David Vs Goliath (aka Asteroid vs Guardian)

[Nuetron]

So I found that you can save a template of an asteroid, and then combined that with the fact that when you transform a ship using a template, the speed continues... So what would happen when you take a very light and fast ship and transform it into a large asteroid and throw it at the Guardian?

 

Sound like cheating?

 

P.S. I did this in survival without cheating, so if you make it into the center of the galaxy, you can quickly kill the guardian without the super battle...

[DerpSuper++]

Those god damned kinetic torpedoes weren't enough, and now you gotta send fucking ass-steroids???... Oh wait, wrong game.

 

Still, that insta-kill though. XD I can see this being abused... :P

[Nuetron]

What's more... this only used about 20k iron and a little titanium, so any player could obliterate your fleet/space station(s), given a little time and freedom on your server.

[DerpSuper++]

Ok, assume that it sticks for a while and gets exploited the hell out of... Any countermeasures? All that comes to mind for me is just either to avoid it if you're a non stationary target, or block it with... Yet another asteroid. 

 

But god help your stations in a PvP environment.

[Nuetron]

Hmm... defense/countermeasures...

Well, before we look at countermeasures, let's look at this scenario, from the attacker's perspective:

You want to irritate another player or get them away from your set of sectors, or reset their spawn sector. They have set up x amount of stations...

You warp into a sector in your battleship, toodle around looking at everything  (not getting attacked by the opposing player's ships of course because they see you as neutral), then finally move about 50 km off...

You position your ship to stay in one spot, and calculate a jump. Then, you exit into your drone, found a ship, apply your template, fly at the station of your choice, transform and bow their ship out of the sky, in less than a minute. Because you were going so fast, your asteroid was "destroyed" so you spawn in your battleship, and warp out of there.

 

Because it was a collision that was over in an instant, all that's left is wreckage, and no trace of whodunit.

 

 

Now, for countermeasures... we can disable collision in the server ini, but you'd still have your station flying away at 2000km per second...

[DerpSuper++]

So... Basically, "You're fucked." ? :P

[Pyrax]

Honestly this should be reported as an "unexpected result" bug.

 

While an awesome exploit (great find Nuetron), this is potentially game-breaking. The builder should do a check when applying a plan to look for asteroid-specific object IDs and set velocity to zero if TRUE. The builder SHOULD maintain inertia in all other cases - otherwise you would introduce another exploit to quickly stop colossal ships by simply re-applying the current plan.

[Nuetron]

Thx Pyrex!

This is exactly why I posted... I'm always finding game-breaking things like this, no matter what game I'm playing.

[Nuetron]

However, another issue:

I used asteroid blocks to cover the outside of one of my ships, to disguise it and to use the huge benefits of the protection it offers.

[Nuetron]

The builder should do a check when applying a plan to look for asteroid-specific object IDs and set velocity to zero if TRUE. The builder SHOULD maintain inertia in all other cases - otherwise you would introduce another exploit to quickly stop colossal ships by simply re-applying the current plan.

 

On the contrary, what happens in the real world when you add mass to an object with a conflicting velocity? Postulate this: object X has velocity A, then you add velocity B  (which has a lesser velocity value, say 0 on the scale relative to the global average) thus reducing A by B producing whole-object average velocity C, which, since B is zero, means that C is half of A. Also, A and B were of equal mass.

 

Another example: an ice scater in a spin. She has her arms out and is spinning slowly. Once she pulls in her arms, she spins faster. Why? The law of conservation of energy.

 

Another example: two cars collide, head-on. The inertia from both cars, both in opposite directions cancel each other out.

[DerpSuper++]

I'm just barking out ideas here.

 

Afaik, and I'm just making a shit tonne of assumptions here, mathematically speaking, if a certain object is moving with X amount of kinetic energy and you suddenly increase its mass, assuming that its X remains the same, then wouldn't its velocity have to be reduced in order to compensate? This is just in context of KE=X=(1/2)mv^2, and that it's within the games environment and not real life.

 

But assuming this was somehow implemented, I can still see this being exploited for extreme acceleration or braking. Another way would be to just instantly stop the ship on a blieprint change, but again, exploitable.

 

Otherwise, the best solution my sleep deprived, insomniac brain can come up with after waking up suddenly at 5am is to simply disable the ability to edit your ship if it's going past a certain speed. That way, if your ship is drifting in space at some low velocity, like when you get shot or nudged while editing,  you'd still be able to continue working, but if your ship is travelling past a certain speed, editing would have to be disabled.

[Nuetron]

I agree.

[cepheni]

This is actually really cool  8) That video gave us a good hearty laugh, sad that we need to do something about that. Someone using that pvp would be really bad.

[Nuetron]

Same thing with the AI... Only it left no wreckage...

 

 

And this time I was able to do it on the first try, with a moving target, in survival.