Problems with Mass Drivers

[Mazryonh]

When I first let the computer describe the Mass Driver for me in X3: The Reunion, I was more than a little puzzled. It sounded rather broken to me and seriously strained my suspension of disbelief, since I'm not sure whether or not the Game Designers fully realized what kind of fire they were playing with here.

If weapons like these were unleashed on the X-Universe and the races acted anything like humans in real life, they would likely utterly revolutionize warfare. With shields made useless EVERYONE would want Mass Drivers and ditch their shields, just like everyone ditched plate armour when firearms came onto the field. I think it was very telling that no enemy ships in vanilla X3:R used them, since they would of course inflict very high repair bills on your ships anytime they were fired upon with them. M5s in particular are very vulnerable to Mass Drivers since they don't have the armour mass to survive many hits and the bullets travel very quickly, but even the biggest battleships can be killed with enough Mass Driver ammo since their shields are useless against it.

(What's really funny is that while Arthur C. Clarke said that "Mass Driver" can be used to refer to ANY propulsion mechanism since they all "drive mass" in one way or another, the way the X-series gun works doesn't fit with the descriptions of real-life railguns at all.)

Real-life railguns use electromagnetic force to throw an inert projectile (often with a ferromagnetic sabot, the real projectile isn't affected by magnetics) at very high speeds, so high that the projectile has more energy than it would be if it were thrown a lower speed saturated with explosives. They require a massive amount of power to run, but in the game, that's not the case.

The game says that "the ammo provides all the energy" which would only be true if they were CONVENTIONAL GUNS. You don't need a battery in your real-life pistol because the ammo has all the chemicals necessary to get it going. A realistic railgun in X3 would travel very fast, have tonnes of recoil, and use your ship's energy along with ammo.

This is not to say that Mass Drivers are the only unbalanced weapons around; Phased Shockwave Generators also eat M5s for breakfast and since they can be "boated" can easily clear squadrons of fighters very easily. Ion Disruptors are also devastating against fighters but luckily aren't as outright broken (they can't inflict kills, only hit the closest target, are short-ranged, and kill your own missiles when you launch them). Flaks utterly own fighters for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and the midnight buffet. If the X-Series were multiplayer I can't honestly say the weaponry would be balanced.

Are Mass Drivers still as broken in Terran Conflict as they were in Reunion? And does anyone have a mod that changes Mass Drivers to more balanced forms, such as doing very little damage against shields (since shields have well adapted to fending off high-speed micro-meteoroids or small space junk that are common in everyday spaceflight) but useful for bashing hulls when your energy is low and needs to recharge? How about mods that make other weapons more balanced, such as turning phased shockwave generators or flak systems into ammo-based weapons that can only be fired so many times, and in the PSG's case, have a recovery time whereupon when one ship launches a shockwave can't do so again until the space has "recovered enough" to fire another one?

My note to the developers about developing weapons in the future--please think them completely through as to what any unforeseen consequences of using them might be BEFORE implementing them. It's no fun when you have automatic "I WIN!" buttons such as the weapons I mentioned.

[Eandir]

I have never considered the mass driver to be overpowering as you seem to be implying. They bypass the shield, as that is their only purpose in life, but they do very little damage. Most heavy laser weapons will drop a ship faster than a full load of mass drivers.

I agree that for their purpose they should be used more often in NPC ships, but from a gameplay standpoint, shields are the buffer between fair fights and unfair fights. If a pack of M5-3's came after your fighter with a full load of mass drivers, your chances of survival are extremely low.

[MegaJohnny]

You've got a very good point. If you could punch through shields just by using this, nobody would bother with lasers any more. I was just thinking when reading the thread, it would be better if weapons like that were good at hulls, but bad at shields.

If the Massdriver isn't modded to be less easymode, there should be a ship extension that stops it passing through shields. You could call it a Crystalline Shield Projector or something.

[Sandalpocalypse]

Mass Drivers don't do enough damage to revolutionize warfare. It is sort of like inventing the armor penetrating blowgun.

MDs don't stand out nearly as much in Terran Conflict. There are a lot of M3-grade weapons that are quite competitive, like the Phased Repeater Gun and the Energy Bolt Chaingun. And the HEPT still has a big edge on sheer damage. Not to forget that old favorites like the PBE are much more common - virtually every xenon fighter mounts them

And if you stay inside MD range all the time you are going to get pummeled by Plasma Burst Generators, the new (and quite common among pirates) replacement for the A/B PSGs. Basically a flamethrower.

Additionally, m6s are quite prevalent as opponents; carrying enough MD ammo to mow down m6s all day is an exercise in frustration. Capital Ships have much stronger hulls as well, rendering MDing them to death impractical. (It takes 6 minutes to kill a Paranid Zeus with 6 mass drivers, firing over 26,000 individual shots.)

EMP cannons function basically as you described - they do PAC damage to shields but they do more damage than HEPTs to hulls.

[Archmagister]

If I understand your post correctly, you seem to lack the understanding of how mass drivers operate in the X universe. Their destructive potential doesn't stem from the high speeds the propelled ammunition achieves, but from the special shells interacting with the shields, and the sheer volume of projectiles delivered to target.
According to the manual, the shells use the shields' own energy to produce a very small spacial distortion to pass through the shields. Apparently, every projectile is encased in some sort of "unique crystalline matrix" which interacts with the target's shields.
So there is no need to have it propelled at massive speeds, like the "conventional" mass drivers, the definition of which is obviously a bit different in X universe.
As far as balancing goes, I don't think they are as unbalanced as you claim. After all, I got the impression from the game(s) that this is still a fairly new weapon, and as such has some special requirements(something about the ammo feed, I believe). The price of standardising all the existing military vessels for such a new weapon probably isn't worth the benefit.

