Ammo racks needed?

[TheFoley]

I've been using ammo racks but I heard somewhere that you don't need ammo racks just the autoloader? Is that true. I am using it like that right now and my gun is recieving no ammo

[capnguts]

There are three ways to use an ammo input feeder.
You can attach them to the clips on autoloaders and let the autoloaders take from the clips. With two feeders per clip, I think this should always be enough to keep up.

You can attach the feeders to autoloaders with no clips on them. This is called a 'clip-less' design. In this setup you only need one ammo feeder per autoloader because they can only hold one shell at a time. Also, when spawned into play, there will be no loaded shells. You will have to wait for the first shell to be passed directly to an autoloader. This can take a long time for big shells. To make best use of a clip-less design, you want the fire rate to be a bit faster than the reload, so there is never more than one or two loaded shells around to blow up.

The third way is to attach the ammo feeder nipples directly to the firing piece. This does not have the 1.5 time penalty of feeding directly to autoloaders, but still spawns with no shells loaded. You can attach a maximum of five feeders to the sides of a firing piece. They can make small, non-explosive point defense turrets. Also, with no autoloaders, there is no limit to the shell length that can be fed directly to the firing piece. This is the only way to fire 9m+ shells.

The moral of the story: At 1m length, belt fed rules. (Explosive, surface mount them so they don't gut your ship when they blow and use as many ammo feeders as you can fit for faster clip reloads.)
At 2m-4m length, clip-less is probably preferable until shell load time gets to long with bigger shells.
Beyond 3m-4m length, I find it best to use clips and ammo ejectors.

One more thing... Solid ammo clips help with lag because the game does not have to render each shell inside the clip. That's the only difference between the clips.

[Videogames]

Belt fed is good if you can kill the enemy in the volley of shots so it doesen't get stuck.

Also autoloaders can only connect to ammo inputs at a specific block on the end.

Yea nick nerfed the "no pointless explosive clips" exploit to death. It was the most annoying for me because I prefer not to build my battleship cannons from solidified nitroglycerine.