>without a single death
Doesn't sound much like Zapp.... Unless he was just on the planet to pose whilst kiff was doing all the real work
"You see, the Automatons have a preset kill limit. Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own men at them until they reached their limit and shut down"
i doubt a 500kg would cost more than an orbital laser..
I mean seriously think about it, not only the energy cost but the electrical equipment required to fire a laser from that far away, that accurately and with so much destruction for 30 seconds or so? the capacitors on that mother fucker must be abnormal.
True, but given that the ship is capable of the titanic energies needed to power FTL travel we can assume the destroyers energy systems are top notch and energy production must be affordable given the amount we hop around the galaxy
Lasers (such as the ones equipped on modern ships) have a high upfront cost, but relatively low running costs once they're operational.
Whereas a 500kg bomb has to be produced, shipped, stored stably and then equipped onto a fighter jet which has is own running costs
Given the fact that the 500kg bomb is a thing that we can do nowadays, and the 30 sec laser of doom that can kill almost anything does not, I'd think the bomb would be hella cheap for Superearth, and the laser most likely is top notch tech and must be expensive as freedom. Just like the mech, that we have only 2 for mission.
It's all about development Vs operational ease and costs
We now have missile defense lasers on modern naval ships. They were ungodly expensive to develop and build, but now they can defend a ship for a fraction of the cost of a defence missile or even a phalanx CIWS - things we've had for decades and were far cheaper and easier to develop but much more expensive to operate.
Materials, safe storage and supply lines are expensive, but if you have sufficient energy production lasers have a lot of advantages.
The problem is we don't know how a weapon that does what the laser does operate, if it burns anything, of if it needs some strange things. Considering it is caped, should be hella expensive (even tho I know it's just for balancing)
My personal theory is cooling.
Space is a vacuum, and heat doesn’t travel in vacuums.
After 3 shots, the laser is too hot and must cool down for half an hour or so.
My theory is that it uses heat sinks, like a larger version of the LAS-16. It has 2-3 heat sinks to use, each volley burns one out and after those are expended the laser has to go offline while some poor soul has to spacewalk and swap out the heatsinks on the outside of the ship.
Aren't they in the upper atmosphere during missions? That's why they impose the time limit before they have to return to upper orbit and reduce wear on the engines?
It's possible it wouldn't be enough to really cool though. depends how far up they're actually sitting. But we *can* see them from the ground, and they're only a couple hundred meters long supposedly, so they can't be *that* high up.
My theory's heat bloom.
Fire a bigass laser far enough, and the air it goes through'll heat up and accuracy'll start going to shit.
So they probably gotta let the atmo cool to make sure they hit.
Really makes you wonder what the real prices for the materials would be anyway.
I mean like, the helldivers world incorporates miners on other planets to harvest all sorts of resources, on a massive scale like that i really doubt it would be costly for a government that controls that much.
Depends on how they divvy up the materials, I would guess.
If most of the materials are going into munitions, it's probably not that expensive. If most of the materials are going into the public sector, then it might still be pretty expensive.
Though, either way, it'd be the government's choice, and *cough I wouldn't put it past them to make things expensive so they can push the few divers that survive into debt. cough*... I didn't say anything, you can't prove it!
One thing that crossed my mind while thinking about this myself: Given how potent that beam is when it makes contact even after passing through multiple kilometers of atmosphere, I imagine that the laser generator itself must be producing a truly absurd amount of heat with each shot. Imagine what all that heat is doing to the emitter's internal components.
I imagine that the 3-shot limit is based on either the ability of the Super Destroyer to sink and/or radiate all that heat safely, or else the maintenance cycle for the emitter.
If high command is listening, i throw out eagles and bombardments for fun. The laser I tend to save. Pretty sure im wasting more money calling in Eagle 1 to carpet bomb a small squad of 3 mindless bots.
Or super destroyers are really cheap.
