Unusual Tactics: Just... run into things.
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- Опубліковано 7 січ 2025
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I tried a new method for editing where the audio is totally scripted and the videos are recorded separately. I do not like this method. I'm going back to the normal method.
There will be a part 2 where I go more hands on with the ramming of meta, and test more thoroughly. This is just an overview.
the klang ram will always be my mount of choice
You can also use a hangar doors for piercing enemies. They have a small radius - yes. But they can cut through light armour like through butter.
And so... I built a transport with one purpose... To launch the shurikens made of this doors)
Just battery, rotor and doors
@@Aganeya huh. Door shuriken. Interesting
I have never seen this game before, I have no idea why UA-cam put this in my recommendations. Good video I had fun. If I ever play this game I'll be sure to make a Blackstone fortress and yeet it into something.
@Gentleman_33 YT hasn't put me in the space engineers bubble yet, so I still get sent to unsuspecting people. Glad you enjoyed though.
I’ve built a “plasma lance” (patent pending) style ship, which drives an armored payload on a large spire into an enemy ship, once in, a landing gear activates to grab onto the inside, it detached from the ship, and doors open up to reveal turrets to gnaw at the internals
Also have you tested whiplash ram blades? A Layered ram using rotors to build up speed
have you tried doing the same with a railgun or two? use the ram to piece multiple layers of heavier armor, then the railguns basically bunker buster the thing?
The freezer laptop is peak
love your work mate
Great vid topic and coverage! I hadn't realized how deep some player communities have gone into this play style. :D
My ram ship phase didn't last long on its own. I've generally gone for your option of supplementing some of my other fighting ships with a small blast door 3x3x10 cross shaped ram, for use in case of emergencies. However, I also tend to design my ships with a basic heavy armor skeleton or frame to reduce chances of grid splitting. At its simplest usually, this is just a spine running the ship's length (either middle, dorsal, or ventral alignment). In case of extra emergencies (usually terminal kamikaze type situations), it can also act as a ram.
Once you bring mods into the equation, it gets really messy trying to match up tactics to specific servers and modlists.
That said, the vanilla meta is a bit frustrating with how delicate armor blocks are, and how a light armor block has no performance advantage over e.g. a medical station in terms of taking damage (other than cost of components). And the deformation and damage transmission, ugh. XD
I found that something like the AQD Combat Balance Core mod, or using Configurable Parameters to achieve the same, significantly improves my game experience. These reduce armor block deformation (down to about 15-20%) and increase their resistance (50% dmg). Keeping other functional blocks at normal damage and health makes them relatively much squishier compared to the armor.
This gives armor blocks (and blast doors, which count as light armor for damage reduction purposes) specifically more purpose in ship design, since this makes refinery armor, gyro armor, etc much less effective. Unfortunately, it also makes a lot of "rule of cool" workshop ships less useful, since they often use all kinds of non-armor blocks for greebling and cosmetic variation -- sometimes in places that really should be more structurally sound. ^^;
And of course, it makes ramming significantly more effective. In PVE with this change, the MES Reaver and Ork factions become even more of a menace because many of their ships are built primarily with heavy armor.
OTOH, a simple speed mod (like the Aerodynamic Physics default 150 m/s) expands ship maneuverability, making ramming both more effective and more difficult.
And/or add in the kinetic devastation, bigger explosion, critical reactor/jump drive mods, and almost every ship becomes a potentially explosive pinata surrounded by a crunchy armor shell.
for a large ship it would be cool to ram in and have a tunnel in the pike to go through and invade the ship
Personally, I think the prime use of a ram is to penetrate into a ship, then detonate a Warhead cluster. Not only are you going to have a cool factor with your explosive barbs, but you'll generate your OWN scrap to damage and continue shredding internal systems, even if it isn't as meta as stone or ice chunks.
@PWaldo-lw2ds embedding warheads is a horrifying tactic, and will easily split a ship. I like having multi-hit ram ships personally, but all ramming tactics are cool asf
@alingruad There was an animatic a while back about salvaging, and one feature of the animatic was a faction of droneships that used rotor-driven barbs made from antennae to immobilize their prey ships.
Might be some merit in that. Attach some hydrogen engines and a tank (or Ion if you're rich) automate the engagement of dampeners, and use detachable probes from the main ram.
@@J.Hawker Keen patched out damage from stone/ice chunks ages ago though. 6+ years ago stone launchers were a thing. Has that changed again recently? I haven't noticed my mining ships taking any damage as I blithely eject stone willy nilly everywhere.
