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[ShadowDragon8685]

Sundiving is a depricated mod!

Sundiving is Depricated. It does not work as-advertised, and it cannot work as advertised, on the current iteration of Starsector. Alex is aware of this issue and since it stems from something else he thinks is also an issue, he will be correcting the way Solar Shielding works in the next iteration, in such a manner that will enable Sundiving to work.

Having said that, some modifications made by the Sundiving mod still retain some utility. Sundiving is incorporated into my current-gen mod Advanced Hullmods, so get it there!




This very simple, very small and kind of blunt-force mod originated when I was attempting to use the rather swanky Fuel Siphoning mod by Sundog, and found it to be absolutely useless, since my supplies evaporated before my eyes the moment I dipped into the corona of a red giant, even before I switched on the fuel siphon.

The problem was the Coronal environment's CR damage. Even though every ship in my fleet had Solar Shielding, my Supplies usage jumped an order of magnitude, from 2.5/day to ~35 a day. That being with the Solar Shielding hullmod that reduced coronal damage by 75%, I shuddered to think of what hell would have awaited me if I'd dipped a toe in without it! It also, in my estimation, makes lurking within a coronal environment (say, to escape a foe/ambush same,) a losing proposition. I learned after asking if this was intended behavior that it was, and that the Solar Shielding mod was mostly used for 20% energy damage reduction in combat and storm-surfing in hyperspace. No more!

I made this Sundiving mod. This simple and brute-force mod simply causes the Solar Shielding mod to negate Combat Readiness damage from being in a solar coronal environment, so as to allow a fleet fully-equipped with such to lurk where other ships dare not travel. As a side effect it also negates the damage from being caught in a storm in hyperspace, but that damage was minuscule with the mod anyways, and I can't separate the effects.

I made this mod for me, but I hope others find it useful too.

[attachment deleted by admin]

[ShadowDragon8685]

Version 1.1 update: 1.1 recategorizes the Solar Shielding mod to not be treated as a Logistics hullmod, allowing you to still use it if you want to, say, put Solar shielding, Augmented Drive Field, and Surveying Equipment on a Colossus freighter.

[vorpal+5]

Good one.

Same conclusion for Fuel Siphoning, the idea is nice on paper, but it is next to useless in practice, unless you happen to be stranded without fuel but with something like 5000 extra supplies perhaps.

[Sundog]

I'm flattered that you made a companion mod for fuel siphoning! I'll add a link to this in the fuel siphoning forum post so like-minded people can find it more easily.

Even though every ship in my fleet had Solar Shielding, my Supplies usage jumped an order of magnitude, from 2.5/day to ~35 a day. That being with the Solar Shielding hullmod that reduced coronal damage by 75%, I shuddered to think of what hell would have awaited me if I'd dipped a toe in without it!

So with the way CR works, the supply consumption rate for repairs will be the same no matter how much CR your ships have lost. So Solar Shielding doesn't reduce the rate of supply usage, it reduces the duration of supply usage, resulting in fewer supplies consumed overall.

Same conclusion for Fuel Siphoning, the idea is nice on paper, but it is next to useless in practice, unless you happen to be stranded without fuel but with something like 5000 extra supplies perhaps.

The problem was the Coronal environment's CR damage.

After looking into it, it looks like the problem is actually the amount of time you have to spend within a corona with conversion rates lower than 16*. Coronal CR damage is intended as an overhead cost to prevent fuel siphoning from being too powerful, but with default prices for fuel (25) and supplies (100) the conversion rate is only 4 fuel per supply, which increases the time you have to spend within a corona (and by extension, CR damage) to 400% of what I've balanced for. This is an unintended side-effect of how conversion rate works, and I'll patch fuel siphoning to standardize siphoning rate soon.
*16 is the conversion rate I use while playtesting because I use doubled supply costs and halved fuel costs.

I think I'll also add a configurable (disabled by default) effect to the siphon fuel ability to reduce coronal CR damage while it's active.
Edit: I'm not so sure about this anymore. I forgot that fuel siphoning doesn't have configuration functionality, and I'm not sure I want to add it just for this one option.

[ShadowDragon8685]

I'm flattered that you made a companion mod for fuel siphoning! I'll add a link to this in the fuel siphoning forum post so like-minded people can find it more easily.

Oh wow, thank you!

I know some folk don't like the idea of making things "easier," but I don't mind making things easier. To my way of mind, you're already paying the price in OP, you might as well get your OP's worth, especially since even without paying the CR cost for being in a Corona, you're still paying the Supplies cost in going out of your way to a red giant (which is, weirdly, the only star you can do this at - why is that?) for the privilege of turning supplies into more fuel, which you burn through at a prodigious rate anyway. So it's not really much easier.