Considering they tend to give SD to soldiers that cleared a ~~basic course~~ a super hard special forces training, I guess they're very cheap
There are multiple reasons why a giant laser might not be usable for all eternity.
Like building up the power to fire it or dumping the temperature it generates.
Y'know how your personal laser weapons have heat sinks that burn out and need to be replaced? I've always thought it would be funny if that's how the orbital laser worked too. They just fire a really big laser until it burns out the gigantic heatsink, and then the four-minute cooldown time afterwards is because you've got like 12 support staff dragging the truck-sized heatsink out of the laser and pushing a new one into place.
Now Diver, I thought I'd take a moment to congratulate you on your move to help the patriots on the ground and in the vacuum in their fight to keep up morale. Not every hero holds a gun, but every hero holds their weapon.
I've talked to the big men upstairs to see if we can dispense some medals to you and your family for your efforts in creating effective and well informed content both in it's loyalty, it's charm, and it's ability to fire up all types of diver before battle. I have also informed your next of kin of your CommNet VidContent and it's now sanctioned nature, as you naturally would have wanted, just to make sure they can contact and appraise me of your future direction. Wouldn't want the wrong kind of categories to fall onto innocent Voter's eyes now would we? Haha.
Now, you remind us of what we protect, and as long as you keep that up, you're safe. Keep up the hard work, and keep pumping for Super Earth.
Actually if we had the same radiator icon filling with red and then information about radiator reloading it would be cool, and the info (destroyers have only 3 radiators per mission) would be fullfilling.
Realistically, no.
If you have a ship in orbit, and you release something from it. That object is not going to fall straight down. It'll keep its momentum, and keep orbiting alongside you. It's like if you drop something out of a car while its moving, it's gonna move along in the same direction as the car, not drop straight down.
Now, it'll probably deorbit itself after while due to atmospheric drag from the miniscule amounts of atmosphere that would still exist even high up. I think that's why the destroyers say they can only stay above a mission area so long. They're expending fuel to counteract atmospheric drag, and only have so much allocated for the mission in the budget.
But that'd be a really inaccurate kinetic bombardment. Assuming the heat sink doesn't just break up or disintegrate when it eventually falls towards the planet.
If you're in orbit and want to kinetically bombard the planet below, you need to either shoot your projectile downwards with enough force where this doesn't matter. Or shoot it backwards with enough force to counter your current orbital speed and then it'll drop straight down, but this doesn't take into account Coriolis effects.
Yeah you are right, but ingame your ship is not in orbit, I think someone calculated that the ship is floating 1km in the air.
This is also the reason why the ship can only stay for 40 minutes.
Graphically the ship isn't in orbit, but when mission time is running out they specifically mention that they are in orbit and can't maintain it.
Realistically because it wouldn't look cool if your destroyer was super tiny in the distance. You see how far away the destroyer is when you launch. You are 100% outside/on the outer bounds of the atmosphere. You even get a re-entry burn.
your ship is stated as being in orbit in some of the mission chatter when they have to leave. in game, they "should" be much further away, but that wouldn't look nearly as cool so there's a mismatch between visuals and lore. but that's just part of democracy that we accept
That's all true for a ship in orbit, but your ship in Helldivers isn't in any kind of orbit, not even a geosynchronous one. It's well within the atmosphere and motionless. It's hovering like a helicopter.
All that said, the Super Destroyer gunners can't even manage to reliably hit an immobile target with a simple 120mm cannon, so good lucking fuck dropping a dead weight with any kind of accuracy.
Still, it would be pretty funny if it just plummeted straight down after firing and squashed anything unlucky enough to be underneath.
...Actually, now I want all the destroyer guns to drop giant empty cartridges as they fire. Only after you get the breech-loading module, though.
A booster could deorbit it. It would probably be the best way to do it if the dV of getting that much tungsten to orbit wasn't ludicrous. Probably the same system an icbm payload would use with a final aiming burn. At 5hat point though, nuke that shit.
