Overview
A general overview of the new Advanced Cannons feature added into FtD. Currently a work in progress. Warning: May get very wordy.
What are Advanced Cannons / Guide Introduction
Advanced Cannons are a new addition to From the Depths in version 1.861, and onwards. They are (possibly) intended to be used as a replacement/upgrade to/over custom cannons. They generally offer a bit more customization than Custom Cannons, but mainly due to the ability to fine tune the ammunition, and shot/bore size, as well as the addition of the railgun feature.
This guide is intended to cover the basics of building these cannons.
Summary of Advanced Cannon Parts.
This piece is the core of every Advanced cannon. Shells will be fired from this point (technically), and all other pieces must be connected to this piece in order to have use.
This block, assuming it’s connected correctly to a firing piece, another gauge increase, splitter, or cooling unit, increases the width of the shell able to be fired. A maximum of 8 gauge increases are possible to be used, maxing out the shell width at 500mm.
This piece does what it says on the label, and splits the gauge. This piece does essentially nothing except for allowing the gauge to turn, and be split. The central piece in the middle must connect facing the firing piece in order to work.
This piece reduces the barrel cooldown of the gun. A “hot” barrel will be unable to fire unless you override this restriction by “overclocking” the gun, which does have diminishing returns, as it will stack “heat” as the gun fires to the point that the gun won’t be able to fire at all.
These boxes load your ammunition into the gun. Adding more of these to your cannon will increase complexity of the loader, slowing down the reload rate. Adding more clips to the loader speeds up the individual loader. The 1mm belt fed loader is unique, as it loads faster than a conventional 1mm loader with 4 clips, but it cannot fire until it’s clip(s) are fully loaded. Autoloaders can be connected to almost anything attached directly to the gun apparatus.
These hold your completed ammunition for storage until they are ready to fire. The “solid” variant has an extra point of armor, and is a bit easier on your PC FPS, since it won’t render the racked shells. “Clear” clips are good for troubleshooting though.
This is the piece that you use to “talk” to your ammo customizers. Each one of these will load the gun/loader/clip with your choice of ammunition.
These pieces reduce the recoil your gun makes. Recoil is a byproduct of shooting the gun. Recoil will kick your vessel backwards each time your cannon fires. Some particularly large guns can flip ships and planes without any of these pieces. Each meter of this will cut the recoil value by 5%.
Note: In 2.0 these parts have cooldown, corresponding with gauge size. Cannons can now “overload” the hydraulics and effectively make them useless if fire rate is too high.
Each of these give a stationary gun a field of fire depending on the type of mantlet installed. They also have a high armor value, but they can be very expensive to use.
This is part of the actual propulsion of the shell. Each barrel helps to add shot velocity, and accuracy. Heavy barrels are identical, but more well armored and much heavier to use.
This piece functions the same as a barrel, as well as cutting down the barrel cooldown of the gun in question by 10%. This piece can only be used once per cannon, and is also slightly weaker than most barrel pieces. Some suggest using it on the end of the gun, so if it’s lost gun performance isn’t hampered, some prefer to use it at the base of the gun where it’s hard to hit, but has the potential to cut the whole barrel off if destroyed. The decision is yours.
This piece serves a similar function as the Bore Evacuator, it cuts barrel cooldown by 10%. It does this at the cost of cutting shot velocity by 5%. It also can only be placed as the final piece of the gun barrel.
This piece is used to connect pieces together that usually wouldn’t go together. Many people use it to slot on more autoloaders since they are significantly cheaper than gauge increases. You cannot continue a gauge increase snake with a 6 way.
This piece will automatically set fuse information in accordance to the target the gun is attempting to shoot at, making it near essential for flak guns.
This piece draws a visible line from itself, towards the target using the predicted path of fire. This assumes all shots are 100% accurate though, so it can be wrong.
These are the pieces you use to customize your ammunition. The controller is the essential piece, customizers can be added or removed as you see fit.
