piers142: I have a question about mysteriously exploding ships.
I'm in The Expanse. I send my fleet into a system to clear out the Remnants so I can grow my empire a little bit more.
My ships are happily dishing out carnage and shrugging off all the incoming fire. Shields are holding at about 25 million (out of 25.1M) and there is no damage visible. Suddenly - pick a number between 1 and 8 - n ships explode. Simultaneously.
The antimatter reactor is inside a firewall (see attached image) and the crew and computer components are distributed around the ship.
So, what's doing it?
Firgof: Are you playing in Vanilla or with the Expansion? There are a few weapons in the Expansion that could hit your AMG despite the 'holes in your ship' not yet reaching those points. For instance, there's a weapon that primarily strikes your power generation equipment (ignoring armor etc), a weapon that hits all hexes across the ship simultaneously, etc. If you're playing in Vanilla, then it'd need to be the alpha-strike-type beam-weapon that managed to burrow its way through to your AMG in an instant. Worth noting that the AMG doesn't get 'damaged' like normal reactors - any instability in its environment will cause instantaneous ship detonation iirc. Non-fully-hardened shields also do not fully prevent damage from passing through.
If you're playing the expansion, I'd probably point my finger at the Warhead, Disruptor, or Particle Lance weapons.
I assume the expansion you refer to is Wake of the Heralds. Since I haven't downloaded that, I assume this is vanilla, V2.0.1 r5089.
I have seen the Disruptor at work on a previous design. The damage spread out from the AMG, heading for the nearest Crew or Computer core(s) while the AMG itself was undamaged. That is why I changed the design and built multiple cores distributed around the ship and put the AMG in its own armoured box. And it seems to be working as Disruptors do not appear to be doing that kind of damage any more. Or not visibly.
Additionally, I just reloaded a saved game and jumped a ship into a system where I know my ships will explode. Between the 9 Remnant ships in the system, they have 4 Disruptors, 1 Warhead and no Particle Lances.
The ship exploded shortly after being targeted by the 2 Remnants armed with 2 Disruptors each. However, when I then jumped 8 ships into that system, the lead ship was targeted by all 4 Disruptors and then 3
other ships exploded simultaneously.
Reloading and repeating the process 5 more times, I had 2, 7, 2, 2 and 3 ships explode. All at exactly the same moment.
I don't know what the weapon effect of the Warhead looks like but I didn't see any one weapon targeting multiple ships at the same time.
Do you have any other ideas?
I ask because I have found it a bit of a "cooler". If I lose ships because I wasn't paying enough attention to see how much damage they were taking and get them out, that's my fault and I can adapt. If I'm losing ships because of a design flaw, I can try to fix it.
But if there is no defence against losing a random number of very expensive ships at random intervals, there doesn't seem to be much point taking over more of the expanse so that I can build even bigger, more expensive randomly exploding ships.
Any further guidance would be much appreciated.