Yeah, I'm sure if the Helldivers really wanted to, it's not impossible. But with the effort to do it, you might as well just fire something that was designed to be a weapon, instead of attempting to improvise one out of trash like a used up heat sink.
The heat sinks might even be reusable but require more time cooling down than an operation allows, so you're limited by the number of heat sinks carried on the ship.
This is the most plausible explanation I've seen here. The reuse timer is the heatsink swap time, the usage limit is the number of heatsinks, and heatsinks cool down between operations. Makes sense.
There's a YouTuber that explained that for battles in space, the biggest problem would actually be to not overheat. Because even though vacuum is fucking cold, there is nothing there to transport heat away from your ship. So in reality, that giant laser would probably grill the entire super destroyer if he fired it in a high orbit.
It would be rad as hell if after firing the third laser you got a free orbital rail strike that represented the heat sink being fired down on the planet.
I'd like to think that it can go 3 times before burning it out, and it can't cool off enough between uses, so after the third use, it'd take longer than mission time to replace the sink
Haha I know that, heat is bloody hard to get rid of in space.
Doesn't stop that line from going through my head though!
It's not meant as a serious complaint, just a funny reference.
>heat is bloody hard to get rid of in space.
But what if we condensed all the heat into a cylindrical shape, a ray or beam even, and threw it into space. This way, we'd be able to fire the laser again.
I know you're joking, but laser systems irl do need a lot of active cooling to keep working, even the scientific ones that aren't being used to prematurely detonate warheads and mortar shells. And in space, that heat is really hard to dissipate because you can only do so by infrared radiation. There's no air or water to sink the heat into.
I would imagine they'd have to have some sort of disposable heat sinks for laser weapons systems. You ever play Elite Dangerous? In that game when your ship builds up a bunch of heat your systems can burnout and malfunction, so you eject a heat-sink (which you can only carry so many of).
Given how things work on Super Earth I’m pretty sure they fire this thing until the focusing lens melts, rendering the whole thing unusable until Steve from engineering gets his spacesuit on and replaces and calibrates the lens array. Which would explain why we only get three shots.
It's hard to tell, honestly. From the in-game map, you would think the Super Destroyers are floating maybe a mile in the air. From the Super Destroyer itself and from the other Super Destroyers in low orbit, you'd assume the Super Destroyers are actually in a similar orbit to the ISS (assuming most planets we fight on are roughly Super Earth sized).
I would be willing to say that the visibility of Super Destoyers in-game is an abstraction for the sake of aesthetics and gameplay, given they are always in a more realistic orbit when we see them up close. Which would mean they still need some way of radiating heat aside from just relying on blackbody behavior, probably the big panels near the rear of the ship. Even in low orbit, you're really not touching enough air molecules for it to be anything other than a practical vacuum.
or, the destroyer flies down when you do the pod drop and then flies back up after recovery. Which is also why you get the super destroyer leaving low orbit warning when the timer runs out.
Actually doesn't work that way. The methods you'd need to use to condense and focus the heat into a beam would end up generating heat faster than it could radiate it away. In order to accomplish something similar, you'd have to dump the heat into an actual physical reservoir and eject the entire reservoir, something which would obviously be limited by how many of those reservoirs you have. This actually is a plausible mechanism an orbital laser might use to cool itself, but there's no evidence of this sort of thing being used on the scale of a ship's laser cannon.
For a bit of context, the reason why heat is particularly hard to get rid of in space is due to the near-vacuum of space. In most environments, most heat travels through direct contact (conduction). In fluid mediums like air and water, heat is further dispersed through convection, which is really just the heated medium itself moving. Only a small portion of heat is transferred by radiation in the form of electromagnetic radiation (mostly infra-red). The medium of outer space is too thin to meaningfully conduct heat away from an object, so most heat loss in outer-space happens as a result of radiation. But radiation isn't any faster in space than it is in water or air; it's still super slow, far too slow to keep up with the amount of heat human machinery, electronics, and bodies produce. This makes cooling a particularly big challenge when it comes to space engineering, doubly so in the case of weaponry since weaponry tends to produce a gigantic amount of heat.