Basic Cannon Assembly
The cannon i’m going to demonstrate in this build is just going to be a very basic howitzer. It’s probably not going to hold up well in a real fight (in fact, it’s ♥♥♥♥), but the demonstration here will show basic cannon assembly. I will be replacing the primary cannon on the (old) starter fortress.
In this demonstration, I am building a turreted gun, single axis, found under new objects. You don’t NEED a turret for your gun, but in this example, a turret will be used.
Add an advanced firing piece. This is the base of the gun, and is the essential component to actually make an advanced cannon. You can get away with literally nothing else, and it will still “shoot”, but there’s no ammo for it to shoot yet. Note: The “round” end is for the barrel.
Optional, but highly reccomended. Build a “mantlet” for your gun. A mantlet is what allows the gun barrel to move within its own limited range of motion set by the mantlet, results with each will vary as each have different roles. All mantlets can, and will fit onto the firing piece, if plugged correctly into the front. A side bonus of mantlets is that they have rather high armor values.
Add an autoloader. Size will matter, but i’m not covering that now. Technically adding more autoloaders is better, but can make the gun actually load slower, especially if you only use each loader for a single clip. I forgot the math behind it, but there is a balance to be done between too many, and too few. You can put autoloaders on the firing piece itself, or on any gauge increase in the gun assembly, but not on gauge cooling units.
Add ammo clips (should be named belts, or magazines, whatever…). These hold all the ammo that you will create in a few steps. They only fit on the autoloader in one direction. When loaded, these are very… explosive… Note: I rotated the autoloader vertically, so I’m able to use all 4 clip inputs. If left unrotated, you would only have 3 clip inputs available, unless I plugged it into the very back of the firing pin/gauge increase.
Add ammo input feeders. These are the parts where you will load your ammunition into, i’ll cover their use in a bit on how to set them up.
Optionally, add gauge increases. These permit your gun to fire a wider shell, which have obvious benefits of inflicting more damage (almost in every case). They also usually come with the downside of having a rather large cooldown. I also added the barrel on this step, those go in front of the mantlet, you can do that pretty much at any time after you’ve placed the mantlet. It’s usually nice to watch the gauge increases actually making the gun bigger. Technically, you don’t need to add a barrel to any gun, but they barely function without said barrel pieces.
Optionally, add gauge cooling units. These will reduce the “cooldown” your gun has to deal with due to shot recoil letting it shoot faster. Less recoil cooldown is better, so spam these if you can.
Build an ammo customizer. This now only requires an ammo customizer string, and an ammo controller. Remember to have ammo on board too!
Customize your ammo. This is a bit complicated, while also pretty intuitive, i’ve covered the details of the parts in the section below. What’s in the screenshot is a very basic AP shot, just for an example. Make sure to play with the refrence slider to make sure the shell will fit into the gun, I forgot to do that in the image, but I’ve built enough to know that the shot will, in fact, fit.
Order your ammo. Press Q on one of your INPUT feeders, that you connected to the ammo belts on the cannon, it will bring you to this screen. If this is your first assembly on the craft, you would only have one selection to choose from when picking which ammo store to draw from. On my version, i’ve built, and used 3 ammo types. Choose the ammo you just made (whichever ammo type made most recently goes onto the bottom of the list, would be nice to be able to name them). (Updated image coming soon.)
Pick the ammo output port. This is the part in which you assign your inputs, and order that shells are loaded in. In this instance, we will just use this one shot type. We will “assign all unassigned intakes to the source” for simplicity. If you just need one shot type in this gun, assigning all unassigned intakes works out, but if you want different ammo types loaded, that takes some effort. (Updated image coming soon.)
Wait for it to load till it “clicks”, then, FIRE. Middle click or left control/command (by default) to fire. You should now have the knowledge to build a very simple cannon. Tweak the cannon as you see fit. I will cover more in the next section.