Nevermind the fact that shields are still needed for micro-meteorite impacts, collisions, and energy weapons. As such, it isn't really the warfare revolution you think it should have been.
Yes, it would be more fair, if that is the right word, to have your enemies use them more often as well, but realistically it would make the game very difficult.
Likewise, the PSG has many drawbacks, the greatest of which is, ironically, its large area of effect. If you want to play as someone who is at least moderately integrated into society(trading, missions, keeping up race reputation), you need to be pretty damn careful where you discharge your weapons.

And flaks are supposed to eat fighters for breakfast, that is their main purpose. I really think you are overreacting a bit about these weapons, since they are nowhere near the "I WIN!" button you say they are.
Especially the PSGs have been severely handicapped in the transition from X2 to X3, I remember the complaints on the forums when Reunion came out about how the PSGs are useless now because of the shorter range.

[KoshZdryh]

Hey,I love my high-speed-all-destructive-absolutely-funny-it's-good-they-didn't-mount-them-on-enemy-ships MDs.
They are the reason I still dogfight at less than 1 km.
Have ever experienced them on taxi Ks ?

[Sandalpocalypse]

i should note that pirate corvettes occasionally mount mass driver turrets.. very annoying.

[Mazryonh]

If I understand your post correctly, you seem to lack the understanding of how mass drivers operate in the X universe.

Not really, my original post says that I did listen to Betty(?) explain how they work. And yes, after further testing they do seem like "armour penetrating blowguns." However, that still doesn't make sense. I don't believe you realize how attractive the possibility of rendering a target's protection (shields in the X3 universe) useless is in real life, or even to fictional warlike characters in the Split who would want more than anything else to have the entire universe bend the knee to their rule.

In real life even natives in the Amazon jungle know how the stopping power of their blowguns is very low, so the tribes who use them resort to coating them with extremely potent venom from the "poison arrow frogs" in order to increase their lethality. That is the essence of weapons technology; if it doesn't work as well as you want it to, either research it into the ground until it does, discard them immediately (such was the case with swords in the real world), or else field them en masse until they do work (as was the case with Napoleonic muskets--they were slow to load, oftentimes jammed, and were highly inaccurate so you couldn't hit unless you threw out a wall of lead).

Besides, even with Mass Drivers in their current state I'm surprised a dev at Egosoft wouldn't have realized that the Split would love to do hit-and-run attacks with Mass Drivers against Boron vessels or any other convenient enemy; the repair bills alone incurred against attacked vessels would do well to bankrupt an enemy before you frontally assault them.

The aforementioned reasons are why I can't believe that Mass Drivers haven't been furiously researched into becoming cap-ship killers. The main obstacle to destroying capships are their immensely powerful shields--once their shields are gone their hulls are easy prey since hulls in vanilla can't regenerate. I wouldn't be surprised if they became mini-asteroid launchers with shield-piercing generators, for instance. As was the case in real life, if there are easier ways to kill people without getting yourself killed, soon EVERYONE wants one. The genie is out of the bottle, and now everyone wants a wish.

The reasoning behind my idea for a more "reasonable mass driver" is that I remember reading a BBS article that says Spaceflies are automatically repelled by shields; an extension of a system normally used to repel microscopic debris with lots of kinetic energy but very little momentum. Because mass drivers are likely to resemble this (since firing larger projectiles makes for extremely large, sometimes unmanageable recoil) shields would likely be good at deflecting them (since bypassing shields is too revolutionary a factor in my view), so they do good damage against hulls but terrible against shields. Larger and slower versions would work against capship hulls, but are not guided and could be intercepted, but do have more ammo stores than missiles. That's why I suggested this version as a more balanced one.

What I do want to know is if there is a mod for those of us still stuck (or in my case, waiting for a better computer and a more complete 2.0 version of TC) with X3: The Reunion that balances the weapons this way. Making PSGs limited to 2 weapons per mounting, as well as introducing longer recovery times would help. The same thing could be applied to Flak Arrays, only giving them limited ammo as well.

Note: I have no desire to turn the X-Series into hard sci-fi. That would suck more than a black hole formed at the LHC would. I just want weapons that are more balanced and don't strain the suspension of disbelief needed to play this game so much.

[DeadlyDarkness]

I nearly got killed by one today. If the P. Centaur that I was fighting had actually fired it's MD continuously, I would have been toast. Each few bullets would knock my hull down a percent. Thankfully, they have a range of < 1km, so my HEPTs managed to kill it.

[Lancefighter]

The problem with MDs is that do do something silly like 100 damage a shot, and dont fire nearly fast enough to make up for it.

Most of the time, as has been said, the hept outdamages it even with shields taken into account. its current ONLY bonus is that it doesnt use energy at all... But in reality, they arent as amazing as they sound. Perhaps on a complete wing of chimeras, they are devastating... but in the numbers they are usually fitted, even on player ships, they just arent worth the hype you are giving them.

[corhen]

i have 2 of those of those on my ship

im probably gonna take them off.

Mass driver ammo is rare, their damage is pitiful, they suck down 3K of ammo against 1 M7...

meanwhile i could mount a couple fast, anti fighter weapons.

thats just my 2 cents