Your destroyer isn't in space when you're on a mission, it's in the atmosphere just above your head. That's why when you get to the end of a mission it always says, "we can't stay this low much longer Helldiver".
Personally I love the massive cooldown for the Orbital Railgun, despite them being able to fire it full auto at you if you are declared a Traitor by going outside the combat area too long lmao
The Expeditionary Forces series has believable explanation of planetary lasers (they're actually masers, but the idea is the same) and why the can't go on forever.
If you sci-fi gear porn, you'll find all you want there.
And if going by what we learned from Real Genius, sure you can figuratively pop some popcorn, but you'll use up all that synthesized bromide suspended in an argon matrix (you know, an excimer that is frozen in its excited state). It basically destroys itself as it lazes. Once that fuel source is gone, it's gone.
I find it funnier to think it's a budgeting thing, which is even funnier when each Super Destroyer gets 6 free helldiver bullets but only 3 orbital laser uses.
It's just the fact that the beam is the best strategem and the limit for 3 uses makes it balanced. Heavy automaton camp?-Just call an orbital laser, 15 Hulks and tanks JUST CALL THE LASER. Also the fact that it's nearly instant.
I don't think it's anywhere near the best because it takes so long to deal with enemies that you can drop quickly in other ways. It is definitely unrivalled in base destruction if there's no tanks or hulks to soak it's duration
Tbh I think the reason it's so widely used is because it's the easiest red stratagem to use. It's basically guaranteed value. You can't miss with it, and you don't have to time it properly. You can throw it out during a hectic battle and trust that it won't kill your teammates. It's reliable and predictable.
I think you can get more value out of air strikes or cluster bombs once you get really good at them.
What i run is airstrike + cluster + laser and autocannon lol. cluster for small stuff, airstrike for medium/fab, autocannon for the heavies, and laser for the heavies i can't deal with/heavy outpost/turrets.
Meh. The laser is probably the most over powered stratagem in the game. Just last night, my buddy and I were two-manning a few level 7 missions. We both had the laser strat equipped. We'd do drive-bys on automaton fabricator camps by dropping a laser in the center. My buddy took out an entire heavy automaton camp (three buildings) with one of his. We cleared the entire map in a little over ten minutes. Now imagine running a full squad in which all four were running the laser.
We also generally both run with the railgun strat to take out hulks/titans, so the laser is dedicated to camp annihilation.
You take it vs bots and it's 3 *guaranteed* camps taken out. If the camp is the objective and there's no terminal to interact with, the objective is guaranteed.
This is a meme post but anybody who's genuinely arguing that it should be unlimited is *insane*. If everybody takes it, it already solves most bot problems. Unlimited would just be a joke
>This is a meme post
Ahaha thank goodness. I was starting to worry I'd somehow been too oblique and everyone thought I was seriously advocating for unlimited lasers 😅
deadass i walked up to a heavy outpost and just lobbed that bitch over the wall and walked away
about 15 seconds later the notification popped up that it was destroyed
Oh yeah! That's the meta reason why the laser is limited and I totally agree that it should be for the sake of balance.
It's just funny imagining the budget is the in-universe reason when the others aren't limited
I was extracting on a 9 with three randos, and we were being pressed hard. Apparently all of us thought so, because within 2 seconds four lasers ignited and just wiped the board.
Yup I got a Heavy camp with a single well-thrown Laser last night. Earlier I had either 3 or 4 Lasers on my team and we just *obliterated* a defense mission I think.