Advanced… Advanced Cannon Assembely.
A common question people ask is, can I build two cannons on one turret? The answer here, it yes. It’s reasonably simple to do as well, provided you follow one simple rule. The two cannons CAN NOT connect in any way, at any point. In the context of multiple guns, I mean multiple firing pieces, not multiple barrels.
This is a very minimalistic example of what I mean.
Note how there is a gap of space in between the two cannon components. These cannons are only held together by the Local Weapon Controller (it’s bad practice to build the gun like that, if the LWC gets popped by an EMP, you lose all of the gun connected to it like this). You can build as far in either direction as you want, even “tetrising” it together if you want, coiling the parts together, but if any piece is shared, it will break your design.
Like this.
Note, if you look closely, neither cannon is actually connected to the other given this rigging, because you can’t connect the end of a gauge increase to the side of a different gauge increase. There are two independantly functioning cannons on this turret, using this rig. I can further extend each cannon’s gauge increases, and cooling units, provided I continue to keep the ends from connecting to each other.
6 way connectors, and autoloaders themselves sometimes can make this task difficult, since they connect on all sides. Avoid using them near points where two cannons can potentially meet up.
This trick, i’m supprised to say, is actually a feature, not a bug. If you want to fire a shell that simply won’t fit into an autoloader, the solution is supprisingly simple. Dont add an autoloader!
This is the ammo customizer string i’m going to use for my 175mm, extremely unsustainable gun. It does look funny when it fires, and is actually pretty devastating when it hits.
All you need to do in order to fire stupidly long shells is this.
That’s right, all you gotta do is slap an ammo input on top of the firing piece and you can fire shells like this.
As I said, this is an extremely unsustainable way to set up a gun, mostly due to high reload times, however the basic principle can be used for exceptionally small shells to bypass an autoloader feeding time, as configured like this, all barrels will feed directly from the ammo supply instead of requiring a shell to be manufactured and loaded into the loader first first.
Building a Railgun
Railguns are built in largely the same way as a conventional Advanced cannon would be, but with a few pieces added on.
Railguns are powered off of the “energy” resource, which at the moment can only be stored in batteries. Railguns cannot accept power from a source other than the battery, and electric engine power source feeding from an engine of some sort.
I strongly reccomend planning for small caliber railguns, as bigger railguns don’t really work too well unless you have a MASSIVE battery bank, and a whole array of powerhouse engines. Generaly, the bigger the shell, the less efficent the rails will be.
This piece is the base of what allows you to install the actual rail. It must be connected to the firing piece. Place as many or as few as you want, but be aware, more fixtures means (usually) a more efficent, and powerful railgun.
Under the same category as the attachment fixture, you will have barrel magnets. These are the actual rails that will pull your shell.
The chargers are the things that will actually convert battery power unto useable rail power. They can be placed simirlarly to autoloaders and things of the like.
It takes some solid effort to get railguns to do exactly what you want them to do. Give the weapon a shot, fire off a few test rounds, and play around with the Q menu for the cannon, and see what works best for you most of the things there are pretty straightforward, with good tooltips if you don’t know what it’s trying to say.
With propper planning, you can get multiple shots to be fired like this, reasonably consistently. (This was a 9k power battery firing this shot out of the gun in the image above.)
Shell Parts: Casing
Gunpowder is the only way to get a shot to leave the barrel of a gun, with the exception of railguns. At the moment, there is no other casing of its kind to compare to, so I can’t say much else.
A relatively new type of casing that will only work with railguns. This casing assists a railgun to accelerate the projectile, or make it more accurate (depending on the rail configuration), depending on how many of these are in the shell pieces are connected.
How much “boom” do you need?
The question above is in relation to gunpowder, and now “railgun casings”. How much do you need? Can you have too much? Isn’t more ALWAYS better? Bigger dakka is always better right?
