Engines + scout question.

[🎮 PalkoVvodets 🔑]

Trying figure out best engine setup for "M" traders/miners and "S" explorers.
1) Heard npc are bad with "travel" engine type. Thus "all-round"/"combat" is better for them. Is that true?

In regard to miners => Alligator + travel travel engine is the best choice for safe/stable mining, not to worry about threats. But even quickest "Boa" trader with combat engine cant hit 400 m/s which not too big to bypass all threats. Thus:
2) Is it worth to use combat engine on traders? Or anyway they will be shot down and better choice is travel one?

Most important is the best engine for scouts. Regular explore command takes ages to investigate single sector. And it seems rookie pilots with explore order dont seem use travel mode at all. And I've tired drawing hexes above ecliptic to make proccess quicker (I know "explore" is about 3 axes scouting).
3) So what is better engine for scouts and what are circumstances to use (if any)?

P.S. No mods offer, please.

[Wraith]

Originally posted by BurlsoL:

Kha'ak attack anything that gets close to them. Will even attack your stations if you don't have any defenses. The main reason why you don't often have traders being attacked by the Kha'ak is because the trader is moving between gates at travel speeds, usually among other traffic. But in less congested systems, traders are still vulnerable near gates or stations.

That pretty much what I said unless they run into the Kha’ak they don’t actively hunt traders

I have a hive in black hole sun and I lose more trader to pirates and have lost none to the kha’ak because they don’t actively go after your trader

[🎮 PalkoVvodets 🔑]

So basicaly we have 3 options for traders:
1) Split combat engine for extremly safe and extremly slow trading.
2) ARG/TEL/PAR combat engine for balanced trade
3) TER/TEL travel engine for fast but dangerous trade.
Hm...

Here I guess should be one more important question: do pilots escape going to blow vessel or heroically die with?

[Huillam]

Originally posted by 🎮 PalkoVvodets 🔑:

1) Split combat engine for extremly safe and extremly slow trading.

Safeish and slowish maybe but not extremly.
Engines will help but your income won't skyrocket because you use TEL/TER engines and your traders equiped with Mk4 Split engines will still be killed once in a while.

It's probably best to think cost: Is that ship worth a loadout that will multiply the cost by two/five/ten?

[blackphoenixx]

Originally posted by 🎮 PalkoVvodets 🔑:

So basicaly we have 3 options for traders:
1) Split combat engine for extremly safe and extremly slow trading.
2) ARG/TEL/PAR combat engine for balanced trade
3) TER/TEL travel engine for fast but dangerous trade.
Hm...

Here I guess should be one more important question: do pilots escape going to blow vessel or heroically die with?

Even a SPL Mk4 combat engine won't let a trader outrun a Xenon swarm or Dragon Raider. For anything else they're likely to run into (pirate minotaurs and destroyers) you don't need it so sacrificing the travel speed isn't worth it.

As for travel engines being dangerous, not really. A Demeter Sentinel or anything faster will still outrun Minotaurs and destroyers even with a TEL or ARG Mk2 travel engine.

It's a little different for miners where you definitely want a combat engine just for the lower shield drain when boosting, but a miner with a SPL engine won't live noticably longer compared to any of the others while being notably less efficient on anything but very short ranges (basically anything where you're not mining right next to the delivery point).

Even a TER engine can outrun Khaak with boost, the deciding factor when it comes to their survival is having somewhere to flee to like a friendly station or patrolling combat ships.

Originally posted by Huillam:

Safeish and slowish maybe but not extremly.
Engines will help but your income won't skyrocket because you use TEL/TER engines and your traders equiped with Mk4 Split engines will still be killed once in a while.

It's probably best to think cost: Is that ship worth a loadout that will multiply the cost by two/five/ten?

The difference between an ARG or TEL travel engine and a SPL combat engine is pretty noticable (20-30% easily even over distances of 1-2 jumps). That's not a small difference. It's possibly dozens of ships you don't need to buy if you're going with many small stations instead of megastations.

[🎮 PalkoVvodets 🔑]

Originally posted by Huillam:

It's probably best to think cost: Is that ship worth a loadout that will multiply the cost by two/five/ten?

Of course MK4 doesn't worth. I only consider Mk2-3. Basically Mk2. But if it leads to notable survival increase Mk3 is an option too.

Originally posted by blackphoenixx:

Even a SPL Mk4 combat engine won't let a trader outrun a Xenon swarm or Dragon Raider.

Never seen hostile Dragon Raider. But why trader cant escape Xenon? Boa with TEL/PAR Mk3 combat engine outrun even Xenon M. And AI doesn't seem abuse travel mode when fight started.
Xenon will use travel when target is too far of course, but its enough time for trader to perform travel escape too. M xenons seem have incredible travel max speed. But they were never able to catch up my ship with twice less max travel speed.
Not sure how it performs OOS as I only have Alligator miners atm and part of them fly freely in the system full of xenon invading forces (may be I just lucky). So cant properly test it.

[johntarmac]

Originally posted by 🎮 PalkoVvodets 🔑:

But why trader cant escape Xenon?

A wandering K will kill a trader very quick. Same with a pirate Rattlesnake.

Edit: I should have said a wandering K can kill a lot of traders very quick :)

[Huillam]

Originally posted by 🎮 PalkoVvodets 🔑:

Never seen hostile Dragon Raider.

They're mostly in split territory but I once saw one that went as far as Sol.

Originally posted by 🎮 PalkoVvodets 🔑:

But why trader cant escape Xenon?