@@dakaodo I assumed it was more about immobilization rather than pure damage, but I know I've had damage from loose debris happen before. And stone/ice chunk damage being 0 would invalidate stuff like those old mechanical railguns, wouldn't it?
@@J.Hawker Can you send me that animatic aka animation?
not really a ram, but i remember several years ago I took the idea of using stones as a shrapnel weapon and made what was essentially gravity claymores:
take a spherical gravity generator, cover it in little rocks in areas pointed away from your stuff. have it set up to create a very strong gravitational field. to fire, just reverse its gravity
the little rocks get embedded in armor and internals, and cause more damage as the target moves. it's brutal
the axe is dope
*@Alingruad*
idea, make a "ramming arm" that extends (far) beyond your ship (perpendicular), then you just drive as fast & close as possible past the target ship & cut it in half...
But here is the trick, you have space for 2 (or more) ramming arms, each in their own "socket" (protected indentation in the ship), this socket is filled with either repair arms, or you can detach the arm, fold back the hinge, deploy a hologram & rebuild the arm, on the fly, basically a ramming weapon that can re-grow itself :D
@sebbes333 the problem with this is that putting a ramrod on a subgrid can either destroy your ship, or simply break. The ramrods would have to be welded in place, maybe some welder subgrids to reprint after ramming super quickly. I'd have to learn how much cargo could hold the ramrods though
@@alingruad Happy experimenting to you, I hope you find some interesting solutions :)
@@alingruad Merge blocks could make it one grid for the duration of a ram, but I'd defo consider the ram to be detachable/disposable at the weak point of the merge. But the combo of 2 merge blocks, a double rotor (hinges, pistons, whatever) to separate the grids enough for the merge to function, and the welders makes this a very PCU-expensive proposition. Each welder can only cover a 1x3 section of ram, and IIRC it takes a minimum 5 blocks in line to cut off damage being transmitted. Looks like most of your rams shown are 10-20 blocks? So that's 4-7 welders.
Total PCU for a single 10-block arm and welders:
200 merge blocks x 2
200 rotors x 2
600 welders x 4
90 conveyors between the welders 3 x 3
10 ram itself 1x10 blocks
That's 1100 PCU for only one ram arm. Compare its effectiveness to 1100 blocks of heavy armor. You could make your ram ship into a sea urchin, with 10 x 110 rams, for the same PCU cost. Each 110-block ram could be 10x3x3 in a cross pattern with one or two quarters filled in as a reinforcing spine, making them more durable than a welded 1x10 ram. I don't know how long a single ram would last, but let's say 2 rams on average.
So you have to ask yourself if the single welded ram arm assembly will perform equivalent to at least 10, preferably 20 of the larger fixed rams. And how long your ship's thrust and other systems will last. Long enough to ram, retreat, weld, repeat 10 times? Or use multiple fixed rams like a pitchfork to get 2-3 rams in per run, about 5 times?
Heavy armor is only 10% more HP than blast door, with 150 steel plates and 50 metal grids. Blast door blocks are 140 steel plates. The metal grids take up a lot of volume, while steel plates are very dense.
Weld time is proportional to HP: 3.6s for a blast door, 4s for a heavy armor block.
A large cargo container holds 421875 L. That's components for 1000 blast doors weighing 2800 tons (2.8M kg), or for 351 heavy armor weighing 1153 tons (1.16M kg). This probably won't be the limiting factor in the process, since that's enough for 100 blast door rams or 35 heavy armor rams.
Scale these numbers as needed, depending on your desired ram design, either fixed or rotating.
Carrying dead cargo weight into combat for the first few rams is a bit of a liability. You're carrying the weight of the armor components, but not getting either its passive protective benefits or ramming ability, until you spend that weight on welding up a new ram arm.
A big part of the SE meta (not covered in this video) is the PCU economy in ship design. Fiddly rotating subgrid bits, welder arrays, and custom weapons in general have a high cool factor, but they're very expensive and often very fragile.
e.g. a PMW (player made weapon) missile is what recent SE updates have made much easier to build, but they still cost at least 500 PCU per (very simple) missile, not including any welder arrays.
or e.g. PMW turrets. One custom turret needs minimum 3 guns to break even on PCU compared to vanilla large grid artillery or assault cannon turrets. But the custom turret is more fragile, less accurate due to occasional weird phantom forces causing wobbling and spinning, and overall more temperamental.