The answer is, you can take as much gunpowder as you need/want, depending on your expected combat distances, vehicle role, and shell types. You must consider however, is adding more gunpowder going to make the shot/cannon less efficient? In general, if you are shooting for accuracy, and distance, more gunpowder is better. With enough of it, you can literally shoot across the entire world before the shell despawns (it will crash the game once it hits the edge, at least in my experience). Too little of it, and the shot will tumble out of the gun (literally), but be rather powerful when (if) it hits it’s mark.
As a general rule, more gunpowder means more recoil, and therefore you need to compensate by either adding A LOT of cooling related parts, either gauge cooling parts (to shoot faster), or hydraulic recoil compensators (to keep from flipping your vehicle), or instead just deal with the cooldown. Long story short, if you want a lot of gunpowder, you are going to need a VERY big gun setup in order to compensate, and keep the gun useful in terms of fire rate. Combining this with a railgun can create two things. A shot that can travel faster than the speed of light and recoil that can flip some incredibly massive ships, unless the gun is built in just the right spot. Each piece of gunpowder also will reduce the amount of “real” shot that will impact the target, since that space is taken by the propulsion. In extreme cases, you can build an almost entirely gunpowder round that has an APsabot cap, but when building a shot like this, you can’t build an effective HE/EMP/Fragmentation warhead. Generally, a faster shot is going to be much harder to miss with, and also have the fun bonus of being able to skip off the water, although usually weaker in terms of damage.
Lower amounts of gunpowder generally lead to bigger effective shells, that generally deliver more damage (with the exception of APSabot shells most of the time), as well as options to add utility to the round. In a mostly gunpowder round (say almost full gunpowder on a 10 part shell, minus two parts), you can only choose two parts for the round, if you stick with a design as such, and that generally leads to a quite fast, reasonably accurate shot, that often doesn’t inflict too much damage. Now take the same amount of shell parts, and only use 3 or 4 gunpowder parts. Firstly, you can add a base bleeder to boost muzzle velocity a bit more. It will never be as fast as 8 gunpowder parts, but that’s not the point. Then you have further degrees of customization, as you can design a, for example APHE shot, which requires at minimum 3 shell parts to be functional, or ideally 5 parts to add either extra HE filler, or solid bodies. This shot is going to be inherently stronger in terms of HE power, since you can add more HE body to a shot, weaker in terms of AP power (or potentially equal if designed well, again, the math is weird), and a bit (lot) slower due to less gunpowder. That, and the fact that this gun doesn’t need to be built as beefy in order to sustain a reasonable rate of fire. A shot with low gunpowder is going to be much slower once it leaves the barrel, and usually can be dodged by particularly smallswift vehicles, but inherently more powerful in most cases.
What about NO gunpowder? It can be done, as stupid as it seems. You must use a rail deployment system in order for this type of shot to work. This is for making the biggest types effective shells possible. Generally, a fully charged, moderate sized railgun will have the potential to send a shot to decent speeds depending on the design, which is pretty great, all things considered. The only major downside to these are that they are very expensive to build, and they must have a full charge in order to be effective.
Typically “half and half” is the most optimal type of shell when it comes down to assembly of rounds. As more gunpowder requires more time for full propellant burn, but increases accuracy and speed of the shot. Low gunpowder amounts lead to requiring a longer barrel since the shell itself becomes longer, requiring a longer barrel to keep the shell flying in a relatively straight line. Half gunpowder, half shell ratios are usually where the barrel lengths meet their minimums closest together.
Note: After 2.0, optimal powder ratios are now a quarter powder, three quarters shell.
Shell Parts: Base
Each shell can only have a single base, and each one has a different role that must be paid attention to.
The base bleeder is a portion of a shell that in the real world is put in place to ensure no gasses escape in front of the shot fired, or get sucked back into the vacuum behind the shot while leaving the barrel, allowing for smoother exit from the barrel. This helps boost shell velocity in game and in the real world (as well as improve accuracy in the real world, but mainly due to the speed). This also makes the shot easier to detect, since once it leaves the barrel it somewhat acts as a rocket, as the bleeder starts to burn any left over propellant once it leaves the barrel.
