[OLD VERSION] How to make q̶u̶i̶t̶e̶ ̶l̶i̶k̶e̶l̶y̶ the most efficient armour in version 0.2

Overview

A Guide for how to make the T H I C C E S T drone for battle.

Introduction

I bought this game three days ago, and after 10 hours of gameplay and plenty of discussion some friends and I have been able to figure out the most effective method of armouring your drone, taking into account volume, resistance and drone budget. I’ve decided to share this information with the public, and by the end of this I hope that you have gained enough new knowledge to have more ideas about how to properly construct your drone and ultimately have more fun shooting your enemies out of the sky!

Before you continue reading, I’d like to preface this guide with a few things

• This is, of course, in an early build of the game so if you spend ages building a drone which then breaks in a future update then don’t blame me!
• There are a few things in this guide which have broken the game in my experience, and as such for the sake of mine, your and everyone else’s enjoyment I implore you to at the very least read every section in bold

Building the armour

NOTE: This is now obsolete, but you can read the maths if you would like to understand how this is so efficient
To get the most out of your armour, build like so:

1. Build a 1×3 block structure
2. Place SPEISD-72 3×1 armour all around the blocks in the way shown by the image below.
3. Stack this pattern forwards and backwards as far as required to create a sort of cylinder.

With this configuration, each 5x3x1 block layer of a cylinder will offer 35 durability for only 19 budget and 2.7 weight.

The piece of armour used is preferable because it has the best ratio of surface area:resistance offered:building budget consumed . Though the DICE-DO1 armour has a surface area:resistance ratio of 3 while the SPEISD-72 only has that of 2.67, the DICE-DO1 costs 1 point more. Additionally, though the SPEISD-72 takes up a 3x1x1 area it technically only needs one square to attach to, allowing for such a compact configuration.
Therefore, I would suggest that in addition to building the structure above, you use the SPEISD-72 where possible elsewhere –
– and where it is impossible, use the DICE-DO1 –
If there are any remaining 1×1 gaps, then you have to resort to the BRIK-100 1×1.

What does the extreme of this design look like?

three words: Literally game breaking
With what I’ve calculated, I produced this design. I cannot emphasize enough that you SHOULD NOT replicate this design for online battling purposes (and not just because it took forever to make)
Though i was able to break 11,000 durability with this design while keeping it in a tier that is allowed in pvp battles, this is not a sustainable way of playing. Enemies already take an age to kill you, but this straight up breaks the game. Servers lag when you try to join with this behemoth and the game can’t even render all of the armour on the drone. I even somehow encountered a glitch where the game considered me dead but i was still playing with 0% health, making me invincible. You can see the footage of it here where my friend and I each took our own designs for a spin:
Later, the server crashed.

If you want my advice, keep your drone within tier 3 if you want to hopefully complete a whole match.

Edit: A new frontier in thicc

Me and my friends have discovered a superior design which uses a similar amount of armour for significantly fewer blocks.
Not gonna lie, I’m not exactly sure how this is better mathematically, but it is slightly superior as i was able to increase my durability by around 500, even if it may be a bit less space efficient.This breaks servers even more than the other design, so DEFINITELY do not replicate this:

Design Variants

Below is a series of different configurations of cylinders which are all quite similarly effective and can be used in your own designs.

Designs listed above (Left to right, top to bottom: 2×2, 1×3, 1×2, 1×1)

An example of how to use this information

Below is a design I currently used named “The pringles can”. It has significantly less durability (6,500), but on the extreme designs half of the armour wouldn’t load anyways so it may be just as effective. Although it lags when you respawn it doesn’t crash servers since I kept it within tier 4, so you can actually finish games with it. However, it only has a top speed of 24 with 7% acceleration and no matter what I do the boosters don’t load in so you tend to have to sit in the corner that you spawn in and be a bullet sponge. That doesn’t stop me from winning games though ¯_(ツ)_/¯.

Conclusion

The benefits of using this doctrine are evident, so long as you don’t take it too far. I hope that in the current version of the game people will have fun with this, though at the same time I think this presents a glaring issue to the developers if they want to balance their armour system. Despite this, i congratulate the devs on their work and look forward to seeing what they are able to do in the future.

If you read this guide in its entirety then I thank you very much ’cause this is my first real one and I spent a lot of time making it. Upon reflection there could potentially be an even more efficient way of armour placement utilising a certain other piece, but I’ll leave that to the comment section to yell at me about. But that’s all I have to say, so thank you again and I’ll see you on the battlefield!