20:29:01 Notify Heretic Soldier has yet to undergo physiognomic genesculpting. As a result, CONCORD has banned her from displaying her appearance in public.
Had a little kitefest with 2 Drifter BS. They are
faast. Not Machariel-with-snakes fast, but still easily going to chase down anything from a plated cruiser upwards. They're also tanked to hell, and appear to have rudimentary ECM. When you break
their first shield, your lock on that ship is dropped and they recharge a full, second shield. They do not aggress until you do, but will respond immediately upon being fired upon. They also call in reinforcements, with an initial spawn of 2x BS, destroying 1 will result in a new BS arriving along with 3 or more Circadian Sleepers. There are also some interesting visual effects I will attempt to screenshot.
Yes Ortanc ! That's the one I was looking for.
Neither. It is both nicely high quality, and no more resource intensive than the gas clouds surrounding it. As far as I noticed anyway.
It has to be. Or it is completely procedural textures but that I doubt it. It's mathematical really. The bigger the mesh, the bigger the texture must be not to be in low resolution compared to the rest of the textures. If you got say (completely arbitrary) 1024 px textures per 10 metres, than a 10x10 m object in surface will probably use a texture map close to 1024x1024 px. And if you got a 40x40 m object in surface, then your texture should be 4096x4096 px. And so on.
And it is really not comparable to gas clouds, which are shaders FX of particles.
Gas clouds
are famously resource intensive however, and the addition of the structure doesn't appear to have any affect on this.
Editing to add:
Visual effects: Very difficult to spot on a still screenshot, but the antenna generate a forcefield of some kind across them. Basically looks like a ripple in space, not unlike that inside the Stratios' ring.
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Another screenshot to show just how fast these things are, and how surprisingly low their damage is:
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However, despite their low dps, I cannot overstate what a seriously huge tank these have. It takes my 1075dps Machariel around 5 minutes
per ship.
Second edit:
It takes 170 goddamn seconds to lock the structure.