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Large Grid 108

Yeah, that's the same reason I prefer AQD's combat core that rebalances 1) all block integrity to have more health, proportional based on number of steel plates, and 2) assigns a damage resistance bonus to specifically light/heavy armor blocks (50% damage reduction essentially doubles the health of armor blocks). Unfortunately, the XL blocks don't have this damage reduction. Though I could locally mod it, I think, since it's just an attribute to add to them.

Keep building or go into my workshop and paste that blackstone fortress and youl see what i'mean xd. Other than the fps issue, clipping, graphical bugs and weakness of the blocks, they do their job and are great but then I am very bias and like my heavy armor relative to weapon power.

Don't like having to use shields or be dependent on them and would rather complex internal armor layering and so on etc.

Ha ha, I guess I missed that since my Kushan mothership shell is only around 10k XL blocks. I stopped since it was a somewhat functional shell/prop piece, and I knew making it a fully functional ship with thrusters and gyros was probably impossible.

I'm trying out different ship sizes to find a block count that lets me operate one full scale capital ship and a handful of small craft in PVE survival. Maybe even two full scale smaller frigates, and a few small craft.

You have a lot more experience than me with these megaprojects! :D Your HW stuff is awesome.

I found that at around 33k XL blocks the game dropped significant fps, down to about 60 from 120 but he might have fixed that, not sure.

Oh, yeah. That's true -- there are some compromises that come with the XL blocks. Their size is really their main advantage. Maybe the only advantage? :P

I also use them for the main hull or foundation -- the mod author says these are meant to be just a foundation for larger ship designs. Sometimes need regular large grid blocks to transition a connection between sections of XL. Then I put details with regular large grid blocks afterwards.

The Kushan mothership was so large, I sometimes forgot I was working with XL blocks. :P

Overlooking the integrity/strength, the visuals of the new blocks are not great. I found staggering blocks on top (dura/whatever) does break up the weird discolouration/weird texture they create at distance.

Cheers for the info, I've been not bothering to use them for 100% xl block builds after making my Blackstone fortress and finding the lag 2x normal duraarmor blocks.

I was going to update my mothership too, the trick i've found is using a mix of dura and these new giant blocks. Using the large blocks as the hull shape and a single layer of dura overtop for reinforcement.

Did the same thing when updating my carriers, spacestations (upscaled) and so on. It's not ideal but it's better than nothing.

I've been building the HW1 Kushan mothership, but I'm using the POM XL blocks mod in order to build it to scale (2.1 kilometer height) without dying from the block count. Each 1 PCU XL block is LG 5x5x5. As is, I finished a rough draft of the base hull of the ship using about 10k XL blocks. With vanilla 1x1 LG armor blocks, this would have been approx 100k to 200k blocks.

There are trade-offs. The XL blocks are a limited, simple selection of armor shapes. They are also a bit weak -- but there is a modified version that doubles their integrity, and using AQD Combat Core or another similar steel plate/metal grid health buff mod will double it again. That gives 1 XL block 1,000,000 integrity for hit points.