Space Engineers

Space Engineers

2cm Beam System
A few improvements
I saw this mod in a youtube video today and tried it out. I love the mod and have already played around with it a bunch. I completely agree with the other comments saying that the mod flows well with Space Engineers and I love that the mod opens so many new possibilites for engineering.

There's a few things however that I feel like should be addressed from my experiences with it so far:

1. "Q-Switching" requires a rotor. It wasn't a problem in my test builds, but it's difficult to actually build a ship while having to account for a rotating 5x5x5 block. Especially considering how glitchy rotors can be sometimes.

The best way in my opinion to address this would be adding a splitter block with one input and 5 individually toggle-able outputs. I think having the splitter block split the power evenly between all active outputs is the cleanest solution in my opinion and opens the door for more implementations than the other suggestions. Bonus points if I can select the output strength for each side! :^)

2. I feel as though the balancing for the ion beam is a bit off. The amount of damage it does is fair for the amount of energy spent, but it dumps all of its energy so quickly that it feels almost like I just click on a target and it's gone. A setup with 2 ion capacitors charged to 100% lasts a fraction of a second and managed to blow a hole straight through 15 layers of heavy armor. I'd much prefer the beam lasted a few seconds and burned through the target more slowly.

3. I feel as though the ion capacitors are a bit large. I personally would make them have a 5x5 block footprint, which would make them fit nicely atop the ion beam combiners. As it stands all of the ion beam parts are absolutely massive and I'm having trouble fitting them inside my existing ships.

4. Laser capacitors (large ship) are 1x1x1 block in size visually, but their hitbox is 5x5x5 blocks large. There also needs to be a way to fire them on demand rather than whenever the capacitor finishes charging.

5. Ion beams past a certain brightness black out portions of my screen. Not sure if this is an issue related to my specific graphics card, but it's quite jarring and may be the same issue mentioned in the original post. I'm running on an nVidia GTX 980M.

6. The mod works fine in multiplayer, but only the host can see the beams and hear sound effects.

7. The laser generator says it's consuming 125 kW at full power but is actually consuming 125 MW. Likewise, the ion beam generator says it's consuming 2.5MW at full power but is actually consuming 2.5 GW.

8. Ion capacitors show charge progress in 1% increments, despite showing two decimal places. I'd like to get more accurate readings for charge progress, as the charging for the beam weapon can take quite a while.


Sorry if that seems like a lot, but I really like this mod and a lot of these seem like small fixes and tweaks that would really improve the overall quality.
Also it's worth mentioning that I've only played around with the large ship blocks and not the small ship ones. I'll play around with those as I have more time to do so.
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Showing 1-6 of 6 comments
Slader Harkeness 24 May, 2019 @ 8:27pm 
tbh the main change i would like to see is the ion system shrunk down. like make the generators have a 5x5x? footprint and the combiners have a 3x3x3 footprint, with capacitors also being 3x3x3
Gryphorim 25 May, 2019 @ 2:26am 
Maybe there should be a 3x3x3 intermediate sized system, but I do like there being a humungous 5x5x5 system.
UpsideDownAirline 25 May, 2019 @ 6:10am 
The large system should be that big because of the insane amount of damage it does. Something that powerful is right to take up a lot of space, and having to make design considerations to accommodate such a powerful weapon only makes sense. My main complaint in that regard is just how quickly it dumps all of its energy. Having the beam deal the same amount of damage over the course of 5 or 10 seconds would be more balanced in my opinion.

I feel as though the lasers do a decent job of being an intermediate system. If you stack 10 lasers, the beam has no trouble cutting large ships in half even without a charging loop. It just really depends how you use the weapon. Without any upper limit on how strong either beam can be, both of them have the potential to be devastating weapons, and I feel as though this covers the gap between the two systems nicely.
Last edited by UpsideDownAirline; 25 May, 2019 @ 6:11am
Soren MC 26 May, 2019 @ 8:40am 
Awesome job adding the laser splitter. could you add a splitter for the ion beam ?
Master engineer 26 May, 2019 @ 3:34pm 
I also made a comment from a different account I do agree with a system to better support multiplayer needs like the antenna system but I would also like to see a way to transfer it more cinematically so you can tell from afar they are charging a super laser of massive proportions , rather than just get obliterated out of no where , it would be cool to see the energy transfer / over charging a laser
Just checked back and saw that most of the points I brought up have been addressed. Thank you very much!
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Showing 1-6 of 6 comments
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