Delivery for a "Mr Stronghold," Did someone order 2000 Frag Shells?
v.redd.it/thy6h3tkcoga1
v.redd.itPosted Feb 7, 2023, 2:07 AM UTC
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v.redd.itSo, uh, how did it survive being hit by the AA? Multiple times. Are the Stronghold's AA shells really that weak?
9
Well yes and no
It’s completely covered in alloy armor, and since flak is ABSOLUTE GARBAGE flak doesn’t really do anything to it
The stronghold’s AA is amazing against unarmored fliers, but against even ONE layer of alloy flak just does literally nothing. It barely does any damage to applique for god’s sake, it’s so trash at its intended job.
Honest to god, just test pure flak against any armored flier, it just won’t do anything. I did some testing with 500RPMx50mm turrets, flak was the WORST contender of any AA shell… by a factor of 2. It took over 5 minutes to kill a flier with one layer of alloy armor, where most other shells could kill it in under 30s
Buff flak btw (and HE against armor)
16
I had no idea Flak was that bad against armor.
I have the vague idea that it trades damage for explosive radius, which doesn't help either, I guess.
Survivability aside, how does the shell type change the damage done? I imagine the frag might spread the damage around, but I'm not sure how it'd differ from HE.
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Flak not only has lower damage than HE, but it also suffers directly against armor more; exponentially worse against AC
It was balanced previously actually, since the HE and flak damage reduction due to AC was an exponential scale before the armor update it wasn’t a huge deal; half the armor on all blocks and no armor stacking against explosive damage means they did around 4x the damage they did now… but then the armor update came and WRECKED the damage scaling for flak and made HE significantly worse.
So basically, flak trades a little bit of raw damage and most of its ability to deal with armor to have bigger boom
The shell type is actually super important on AA, kinetic and HEAT-EMP AA require direct hits in order to deal damage, but at close range can DUMP damage against even well armored targets. Timed Frag is basically what flak wishes it was, being able to spam a TON of raw damage at low gauges, but suffers a bit against medium and heavy armor (still works though, against alloy armored targets was the fastest at killing enemies)
Also, HEAT-EMP and Kinetic shells tend to kill the target without blowing off wings, but frag and flak tend to blow off wings well before breaking the armor. If you destroy a plane’s wing, it’ll go into a death spiral and make you waste ammo on a target you can’t really hit, so it’s not ideal.
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Oh, whoops, I mean how the shell type changed the damage the 'missile' did, not the AA.
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Flak being bad against vehicles is intentional because large-radius explosions interacting with vehicles take a lot more processing power than low-radius ones, and flak allows easy spamming of large-radius explosions.
Flak is intended to be only used in the anti-munition role.
4
I disagree?
The entire point of flak is to be a dedicated AA shell, and has been from the beginning. That’s how it’s used IRL, and it’s the inspiration for it since it was introduced
I don’t think the processing power of each explosion really has anything to do with why it’s bad against vehicles; it takes the same processing power to make it bad against them as it does to make it good against them, and they also removed the explosions size limit a while ago which is a good indicator that processing power is not a factor.
Pure flak against munitions isn’t even that good either; it’s alright against small and medium missiles sure but that’s mainly due to their grouping and already pretty low health compared to other munitions. Flak is terrible against large and huge missiles, and doesn’t really have a chance at shooting down half decent CRAM shots either. Kinetic is by far the best anti-munitions round against those things, doing 3-4x the DPS quite easily.
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Flak and 20ap kinetics are literally the only two good anti munition shells what are you on about. With a good shell and good burst you can get a good cram buster with flak
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How does it work exactly
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It’s a suicide nuke powered by a breadboard AI
The breadboard has target prediction like some of my other nukes so it can easily home in on any target
When it touches the enemy, the front wedge gets broken and the ACB behind it takes damage, when the ACB is damaged it triggers all weapons to fire
It has a couple nukes in the tip, and some ammo boxes throughout to make the entire thing detonate when the nukes go off
It also has a 50mm APS cannon inside, completely loaded with shells and with ejectors on the autoloaders. When the autoloaders, ejectors, or clips are destroyed in the self-destruction the ejectors launch every stored shell forwards to deal even more damage than the nukes can cause alone
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Bunch of ejectors triggered at the same time. Don't know the details unfortunately
1
How good is emp with this, those frags gotta make the game go crazy slow?
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Honestly not amazing, frag is by FAR the best performer against everything except pure HA
Best performer against pure HA is 333mm HESH
I thought EMP would be amazing but honestly it’s very inconsistent and tends to get all soaked by surge protectors since APS EMP is kinda not great
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haha BESH go ***Krbthomb!!***
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Also shows off a weird flaw of the stronghold that I point out to its creator that ai being located at that exact point makes it easy to one or two shot with Remote guidance weapons.
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Well to be fair all player based aiming is overpowered
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The AI can also use it, but its been nerfed heavily.
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Yea but the AI has random block targetting which is what I was implying; the chances of hitting the AI while targetting a random block are super low
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If you’re going to use manual aim, you can reliably and easily one shot every craft in the game for like 100k mats. If you bring manual aim into the picture, nothing works.
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would it be possible to have a larger spread of the shells because it looks like a lot of shells hit the same block so you could increase damage by having more shells hit indivedial blocks
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Shells hitting the same blocks is actually since each shell is only 50mm, they can’t each break an individual block they simply don’t do enough damage
But yes actually, you can! My initial version of the frag bomb actually had ejectors facing sideways, so when it detonated it ejects large groups of shells up, down, left, and right of it instead of just forwards!
The sideways ejectors have pros and cons though. It makes a much larger coverage of shells and spreads the damage out more which can be good, but it also usually makes at least 2 groups of the shells miss entirely, wasting all that damage. The larger spread also means more surface damage, but often less critical damage since I’m not penetrating as deep into the enemy’s armor.
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How did you do this and how could i replicate it
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do you have a workshop link? that looks fun to play around with
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'I am a dwarf and I'm digging a hole, diggy diggy hole, diggy diggy hole'
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Yes, that's actually 2000 frag shells (well, specifically 2006 Frag-Hesh-HEAT shells)