isn't the "bow" the front? The stern is the back if i remember correctly. :)

When huge missiles first came out, people claimed that they were OP and the new meta and the Basking shark was too powerful (my noncombat command ship beat it with scratched paint.) If fire and flamethrowers get added, I'm sure people will say it's OP and the new meta. And the same for anything else that gets added. APS is just too versatile. Others may be better in certain situations, but APS is good in any situation. If these had been HA frontsiders, that's the only situation I would expect the plasma to win. A little personal note. If you are going to be using alloy in your hull armour, I like to have a skin of alloy for the lower radar/sonar signature.

Bro said: "not actually tremendously thicc armor..." this armor scheme is as thicc as my whole ship bro ! XD

I'm actually pretty amazed by how good your realistic building is after such a short time! You've clearly understood the overall concepts (especially the parts that actually translate to FtD) even if the level of detail isn't crazy, and I actually really like your version of semi-realistic. Also, in my experience 90% of the time that a turret first gets exposed on a surface ship it's because of CRAM or something similar blowing the deck armor off by hitting the well armored turret cap, so in my opinion the wide barbettes are actually a very good idea.

Woh, that Firepower Difference though. 225 vs 709. All of this being said, plasma is designed as a firm counter to sloped heavy armor meta, and your APS gun is hitting one of its best target profiles against standard metal/alloy beams. Also, and I don't claim to be a plsma expert here: your are sending those plasma shots down at 2400 m/s? But only using 15 charges per shot. That's a TON of wasted energy, since the speed wont really matter, it doesn't do impact damage. You could cut that to 800-1000, save a TON of energy, and find a better sweet spot of the charges per shot. I almost imagine your getting close to heat throttling your ROF unless your spending another ton of energy on active cooling?

Before watching, will predict aps will win at same cost

Very interesting... Imma have to learn plasma

plasma for me seems really bad just do to it's cost and lack of versatility like if the target isn't dense it doesn't do very well where aps doesn't have such weaknesses (edit) well aps does which is lots of heavy armor slopes but even then it can still do significant damage

I live the empty space in your ships man super cool. It makes it super realistic i wish i could fit everything like you

Honestly, I personally NEVER use plasma that has more than 10 charges per shot. I zse rapid fire ~5 charge plasma because it just cores out its target mich like the APS, while also leaving a bigger hole where it's traveling to battle some of the inaccuracy through stability and heat buildup. And I feel like that's way better than just sending 100 charges at once or so.

21:16 I don't get why health is a thing, it's a ship it's either floating and/or fighting or it's destroyed.

Sorry it's taken me a few days to get back to this. I touched on the concept in the livestream, but Plasma has a real issue when it comes to high damage per shot setups. To explain why we'll look at the most basic scenario, a big pile of vertical, (or horizontal), beams several layers deep. The first block you hit takes the full damage. Perfect It now propagates in 6 directions from this initial block. This means that 5 real blocks and 1 air block get damage transferred to them, but air counts as 2 blocks with plasma propagation rules. So the damage gets split 7 ways, and 2 of those 7 ways are allocated to empty air which eats the damage, that damage is gone, lost. 2/7ths is 28.57%. You've lost over a quarter of your damage just at the first propagation. of the 5 blocks that get damage transferred to them, 4 are in the outer layer, and 1 is in the second layer. It's even worse at the next one as all the blocks in the first layer now have air on 2 sides of them, so they lose 4/9ths of the damage transferred to them. And the one block in the second layer has the same math outlined for the first propagation event in layer 1. I won't go through the math in detail for the final loss amount as it's a bit hard to visualise without a diagram but in the end just 42% of the initial damage remains after the propagation. The next layer is even worse as you have 4 blocks in layer 2 and 8 blocks in layer 1 losing 4/9ths and 1 block in layer 3 losing 2/7ths in their propagation. Whilst you can math this out for a super exact number you can use a multiplier of 0.6 to get a very close approximation of the amount of remaining damage transferred, 42%*0.6 = 25.2%. So your now down to a quarter of your starting damage, and it's spread not quite evenly amongst over 20 blocks at this point. Your looking at a 100k+ damage reaching the target just to pop a 4m metal beam at this point, and the amount you'll need grows exponentially from there. Thus plasma is most efficient when you it the target with just enough damage to pop a single block.Anymore and an enormous percentage gets wasted, and if you go beyond one propagation that amount starts to exceed half your initial damage which makes it become really inefficient.

Would plasma treat the .5 block air gap left by appliqué panels? Usually use those as an air gap

would be interesting to see how much worse the plasma would do if the AI was on broadside 2.0 with the ability to turn the ship to present fresh armor... because I think it will lose pretty hard vs armor piercing

Another point I've not seen yet, pc is down so can't check, but do ciws weapons work against plasma? And if so, how easily?

I prefer my aps as AP head-HEAT-HE-HE-HE etc

wait, was the particle cannon been switched to this new plasma cannon? (I havent logged into FTDs in half a year so dont know new changes)

I feel like Plasma needs a cost reduction. It's okay for a specialized weapon to be cheap or for a very versatile weapon to be expensive but a specialized weapon that is also expensive? No sense in using it unless you are building to counter a very specific craft. Why would I want to build something that is only good against wedge spam front siders?

Hey man, don't know who to ask so I come to you for answear. Why the hell in campaign its always 1v1 battles. My fleet is designed to work together yet DWG sends single ship and its always 1v1!? The hell is wrong with the campaign!? (Not to mention that there is little to no explanation/tutorial for campaign mechanics for newbie like me)

You sure say like a lot like every like other word like is like you know? Like