The tracer shell base is primarily intended to be used in smaller caliber cannons, usually with multiple barrels. The purpose of the shot in game is to help guide the other shots fired immediately after a shot containing this. This is accurate to real world shells, as you can see where they’re going (real world, non tracer shells are basically invisible), including the fact that in lower calibers, tracers actually have the potential to make a shot very inaccurate, due to uneven burning of the tracer element which also serves as propellant. When fired, the tracer looks quite similar to what a spotlight would look like if you looked right at it. Tracers can also have their color changed in order to conceal the type of shot they are, as well as assist you to figure out which shot the shot really is. I personally recommend using a mixed belt when firing these, that way you boost the accuracy of the other shells. Greatly increased detection on shots being fired as a result of the bright, hot burning tracer.
This particular shell base is essentially the torpedo fins for a bullet. In all honesty, it’s very situational, as submarines are a very rare thing to have to deal with. This also reduces HE potential down to 25%.
A shell base that is used to change kinetic damage into torque, pushing a target backwards and/or imparting a roll factor to the target being hit. This is useful as it can, and usually will throw off the aim of the AI, or push it away if the target is light enough.
Shell Parts: Body
The body is arguably the most important part of the shell, and largely dictates what the shell is designed to be used for, and also includes fuses for each shot, which are also used to determine the use of the shell.
Generally considered to be the AP portion of the warhead, besides the AP warhead itself. This is the conventional mass giving part of the shot, it boosts velocity of a shell, and kinetic power of the shot, granting penetration against armor, with the exception that the armor is too great, and this part may shatter.
This is the other common shell body piece, and is used along with quite a few shell heads (well two). The HE warhead body is at some point supposed to explode, often dealing large AoE damage. It doesn’t offer any bonuses to shell velocity, or accuracy, but it doesn’t hurt anything either, generally though, a shot full of this warhead body will fly slower than most other warheads. Bigger is better with HE warheads, as shot speed doesn’t matter, since there is very little penetration ability with the HE rounds, besides the actual force of the blast itself. HE will function just as well, flying towards the target at the speed of light, as it does when dropped like a feather onto the target, a straight HE shell will not inflict “real” kinetic damage.
The flak warhead is intended to be used for… well… flak. It deals roughly half the damage of a conventional HE shell, but it has double the burst radius, making it excellent to hit fast moving targets, even if it missed direct contact with the target.
This is a kind of unusual, and largely situational warhead. It is intended for use against lasers. It is best used with small, short, high caliber cannons with a very short timed fuse. Each time the round bursts, it will generate a large quantity of smoke, reducing the effectiveness of any lasers passing through.
The fragmentation warhead is generally intended to be used against lightly armored targets, commonly helicopters, jets, and other equally light things armored with wood or glass. Flak functions effectively the same as a shotgun round would. It is recommended to either use a proximity fuse, or a timed/altitude fuse. Flak is designed so that they will still work, even after a near miss. It is highly recommended to use a fuse, otherwise, this probably won’t work. For the proximity fuse to work, you won’t need a laser targeting system, but it’s likely the shot won’t burst if it sails wide, for a timed/altitude fuse, it will just work, however having a laser targeter allows for automatic fuse timing/setting. Ideally, while configuring your flak portion of the shell (fragmentation), it’s recommended to either set the burst to go 90 degrees (all fragments go mostly forward) especially on proxy fuses, or 180 degrees (fragments go everywhere) on timed fuses. Setting the cone even tighter can make the shell work in place of AP shells in some cases, especially if shields aren’t involved.
This shell part is intended to be a specialty part. It’s designed to allow the maximum amount of velocity to be achieved, at the cost of actual round size, which is usually in effect, half the size of the bore. I’m not entirely sure if this part of the shot is incapable of fragmenting, but the head is (which I’ll cover later). It offers a bit higher AP bonus than a solid body, but less kinetic damage.