This mod also has the other knock-on effect of making dabbling in solar coronal environments for tactical advantage viable, so I still like to hang onto it, personally.

[Null Ganymede]

Solar shielding is also something you either avoid, or go all-in on your whole fleet on. So it's not the OP cost of adding it to one ship, but to *all* your ships if you want to make full use of it. And probably the complementary Industry skill too.

I like the option of going for a no-tanker deep space fleet. It's fluffy!

[ShadowDragon8685]

Solar shielding is also something you either avoid, or go all-in on your whole fleet on. So it's not the OP cost of adding it to one ship, but to *all* your ships if you want to make full use of it. And probably the complementary Industry skill too.

I like the option of going for a no-tanker deep space fleet. It's fluffy!

Well, while Solar Shielding has additional uses (it straight-up discards one-fifth of energy damage to your armor,) you're right. Besides using it as a cheap and cheerful damage resistance buff, you either go all-in or forget it.

My approach to things like that is "I'm already paying for it this way, and this way. That's enough cost," WRT things like the stupidly-increased overhead of flying into a corona and watching my supplies evaporate even before I turned on the Siphon.

That's also kind of why I tossed Shadowrun 5e. The showrunner decreed that "everything has a price." Well, yeah. I paid the price. In Nuyen. And Essence. So you can take your "cyberware steals your soul" thing and airlock it - and you can then grab hold of your "oh, and you have to expose your cyber to bricking if you want to actually get use out of it" crap and airlock yourself, too.

[sinani210]

I'm guessing I'm probably just blind here, but would you mind pointing out the download link to me?

[ShadowDragon8685]

It's attached to the first post.

[sinani210]

Ah I see. It only shows up if you are logged in. Interesting. Thanks for the great mod!

[Irras]

I'm not sure if the mod or my game is bugged but with this installed I still receive sun corona dmg and hyperspace storm dmg. The tooltip is showing the correct value but the dmg is still present? not sure whats going on

[Sanrai]

The same thing is happening to me as the last post, still taking damage even though the mod displays the correct value. The updater mod says that it's incompatible.

[Irras]

any chance this can get checked? i really like the idea of the mod but its just not working right now

[Sanrai]

I did a little testing and pulled the shielding mod off one of my ships, turns out, the shielding is only reducing corona damage to equal exactly how much CR you can repair a tick. So while you never see an increase in supply/day, it still causes supplies to evaporate. With repairing off, by the time my one ship without shielding hit 10%, my other ships were at 20%.

Edit: Did a little more testing with solar storms. Solar Storms work, though you still take hull and armor damage, the majority of the supply cost from getting hit by them.

[Sanrai]

So, I did more testing and can only come to one conclusion.

Corona's are an eldritch horror we can never understand.

"public static final float CORONA_EFFECT_REDUCTION = 0.0f;" is the line in the mod that controls how strong the mod is. You can find it in datas\hullmods\solarshielding.java. You can edit this file with any decent text editor, I recommend notepad++. I tried setting this value to increasingly smaller negatives with only some results until I flipped it to over -8.99. I don't know if this was some oversight in my testing, or if my computer was just being a ***, but only after that did coronas start healing me, and by a lot. I tuned it back and found that -2.9 seems to be the golden zone where coronas only do the barest bit of CR damage. You'll want to turn off repairing while in a sun's field to prevent bleeding supply like crazy, as every ship in your fleet constantly spends a full repair tick of supply when you are the barest sliver below max CR. Please note, moving around seems to have some kind of effect, and for some reason, while Sun flares push you away, and generally do more damage, being right by the base of one can cause a very minor heal. Also, don't use emergency burn and go straight at the sun, you'll punch right through and the middle of the sun WILL start healing you CR. Surprisingly, nebula damage seems to still work as intended.

I theorize that there is actually a second damage type being emitted by the sun that is only being countered by the healing the corona is doing. Now, a really cool mod to add to this would be something that disables ship repairing while in coronas, making gameplay a little more seamless, and it honestly makes sense that you can't perform repairs while next to a sun. Your ship might be sun-proof, but I doubt the spacesuits are.

Oh, and by the way, "if (index == 0) return "" + (int) Math.round((1f - CORONA_EFFECT_REDUCTION) * 100f) + "%";" is the line determing what the mod description shows on your ship. If leftalone after my modification it will list as 390% but you can change it to "if (index == 0) return "" + (int) Math.round(100f) + "%";" Or how it's going to look in my game, "if (index == 0) return "NEARLY " + (int) Math.round(100f) + "% (Terms and conditions may apply)";".