It's not possible to engage travel while in combat or while too close to an enemy. Even if your trader is faster, you can't be certain it will be out of weapon range fast enough.
That and the fact that your trader is blind to anything that hasn't interacted with him. He will suicide himself into a whole fleet of Xenon if they are on his path.
And finally while over the years egosoft made a lot of effort for OOS combat to be as accurate as possible, it will never be 100% accurate. On occasion the game will determine that you trader died before he could escape.

[🎮 PalkoVvodets 🔑]

Ok, guess I understood benefits and downsides. Thanks, guys!

[Kalisa]

i think they do boost when trying to escape sometimes though but not positive, also if they have laser towers they will drop those to distract so they can enter travel mode, thats where terran can save their life with fast acceleration, and if they use boost, better boost potential (about 2x more boost duration then argon or paranid for equal shield drain), the only thing arg, teladi, and paranid combats have on terran is higher top speed, but they have slower acceleration for that, at least in travel mode, paranid combats are better overall then argon, you lose a tiny bit of top speed but gain faster travel acceleration, higher top speed, and better boost.
Travels are good if you dont intend that ship to ever get hit and need to run and have enough time in transit for their travel to accelerate. Really wish it showed in stats for travel mode acceleration, on paper split level 3 combat engines look almost the exact same as terran for travel speed, but their is a vast difference.

All engines have their place, just depends on the goal you have in mind for each ship and its route.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9l9174ZcoQ very good section on engines as well.

[🎮 PalkoVvodets 🔑]

Originally posted by Kalisa:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9l9174ZcoQ very good section on engines as well.

Yep, I saw this video. But due to lack of numeric information compare to different ship classes and different ship's role combat behavior it doesn't give complex comprehension.

Originally posted by Kalisa:

paranid combats are better overall then argon, you lose a tiny bit of top speed but gain faster travel acceleration, higher top speed, and better boost.

According to video stats ARG, PAR and SPL share same travel speed boost. And I definitely know Split travel acceleration - its awful. All depend on how good traders handle mixed mode to escape if they ever do. If they not then Teladi combat engine with Boa looks like a golden mean.

[Kalisa]

im not sure if split travel acceleration is actually worse then the argon tho, that i need to test more, im not sure theres any place that offers exact numbers, maybe if we go directly into the files we would get some answers? but if it takes say 20 seconds to reach max speed with argon and split, and split has an overall much lower top speed, it is going to feel more slugish as well, easy enough to test tho, just time how long it takes to reach top speed, or how long it takes to reach 50% of max speed, 75%, then 100%, who knows if thats different on each engine as well.
also mentioned in video is ship mass and different races engines providing better value to that, that also complicates the calucations then, so teladi mediums may not be good on a corvette, but a freighter with max cargo its going to play a big difference then, as also cargo weight does effect how the ship handles and accelerates.
Edit: just did a test on my fighter im flying thats using small mk3 paranid combats, from max normal speed to max travel speed took 20 seconds. even about 20 seconds going from a stop to max travel speed as well (not boosting) acceleration seems pretty consist up to about 15 second mark, at that point ur traveling at about 96% top speed and the last 5 sec are just those last few %

[🎮 PalkoVvodets 🔑]

Originally posted by Kalisa:

but if it takes say 20 seconds to reach max speed with argon and split, and split has an overall much lower top speed

Thats why those lines without actual numbers makes cunfusing. I dont know if that boost line shows equal time to reach max speed or its equal absolute boost value.

[Kalisa]

my assumption would be that for small combat engines at least, 20 seconds to reach top speed, and about 15 seconds to reach pretty top speed would be probably the same between the split, argon and paranid then, so if top speed is 6k, you will reach like 5.8k in about 15 seconds, if top speed is 3k, you would reach about 2.9k within 15 seconds with those 3 racial engines, should be easy enough to test, will be doing test runs once i unlock stuff again in my current game. that would still explain why split feel slugish, they have pretty poor top speed for travel, and argon have the best top speed for travel, outside of teladi and freight/massive ships
Edit: current game im a yaki thats hated by almost everyone, so may be abit before i get some other race engine tech, workin on terrans now tho >.> should be a good comparison. on a side note, trying to get terran rep up from -25 is brutal when they dont own any sectors that are under attack >.<

[blackphoenixx]

https://www.qsna.eu/x4/ships/ has the data on TD acceleration (attack time, the time to reach maximum travel speed), charge time etc.

For M engines it's pretty simple: all combat engines have zero charge time on travel drives, everything but TEL and TER has an attack time of 15 seconds, TEL has 12 seconds, TER has 2.

M Travel engines all have 3 seconds charge time, 45 seconds attack time for ARG/PAR/SPL, 36 seconds for TEL, 6 seconds for TER.

The lower top speed on combat engines however means that a travel engine will reach the combat engines max speed long before that and then keep accelerating which makes them much faster in practice. I've tested that in a custom game start.

The same applies to the difference between TER and TEL engines - the faster acceleration on TER engines does not make them significantly faster on anything but very short (<150km) distances because of their lower top speed.
It's also the reason why PAR engines perform worse than both ARG and TEL when it comes to travel time.

For L and XL engines it's even more simple - the difference in top speed between all-around and travel drives is minimal but all-around engines have lower attack time, so they're always better.
And the TER engines much lower attack time makes them significantly faster than any other L or XL engine over any distance.

[Kalisa]

Originally posted by blackphoenixx:

The same applies to the difference between TER and TEL engines - the faster acceleration on TER engines does not make them significantly faster on anything but very short (<150km) distances because of their lower top speed.

this is talking just medium right? cause at least with larges, that acceleration even on long haul (600km) terran still command quite an advantage, but thats because theres such a huge difference at that stage (67 second attack time vs 17 second with only a about a 10% speed difference on travel or 60/15 with all around)
and i see what the video meant now, split, paranid and argon all have exact same attack time.