is now a flaming pile of junk at the base of a mountain i want craggies gone.
deleted erased i want that rover killing terrain generation out.
i had done so much only to end up back at nothing.
There is a mod called Smooth Voxels which does what you want.
@@darkehartplays thank you
Can you build some thing like a halo prowler
Just slap ERA on it!
I wanna make cage armor for tanks against rockets
Was watching a really good video on real life cage armour and the testing conducted have a search there's some really interesting informative videos.
It's better to use Space balls. they are tanky.