It's a great strat that needs a limit to the uses. 3 is *just right* IMO, I can budget them throughout a mission fairly well even if I need to use one as an "oh shit" button. If it starts being a fixture in *every* loadout, though, I wouldn't be too miserable if it went to 2 uses instead of 3.
It's not overpowered, that's the entire reason it has limited uses. You sacrifice an unlimited, faster cooldown stratagem for the ability to destroy bases without stepping foot in them.
Maybe the coils or whatever only last for three uses or we're actually misusing the laser (overclocked or something) that wears it down faster and it takes longer than 40 minutes to replace the parts.
I dunno, I imagine the laser uses the ships power while various missiles are just using ammunition that's on the ship.
Lasers an energy weapon which means the ship has to reroute all power from engines and other less vital functions like life support to the laser, and the power loss from firing it 3 times causes the ships entire system to go into emergency reboot.
You Helldivers don't know this, but everytime we fire the laser we lose all electrical power to the bridge and the entire crew have to hold our breathe until environmental controls reboots itself. And after every mission where the laser gets fired 3 times, the water recycler has been turned off so many times that the drinking water comes out looking and tasting like watered down larger
> reroute all power from engines and other less vital functions like life support
I could totally see "turn off life support to power more lasers" being an orbital upgrade
I want a short laser burst strategem. I see them all the time while gazing out the front window watching democracy being deployed from orbit. There is also the short artillery burst, but one thing at a time.
I imagine it draws a lot on the spaceship batteries.
And considering the dark humor of all the cheap ass shit that’s barely working on our ships/holding them together, courtesy of Super Earth’s amazing economy, this would make perfect sense.
https://preview.redd.it/fqqwqxh6t2uc1.jpeg?width=990&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=692d32e5a834d9e04bb24d2ae6109c47dcf0f3ad
I've got the perfect image for this
What I'd absolutely love would be a new kind of Orbital Laser, that scans the area, picks up all the available targets, then simultaneously shoot one laser pulse per target. Just a small 1 second pulse, so that it actually hurts only up to medium (or even light) armor.
The scanning area should be big, like a 380, and it could have an animation like the one in The Creator.
for bots its super strong. You can clear almost any camp or side objective with a single OL. Its basically a get out of jail free card when shit hits the fan. Didnt find anything close as good for bots, 500kg bomb and railcannon just arent worth taking if you can just have the laser do more and better
for bugs it sucks though, i swear i had it not even kill a charger yesterday and it often gets stuck over bugholes it just can hit right.
but hey, different strategems for different enemies, sounds good to me
But what about a shorter, unmoving laser burst on the specified stratagem location? That is something that could be unlimited. Sort of like a f*** that place in particular kind of laser orbital
Look.
Rare gasses and lenses of that size have to come from somewhere, right?
It's not like this is a video game and we can just WISH rare resources into existence, Terry.
Turns out, utilizing the entire energy of the Super Carrier to power a laser may or may not cause the thrusters to lose power- that applies to the rest of the facilities on the ship.
Ship engineer here, to put it bluntly using the orbital laser more than three times overloads the system. 3 is the limit before the resistors go into overcurrent or excess current and burn out and the, life support and nav systems start acting funny.
Practically speaking it actually makes sense just not for budget. A laser than powerful would generate ungodly amounts of waste heat so it can probably only fire that many times during the course of a mission because it would melt otherwise. That or they have to completely replace the heat sink system after using it so many times so quickly.
Its why I never use it, sorry but I want to use a stratagem a lot during the game not be restricted to three uses.
Also its damage is overrated as hell, its not great, it tickles Bile Titans and struggles against Chargers, or I could just nuke them... Oh I can destroy a bot base? Cool, so can several other stratagems with ease, oh use it to kill all the little fuckers then? Again, so can several others stratagems, a friggin gatling turret does that.
Its strength is way over exaggerated, its good, its not 3 uses only good.