This was added fairly recently. With the shots added along with the cannons, it wasn’t far from impossible to send rounds into space, without ever coming back down (in fact, it was almost too easy). This part of the shell will enforce a ballistic arc, even if it’s in space, which will prevent the shot from going into “orbit”, and bringing it back down to the planet. This shot also works in reverse. This shell part can also work on orbital platforms. Ordinarily, a shot fired, originating from space would have a velocity set, just as it was once it leaves the barrel. With this part, a shot can accelerate, or decelerate based on altitude gained (and make for a cool “mass driver” type of weapon, if targeting surface vehicles).
This is generally, the electronic version of the HE body. It largely serves the same role, but instead of blowing massive holes into the structure, it is intended to disable special systems such as the shields (probably the primary use), the AI, and repair drones.
The fin stabilizer is intended to be used when you need accuracy in a shot, more than you need distance, or velocity of the round. A fairly good example would be if you had a short barreled railgun, for whatever reason. It reduces muzzle velocity by 20%, and makes the shot on average 15% more accurate.
The most basic fuse. Once this hits the time you have set, the shot explodes, not much else to say about it, but ideally, it’s not particularly useful compared to the many other fuses without a laser targeting piece.
This is a fairly advanced fuse piece intended to be used as a part for flak. Once the shot approaches a certain distance to the target, set by you, the shot will explode. This shot only scans forwards in a 70 degree arc, so it’s entirely possible for this to not work at all, but it works without a laser targeter.
A different type of fuse, similar to the timed fuse, except this is set to go off at a certain altitude, above, or below sea level. Be cautious that you aren’t above, or below the altitude limits you have set, otherwise the shot will explode the moment it leaves the barrel.
A type of fuse specifically used to defeat shields, as once this fuse detects an abrupt path change (usually caused by bouncing off a shield), it will trigger the shell detonation.
A type of fuse used for making my favorite type of shot, the APHE shell. This fuse delays the activation of the HEFragmentation charge until it passes through enough armor to detonate, or exceeds a timer after touching armor, if the first category isn’t met.
This new piece of shell type allows for tandem HEAT shells, primarially used to defeat the new ERA armor. Assuming this is placed behind a different shell piece, this can be used to bypass ERA armor, as it will activate shortly after the ERA explodes. The HEAT jet is inherently weaker, but some damage is better than none.
Shell Parts: Head
Technically, you don’t need a head on your shell, but adding a proper head will help the shot to retain velocity, make it look a little better, and honestly just make sense.
This is a kinda special head. It uses the speed of the shot, and once it hits a target, it converts speed into kinetic energy enabling the shot to inflict more damage, the faster it goes. It can make rather large holes at the entry point, as it spreads damage laterally (sideways, and not drilled in), but typically won’t deal much damage beyond the initial point of entry, unless there is something explosive behind it on a timer.
The standard AP head, intended to penetrate the armor of the target first, allowing the rest of the shot to enter the hull. This is typically used as the primary part of most shells, at least in the real world. Ideally, once this penetrates the target, it will fragment spreading damage in the shape of a cone within the target, not including whatever follows behind it.
This is technically an APCR (armor piercing composite rigid) head, as that’s the literal definition of “composite”. This is technically a Sabot Head, but different, as it’s got a metal portion around the sabot head. This head has a higher chance to penetrate armor, but won’t fragment internally, unless it reaches armor beyond what it’s rated to handle, then it will shatter against said armor, largely doing nothing useful, although this shatter may damage things around the armor it breaks against.
