Thank you for the update!

***SOVEREIGN INCIDENT DEMO***
*v0.9.0*

- Added Waypoint IFV-3 Converted VCV to the Raiders
- New EWAR options for the Raiders, and a new Illuminator for both factions
- Chaff and Flares enabled for both factions
- Integrated flare/chaff launchers for all Navy ships
- Raiders now have access to navy missile turrets
- Many balance tweaks and polish, more than I bothered remembering.

Oh also (x2 lol) what are Macron guns intended to be used for? They seem to have very low damage output compared to cannons for far higher price (+ large power cost). They are a freaking AWESOME concept but I can't seem to use them effectively. Cannons seem to be just better which is really sad as well.

Btw I can't believe I forgot to say it but this mod is AWESOME! I cannot wait until the Sovereign Navy is fleshed out more and the Raiders have their buttons fixed. I've already been having an incredible amount of fun with it. Best mod in Nebulous in my opinion! Nobody else is nearly this creative. This must have taken a ton of work.

Oh also the Casaba Howitzers like to disappear before they get in staging range with no effect. I think they might be staging on asteroids and the effect isn't triggering properly if it's not staged on a ship? I'm not sure. They just keep disappearing randomly when my enemy doesn't have any long-range PD.

Putting nuclear ordinance on the voidcraft seems to be broken atm :(. Gives a "invalidCastException" or something when the nukes try to detonate, where nukes fired from ships work fine. Also not sure if they're worth it at all since the bulk hangars have so low hp (as the person below me said) and you can only bring 6 craft per ship max, launching 2 at a time max. I could not BELIEVE how awesome they looked coming out of the hangars when I tried them the first time so this really makes me sad. I hate carriers in this game due to the micro but if you give the Sovereign Navy a carrier I would actually play it - the cool factor would be too much to pass up.

nvm i take it back i relapsed back to using artillery coastwalkers & just use heavy armorers for brawling - hangar coastwalkers w/ vs-18 support just arent worth it imo

not going to lie i kept underutilizing vs-18s but giving them heavy armorers is just so satisfying, only issue i have is that their arming times are quite long (specially for rocket loadouts which are pretty underwhelming since they really only work well against scouts) - that and how fragile the vanilla internal hangars are

yea disabling faction exclusivity & the coastwalker's survivability is really nice with citadel mags,
i just run them in duos w/ modC TC for use as artillery

...but its really tempting to run them w/ hangars for rocket support from VS-18s, though thatd necessitate replacing a power reg. with extended mag space and leave you unable to use DEWs on them - on that note i feel like the power regulators and extended magazine could use some additional dmg threshold with how much ive had them sniped while using the saltwraith

The Coastwalker compartment 5 is clearly meant for the magazine but since they don't have citadel mags it keeps getting destroyed and greyed whenever the ship takes even light fire from the front, even when everything else in the ship is barely damaged. Personally I think they'd really benefit from access to citadel mags since they have the 3-height compartments like OSP. Otherwise I really think the Coastwalker needs some adjustment to it's compartment placement so that there's a better place to put the magazine.

-.1* i mean unless its supposed to be -90% instead of just reducing beam cooldown to 90% of its base state

yea the modifier is set to .9 instead of -.9

Edit: it says "+90%", maybe you meant to set it to 90% instead of adding 90%?

@Gwyvern ah okay. Also umm no it increases it by 90%, it doesn't decrease the cooldown at all. At least that's what it says in the fleet editor.

It shortens the cooldown

Also yeah fleet orders for the systems are still bugged, im hoping AGM figures that out.

btw is the cooling system component supposed to increase beam reload times? i mustve misinterpreted it as i just skimmed through its description & it mentioned 'reduced cooldown times' though it increases it

Edit: of course I understand this is a demo, I don't expect it to be intuitive or everything to be complete, that wouldn't make any sense. I'm just saying it would be great if possible to understand how that works so that I can try out the Raider faction effectively.

Ah okay, I see. What about the Raider faction buttons? To be clear I'm referring to the additional controls in the menu that has ship speed, weapon controls, formation type, point defense settings, etc.

