Oolite Bulletins

Every player that bought Shield Booster probably noticed that charging the new shields upon first launch after buying took a long time ( 64 seconds i think) .

I looked equipment scriptinfo and found that the shield booster has a shield recharge mulltiplier of 1.00 , which does not increase sheild recharging at all.

The Military shields has 1.5 as recharge multiplier.

Is the multiplier of 1.00 for shield booster intentional or an oversight that no one noticed ?

Lone_Wolf wrote:

Is the multiplier of 1.00 for shield booster intentional

Due to fit with the wiki I think it is intentional, so the booster increase the max. strength only and not the recharge rate.

Yes, intentional - 1.82 just moved the existing behaviour into script_info. I don't know what the original reasoning is but here's my thoughts for keeping it this way.

Your shield recharge comes 1-for-1 from your energy banks, at a standard rate of 2 units per second per shield. With both shields trying to recharge, that's the entire recharge rate of a Cobra III taken up, already leaving relatively little flexibility for firing weapons, using ECM, etc without seriously draining your banks - just from having been hit a few times. The Extra Energy Unit gets you out of that situation and lets you at least fire back while your shields are charging, which is what makes it so important in combat.

If the shield boosters increased recharge rate, rather than just buying you more time before the shields collapsed, the Extra Energy Unit's extra power would be entirely used up (or on anything less powered than a Cobra III, would still be insufficient to charge both shields at once without losing power, which can get you into quite nasty situations)

The military shield boosters ... partly they're meant to be paired with a Naval Energy Unit - whether the player has the clearance for one or not; partly they're about three times the price of the regular ones so should do more than just add another 128 units; partly waiting over three minutes for shields to recharge after a tough fight would lead to rather too much safe but dull hanging around for the more cautious players.

Most freighters can't fit them at all, and for most ships smaller than the Cobra III you're probably much better off trading up to a Cobra III than buying military shield boosters, so the expectation is that even with just the EEU fitted you're still not losing energy while they recharge.

Thanks for the explanation, Cim.

I'm looking into changing navel energy grid into a shield recharger (using the multiplier now it's r/w so the core game code can do the shield increase instead of an oxp timer ), that should also benefit players without naval energy unit.

Currently thinking i should base availability or shield recharge increase of the new device on real energy recharge rate.

cim wrote:

Your shield recharge comes 1-for-1 from your energy banks, at a standard rate of 2 units per second per shield.

How is shield recharge calculated, what does 1 for 1 mean ? A few easy examples, perhaps ?

The smaller a ship is, the harder to hit it is. That's true even for NPCs I noticed again, switching from cobra 3 to something much smaller, although the sniping capability of some of the NPCs seems way beyond human but it's worse with cobra 3. A large thing is easier or at least possible to hit from distance for a human even (krait, cobra 3, vortex, thargoid warship, station) so to have same defensive strength as a small ship their shields should recharge faster, but I get the impression the rate depends just on equipment ?

Anonymissimus wrote:

A large thing is easier or at least possible to hit from distance ... so to have same defensive strength as a small ship their shields should recharge faster, but I get the impression the rate depends just on equipment ?

But they do have the same 'defensive strength', because they have the same equipment. Why should a large ship recharge faster just because it is large? That would be illogical.
In practice of course the larger ship probably has more 'defensive strength' than a smaller ship because it is likely to have more energy banks.

Smivs wrote:

Why should a large ship recharge faster just because it is large? That would be illogical.

Not at all. There's more space to fit generators.
Look at deep space dredgers, behemoths and stations. All very large, all very high energy recharge rate. All NPC, so no "shields" and thus very high "shield recharge rate". Otherwise they'd be too easy to kill. Or that's what I understand of it.

In practice of course the larger ship probably has more 'defensive strength' than a smaller ship because it is likely to have more energy banks.

That only determines the time it lasts until it needs to dodge more or flee it seems. The recharge rate is much more important.

Anonymissimus wrote:

Smivs wrote:

Why should a large ship recharge faster just because it is large? That would be illogical.

Not at all. There's more space to fit generators.

But recharge may not be generator-size dependent. What you're suggesting is like trying to recharge a AA Ni-cad battery quickly by plugging it directly into the mains! Recharge is a process that takes time - a fixed amount of time determined by (real or Oo) physics.

Anonymissimus wrote:

Look at deep space dredgers, behemoths and stations. All very large, all very high energy recharge rate.

Well, the station thing is so they cannot be destroyed (in normal play) for obvious gameplay reasons. I can't comment on the others as they do not exist in my Ooniverse.

Anonymissimus wrote:

How is shield recharge calculated, what does 1 for 1 mean ? A few easy examples, perhaps ?

Assuming no oxp equipment that changes shield recharge :

Built-in shields have shield recharge rate of 2 per shield.
Shield Booster multiplies this with 1 , so stays 2 per shield
Mil. shields multiply shield rechrge by 1.5 , giving 3 recharge per shield.

Built-in shields or Buit-in + Shield Booster : fwd shield recharge = aft shield recharge = 2 .

Fwd shield < max strength : every second 2 is subtracted from your energy and added to fwd shield
Same for aft shield.


When you got Mil. Shields : fwd shield recharge = aft shield recharge = 3
Fwd shield < max strength : every second 3 is subtracted from your energy and added to fwd shield
same for aft shield.

Thanks.
So in the core game there is a single way to improve or modify shield recharge for a player ship (mil shields) and it doesn't depend on energy recharge at all, or more generally, the properties of a ship ?
As far as OXPs go, the shield equalizer should effectively also increase recharge, as it makes sure that both shields are charging if only one of them is hit, at the cost of needing that energy. And there's naval grid and shield cycler (not sure what it can do in addition to the equalizer).

Anonymissimus wrote:

Thanks.
So in the core game there is a single way to improve or modify shield recharge for a player ship (mil shields) and it doesn't depend on energy recharge at all, or more generally, the properties of a ship ?

correct.

Anonymissimus wrote:

As far as OXPs go, the shield equalizer should effectively also increase recharge, as it makes sure that both shields are charging if only one of them is hit, at the cost of needing that energy. And there's naval grid and shield cycler (not sure what it can do in addition to the equalizer).

Shield Equalizer and Shield Cycler both redistribute available shield energy, they just use different methods and algorithms to achieve their goal. Neither changes shield recharge.
From player point-of-view Shield Equalizer and Shield Cycler are 2 alternative methods .
SEC capacitors work fine with Shield Cycler devices.
(Integrating Shield Equalizer & capacitors functionality in Shield Cycler is on my todo list, but near the bottom atm).

Naval Grid does increase shield recharge . The original NG does that in a static way that doesn't show in shield recharge values, NG Next does directly change player.ship.forwardShieldRechargeRate & player.ship.aftShieldRechargeRate .
(NG Next way of doing things became possible with 1.82 )