This is the final part of an APDS head. When placed on top of a regular shell part, anything that isn’t a Sabot body, you should notice that it is significantly smaller than the rest of the shell. The Sabot head in the real world is a very thin, very hard (and very expensive) rod that has the sole purpose of penetrating armor. As a result of it’s design, it will not fragment on contact with anything, and will pass through pretty much everything. It does have a high chance to bounce off sloped armor however. This shot head also can’t really be used with HE, as that’s not how it works in the real world, and it will reduce all HE power in the round by 75%, this includes EMP, HE, and Fragmentation.
This type of head is used with HE body shells and performs a rather cool, and often overlooked role. A HESH head changes the shell from a really big bomb, to a type of shell designed to concuss the hell out of whatever it hits. HESH is a shot with a soft HE head, that once it hits the target, flattens, and then explodes. The point is that these shells don’t explicitly damage the outer armor (they can if big enough), but instead use this armor to tear apart the insides of the target. It flakes off the interior portion of the armor into the vehicle at the speeds of bullets, roughly comparable to the unlockable player minigun. This is also the closest we get to a straight up properly nosed HE round (though 2.0 added proper HE heads) In the real world, these are almost always used in place of regular HE shells, at least in tanks. The heavier the armor this type of head hits, the more shrapnel is thrown from the armor, and the more internal damage is taken.
The HEAT head is almost the opposite of the HESH head. Instead of blasting the outer armor to do damage, a HEAT head instead directs all the force from the blast into a very small point. Think of it like the kid with the magnifying glass, the shell is the sun, the armor is the glass, and the AI/Ammo is the ant. The shot burns it’s way through the armor of the target acting similar to an APCR shot after penetration, but with a higher damage spread. That, and the fact that there should be a pretty large explosion behind it too.
The skipper head is a shell head with quite a few similarities to the average AP cap, but with less AP, and damage values. What makes this head unique is that it guarantees the fact that the shot will skip over the water, provided it hits the water moving forwards at a degree of 30 degrees, or less. This head is quite useful for extending the range of your shots, especially in the case of hull mounted guns. However the AI doesn’t know how to “skip” shots on the water, and these types of shells are better served when in the hands of an actual human player. It’s also worth noting that the supercavitation base negates this head entirely since it sets skip chance to 0, where the skipper head acts as a multiplier 0X2=0.
Suggested basic shell assembely.
For the sake of simplicity, each shell designed here has 4 shell customizers. You can obviously make your shots bigger or smaller, but on the vessel I’m using for these examples, I only used a single gauge increase on each of these cannons. Feel free to tweak these designs to fit your needs, the rounds in these first 7 cases worked well for a .16m AA gun.
This shot as I mentioned before is one of my favorite types of shells. In this example, there is an AP capped head on the end of the shot, followed rearward by HE Warhead body, with a penetration depth fuse behind that, followed by gunpowder. This particular shot is very effective against lightly armored targets, as it doesn’t take much to penetrate the structure of wood.
Generally this type of shot will have a low armor penetration value, and kinetic damage value. This means that shields set into reflect mode can often bounce this round. Also, when shooting at metal, it’s very unlikely to penetrate the structure, functionally making this shot a HE shell.
It’s difficult to show, but this shot actually penetrated the first layer of the target before detonating on the wall behind it, as is apparent by the larger hole in the deck, than the entry point.
This particular shot is almost completely built out of flak warhead. In this instance I’ve stuck a timed fuse just below the head of the shot with a 10 second delay, which in this case was also has an AP capped head. I also placed a tracer at the base of the shell, which reduces the effective range of the shot compared to other rounds in the clip (which are the above and below shots), but helps the other shots stay on target significantly better. This isn’t a particularly powerful shot unless it makes contact with the target, then it’s immensely powerful as the shrapnel spread is set to 90 degrees.
Quite similar to the above. A shield is more than capable of completely negating this shot, although the fragments probably will pass in between small gaps in the shielding. This shot also has a tendency to “pop” before hitting the target, and a high armor value will negate the power of the fragmentation.