It seems to be some sort of heat management controls but the heat fills up to max so fast when I use any that they don't seem to be useful. There's some sort of heat sink ammo but I have no idea what launches them or how to use them. And the controls do not apply to formation despite holding shift unlike every other control it seems. A guide or info on how that's supposed to work (or just a description for the buttons) would be really good because I love the idea of heat management but don't understand how it's really meant to work atm.

The Coastwalker and the Saltwraith have transit coils, which can launch any missile or mine loaded into your magazines, this capability is integrated into the coil, which you need since it is also the ship's drive, if for whatever reason you don't want the missiles, you can ignore the warning.

How do you fix the "No Ammunition: The missile launcher M3002 ModC Payloads on TC Magazine 1 has no missiles loaded" Warning? I have it constantly on the Saltwraith-class First Line Vehicle but I can't find anything called "M3002 ModC Payloads" or "TC Magazine 1". Every single slot on the ship I see is filled.

Also what do the extra buttons on the Raider faction do? They have no description and seem to not work with formations?

I do have other ideas for ships that are less mandatory. most of which are for the navy, but we'll see if/when I get to adding them, there's still quite a bit of work to do in terms of adding equipment to complete both faction's rosters, and Nebulous modding is quite a lot of work in general.

I currently have 3 ships planned that I consider mandatory for a 1.0 release, a small and medium pirate conversion (Like the homestead) and a First Fire Support Vehicle for the navy, which will posess a full-length transit coil like the saltwraith but be more optimized for supporting roles like artillery and Ewar, rather than being general purpose frontline warships

are the saltwraith's cruiser & destroyer-equivalent classes planned for whenever the mod gets to a release state?

Probably an oversight

The Mk 96000 EGAC spinal cannon for the Predator has accuracy marks out to 15km, but the weapon range itself is limited to 7km. Is this an oversight or am I missing a detail?

Another question with the nuclear shaped charges, they seem very underpowered for their cost and what they are, so I feel like I'm doing something wrong. They will reliably knock out a single system of a ship, but they do little else and I can't figure out why.

What is a good build for these munitions? Or is this how they are intended to work?

That sounds like work to set up

i wish you did have a gallery; its a pain in the ass to ever find any of your older art and animations

I don't do anything official with my youtube channel, and It's been a while since I've done any new spaceship renders, got a lot of other projects going on.

I also don't really maintain a proper gallery, but I do occasionally post worldbuilding pieces on my bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/gerardriley.bsky.social

is there a channel with more of these animations or is it just that one?

The patch was an emergency update after investigating a few of the complaints that have been piling up revealed that the signatures for virtually every ship in the mod were wildly incorrect.

It includes a few other bugfixes but the IRPAL is currently bugged.

https://prnt.sc/54aLeFmtqMrn

They got it from me, I made that animation long before it was in nebulous.

I've seen the coastwalker in an animation in background footage for a spacedock video recently and i'm wondering where they got the animation from?, if anybody knows pls tell me.

(Part 2 due to character limit)

The results were grim. Shots Fired per the Battle Report for the IRPALs is 2301, while hits is at 74, for an accuracy of ~3.2%.

Battle Report available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AwH_4QbmBwSQaeDfvDN0YdNcJ3ZR8_sM/view?usp=sharing

Did more testing, this time against standoff weapons.

The target was an FLV with 6 IRPALs along its lower surface, with the launch platform being another FLV with the coil set to High power. The target was equiped with the "Cat armor composite" from the cat technology mod to ensure that it survived testing.

The missiles were fired from a distance of about 7km, ahead and ~30 degrees below the target, to ensure that all IRPALs could fire on the incoming missiles during the entirety of their flight.

12 LMH-200 missiles (speed set to 225m/s, no evasive manuvers, free approach) per standoff fuse were launched (12 with 250m fuses, 12 with 500m fuses, ..., and 12 with 5000m fuses.)

12 NSC-200 charges (speed set to 300m/s) per standoff fuse were launched (12 with 250m fuses, 12 with 500m fuses, ..., and 12 with 5000m fuses.)

36 NSC-300 charges (speed set to 300m/s) were launched, 12 each for the 1000m, 2500m, and 4000m fuses.

Did some testing with the IRPAL. Currently against non-manuvering Armorer missiles set to minimum speed (120m/s) it has a shot to kill rate of around 6.25%.