Ultimately, the SE meta boils down to a few very simple -- crude, really -- designs. Which many of us have seen a hundred times. It gets boring, for sure. To break out of that stale meta, you have to trade off less effectiveness for rule of cool, basically. :D
@dakaodo that was a fantastic breakdown... I might have to try a self welding array for a ramming system, I'm mainly worried about bulk... and reliability.
Cruisers as shown are dead simple. Metal, thrusters, gyros. It's the execution of its armor layout that really makes it effective. If it receives a volley of gunfire on first approach (as it often does) the front section eats tons of damage before inevitably hitting its target.
I'm worried that whatever mechanism designed will just get fubared on first approach and be dead Weight.
How its done canonically is these Cruisers go in for a ram, and if it's with a fleet, there's a gunboat 1km away carrying several of these replaceable rams so it can quickly grab another one. These are meant to operate in trios to keep consistent damage.
As far as making this a reusable, reliable, and still speedy self replacing ramrod, I do have an idea for it. It involves moving a lot of guts around, but if I ever finish it I'll be sure to post it on youtube.
I had always run over the idea of making a self welding reinforced wedge nose on the end of a ship and use it to just cleave parts off other ships.
in practice, the welders end up getting broken a lot. Maybe you could design something that gets around this though!
My first 800 hours I probably spent building ramships. I made all kinds of designs from fixed penetrators to the Arms of Klang that were designed to harness the power of Klang to rend ships apart from within. Never made a pure ramship that was practical though, my most successful designs were an APHE type deal where it would penetrate outer armor then detonate near the center, usually could break a ship in half with that.
For the front of the ram you should use drills. They have a lot of HP and they don't have impact damage.
if someone is willing to abuse the speed limit, but says drills and wheels are too far, they have lost the entire point of PvP... and are just entitled AF
you dont get to pick and choose whatever best suits you and then never fight someone who decides to figure out your weaknesses and then work against them
drills are expensive, they are heavy, but they are SUPER durable, and can only be mounted in a handful of ways
a lot of servers have block limits or PCU enabled in order to make sure that the "PvP is fair" when in reality, it just creates a different meta geared towards a different kind of player than one who is going off of a per-unit-cost system or one that is going off of a sort of fleet points system with subsystems adding to those points in ways that PCU and block limits simply cannot account for on their own
rules need to be established by a neutral third party for them to truly be fair, or agreed upon by both parties beforehand
because when all else fails, there are no rules aside from "dont exploit the normal limitations of the game" and "dont crash the server to win a fight" or "dont crash your opponent in order to win a fight of 'who loads in first' "
@@johnm9263 I would say in a real PVP scenario that wheels and drills are fine, it’s just another block after all. I just don’t like using them because they’re “unrealistic” to a “real life” scenario.
While i only tried it with missiles, i have found a simple 1x1x5 ram that can disable medium to small ships very reliably! From front to back, 2 interior pillars (the thin ones), 1 1x1 wheel, 1 heavy armor block and 1 (or more) warheads set to live
The warheads may be cheating for a ram, but if you're fighting fair, you messed up
@Thetankracer getting a ram to hit is the most difficult part of the process, so once it hits, I think all is fair.
I am curious why you like using containers full of stone. Dropped items no longer do damage to grids. The Reaper Missile on the workshop used to take advantage of that mechanic, but once it was patched out, the missile was basically useless.
@estoericaferret oh. Well I learned something new today.
@estoericaferret Yeah, I thought alingruad was just using it for extra ship ballast in the ram, when he mentioned it in the video.
@@dakaodo i think it still does extra damage just due to weight
@@alingruad yeah, the extra mass behind the grid's velocity probably helps dig deeper into armor.
honestly, tho, keen should roll that one back. like, maybe not components, but rocks/ore and ingots ought to shred things when they're moving at 100m/s.
@estoericaferret I love shrapnel weapons they're so scummy
Maybe put the name of the game you are talking about in the title or something? I don't even play Space Engineers and the UA-cam algorithm fed me this for some reason.
@@JaggedJack1 i label it as space engineers in the tags usually
he's newer on the SE scene on YT, so the algorithm is still figuring out how and who to feed his videos to. Trust me, it's tagged appropriately. I AM on SE YT and I got this vid like, INSTANTLY, pretty much.
edit: also, if anything you saw in the vid peaked your interest, highly recommend picking up the game! It's complex and some systems can be difficult to learn, but god is it fun. Sitting here with 1133 hours in this game.