This shot is almost entirely built out of Solid Warhead Body, capped off with a composite head. It’s pretty great at penetrating real metal/alloy armor, but often over penetrates wooden armor. It’s proven useful against heavy targets, but, unless it hits something critical in a light structure, it often doesn’t inflict major damage.
This shot is pretty basic, and it can usually penetrate reflective shields, unless set to maximum power. In most cases, this shot won’t inflict much damage unless ammofuel is hit, and in most cases, damage is repairable, unless it manages to tear off a large portion of hull, connected by a weak joint in the vessel.
Shell assembely part 2.
This shot is a sabot body, capped with a sabot head. I have built this shot to work with the above shells, and as a result, actually went for less velocity, by adding a fin stabilizer onto the base of the shell for added accuracy, backed up by a base bleeder, which leads to a net loss of speed, pretty much equal to the AP round above. This shot will penetrate whatever the AP shot above wont, unless fired at acute angles, where it usually will bounce off the target.
Quite similar to the above, but as mentioned, sloping is the enemy of this shot. I’ve had it bounce off wood on several occasions due to the fact that the shot glanced off the target at an acute angle. Reflective shields often can’t stop this shot if hit directly, but properly angled, will make this shot useless.
This shot has my personal choice of two gunpowder, a tracer for the other shots included, three flak body pieces, a proximity fuse, as measured with a laser targeting system, but set with a 2m burst distance, and lastly an AP head, which on this shot is fairly useless with the exception of adding a bit of velocity. It’s honestly not supposed to deal much damage, but it will pop balloons, and break glass.
A rather basic shot, and honestly, there is very little about this that you’d need to worry about. If the shot sails wide, it likely won’t trigger the proximity fuse, since they only scan 70 degrees to the front. As mentioned before, shielding is a great way to stop flak.
This shot is specifically intended to be shot at heavily armored targets, hopefully destroying the engines, or knocking out the AI. It is a conventional HEAT head in design according to real world design. It has 2 gunpowder parts, a base bleeder, 4 HE body pieces, and the shaped head changing the shot from a relatively small explosive, to a rather useful utility against heavy armor. It is pretty useless against metal however in terms of damaging the metal itself.
Either type of shield is capable of stopping this. Reflective shields will usually cause detonation of the round, dealing minor damage to the vessel based on distance. Disruption shields will often absorb a large amount of the damage, usually by redirecting the shot somewhere else, typically away from the vessel. There is no real design of the hull of your vessel that can defeat this type of round. Unless you add spaced armor to your vehicle, which means that you’d need to build an air pocket where you’d expect to be taking HEAT rounds.
This is a very small HEAT shell, as I was concerned i’d destroy the whole testing rig. If you look closely, you should notice the HEAT fragments traveling from the secondary wooden wall, to the metal.
I shouldn’t need to get a screenshot of this shell design, as it’s almost identical to the above, but with a squash head instead of a shaped head. It largely does the exact same thing, but instead of directed damage, it sprays off projectiles from the armor.
Pretty much the same as a HEAT round, almost exactly. I highly reccomend making armor spacing in your vehicles whenever possible.
Look closely at the back corner of this maraduer gun deck, you should be able to see the rather large projectiles being thrown from the armor of the ship, as a result of being “thumped”.
This particular shot is actually very useful against thinner structures of most airships, especially helicopters if this round manages to hit the blades, or the blade mount due to the lateral spread of damage, as well as being quite useful against conventional jets, since as the name says, this is an excellent wing breaker. This is a fairly simple design, as it’s almost a complete copy of the AP/APCR shot above, with the exception of the head, which is obviously a Hollow Point head (also, this round I’ve took in the screenshot goes into a few larger caliber guns, so I’ve put a gravity compensator in it too in place of a solid body piece).
Either use a shield, or add an extra layer to your hull. Hell, try adding rubber, it will absorb damage caused by this type of shot, since it directs damage sideways. Basically, any type of buffer is capable of defeating this shot.