The default speed For an SMHM-200 is 217m/s. With the IRPAL's range of 5000m that comes down to an engagement time of ~23sec, which with its fire rate means 4 salvos of 3 shots for a total of 12 shots. The expected value of missiles killed is 12*(1/16), or 0.75. This means that you can cannot reliably expect an IRPAL to handle a single basic missile. For a salvo of 3 missiles you'd need 4 of the things.

I get that as a DP weapon it needs to be worse at PD than dedicated PD weapons, but the numbers here are a bit much. Maybe up the accuracy a bit or let it be buffed by mount gyros and gun plotting centers?

oh, so i guess one of my mods unlocks them, good to know.
One more thing i noticed, nuke cans are launched with a delay. I mean after being programmed they leave ship, get missile icon, and hover for some time before boosting forward with (roughtly) half of velocity from missile editor. Like they had cold launch enabled (i double checked to set them to hot launch).

The shotgun cannisters dont work, they werent meant to be included in this update.

I have some issues to report and one suggestion.

Issues:
1. Birdshot cannisters create errors when hitting targets (Error - Attempted to instantiate a Lightweight Kinetic Munition but the selected munition template with GUID babdd89c-dad4-4d4e-8ea5-10139fb3db58 is not the correct type.

2. Buckshot can empty whole 125rnd magazine supply in single salvo (null reference exception).

Suggestion: Lock out cans from fighters loadout, as they try to perform attack from missile range (250m?), and they can't do it, as they are too close.

Overall great mod, at first i was sad there were no old riders (i loved their rain of lead), but these are even better. It would be cool to add them as another faction (unless these mods are compatible, then only mention they are)

Ah i see ok. So it can only load back up to the original amount brought by the other ship. Makes total sense. It's such a unique and cool system, i hope you will have more ships that can use it in the future. I patiently await every update you guys make on this <3

External damage cannot be repaired, we actually tried.

Repair gantry will repair broken modules on nearby friendly ships to 100% over time, but ONLY if neither ship is currently under fire, and there is a cap on repairs that can be provided to a given ship, i forget what it is. So eventually you hit the cap and that ship cant receive any more repairs.

The Reloading gantry can only refill missing components of the loadout the ship entered combat with, and only if the reloading ship has the munition in question.

so if if the loadout calls for 5x Missile Y, the ship to be reloaded has 3, and the reloading ship has 1, it will give that missile to the ship to be reloaded and then it cannot reload that missile anymore.

This is largely down to coding and game design limitations, doing fully variable reloads is technically possible but it would be a lot of work, be likely to break between updates, and add micro to an already micro heavy mod.

This is 100% one of the most unique faction mods I've seen yet. The ship designs are all incredibly cool while still kinda fitting the Nebulous vibe. I can't wait to see where this goes.
I'm trying to understand how the Gantry's function on the large Raider ship. Do the repair ones only target fully broken components, or only external damage? I'm gonna try testing stuff with my friends later but i thought I'd ask how they are intended to function and if there's supposed to be an animation or not I'm supposed to see to tell me it's working.

Sorry for the big blob of words haha

Eventually. This stuff is a lot of work people, and Its not even the only personal project I've got going on. Let alone all the commissions, I'm actually a little behind on my finances.

All vanilla features will be supported -eventually- Please be patient.

Will there be custom components for fighters soon?

Still, as they are right now they feel pretty under powered. at minimum id think they would feel lot better if they benefited from the various -spread buffs.

They are long range and dual purpose, they can't be perfect against everything.

Are the IRPALs intended to be very weak vs missiles? they nuke craft usually but can only hit even non maneuvering missiles probably like 5% of the time.

Oh, I see. Thanks for the clarification!

Sovereign capital ships have built-in hangar pads, you need to put hangars in their large compartments to deploy them, and even then you wont get very many.

By contrast, Sovereign smallcraft will be very high quality (The void diver is currently underperforming massively, but me and some testers are working on it)

There will also be better navy ships for fighter deployment eventually, but no fleet carriers.

actually Rylek's Raiders have hangar mounts, but I can't seem to find any for Sovereign.