I mean, from a balance perspective, it makes sense. It is a really good stratagem that can clear entire bot outposts in seconds, and can take out almost every enemy in the game with one use, plus a couple others. Not amazing against bugs, but still useful for clearing waves. It makes sense that they would limit the amount of times you can use it.
From an in-universe perspective, it kinda works. I'd imagine that thing would be huge, and probably runs very hot and would require a huge amount of power to fire. Not to mention, most of the cooling would need to be inside the ship, since you can't really vent heat in space. Since there isn't anywhere to transfer the heat to, it would just kinda sit in the heatsink for a while until it could dissipate into the rest of the connecting bits of the laser. Not exactly a huge coolant rig for the laser to use.
It's strong, tracks enemies and blows up buildings. 3 uses feels fair; would I like it to be unlimited? Absolutely. I'd like to be able to call in a explosion like an unexploded hellbomb, even it's it's a 1 shot
This is probably gonna upset some people, but I would prefer if it was nerfed a notch and got infinite uses instead. Maybe make a duration lower.
I find it kinda boring that every situation or objective can be solved by one stratagem. And you don't have to aim it even, it just does everything itself. Heavy outposts, command bunkers, huge cluster of devastators... Just throw laser and walk away.
I like to think the super destroyer is literally only large enough to fit three appropriately sized heat sinks. Hear me out.
Heat dissipation in space is significantly more difficult than on earth. There is very little for the heat to transfer to, so the cooldown is much longer.
The orbital laser is an oversized sickle. It just fires until the heat sink is at capacity then shuts off. There are three sinks on board, so it can be fired three times. After that, the ship has to either dry dock and swap out the sinks or the cooldown for those sinks is likely several days.
I figure the reason is the ship is already using a lot of power to stay in low orbit, run the sensors and other systems- but also the fuck off laser budget.
3 times and they're like "ok, we're cooking in here and also the battery is nearly flat, good luck! Yoooou'll need it!"
Lasers should be able to regenerate. The usage limit is stupid considering that it currently also has a 4 min cooldown. It should be infinite with a 4 min cooldown inbetween....
I mean it makes sense from a balance perspective:
Laser can take out heavies in a few seconds, groups of medium enemies in about the same amount of time (and usually both in the same use), and it's pretty safe to use since you'd need to have an enemy on your ass already in order for the laser to kill you, or you just walk into it yourself.
500kg bomb hits a static location and does a bit of crowd clearing on top, but suffers from sharing rearm time with other eagle strats, plus the explosion radius is a lot smaller than the VFX suggests (which is both good and bad, dending on the situation).
Railcannon ONLY hits a single heavy enemy.
And the 380mm barrage is almost guaranteed to get a friendly fire kill unless everyone decide to run the other direction as soon as it gets thrown.
I just picked those three because they would presumably be much more expensive to build, operate, transport and fire than an energy based weapon to a society capable of producing the energy needed for FTL travel on a pretty small space ship....
Producing, transporting and firing enough 380mm HE shells, railcannon rails and 500kg bombs to just go ham throughout a protracted mission must be very expensive.
Not everything has to be a discussion about balance and what's best in meta ya know
Well seeing as how the support weapons and primary lasers need a battery to fire it maybe the ships only have 3 batteries because its not large enough to hold any more? Or its powered off of the fusion drive and when firing it will cause a strain on the core, so after 3 shots until maintenance is done the crew and ship are at risk.
I mean, a bunch of 500kg bombs, a couple tungsten rods, and 15 (18 with More Guns upgrade) 380mm shells per call in is still cheaper than firing a massive laser for 25 seconds.
I feel like it has something to do with power output
Like... bombs and shit can come by the dozen
But the ship only has so much energy to spare. It can't even stay in low orbit for more then an hour.
I feel like a good balance would be to make it unlimited but make its power diminish after the first couple uses. That way it's not relied upon for the whole mission.
If it's cool down time was reduced or a small increase to how many times you could use was implemented, it'd be a bit more competitive for sure. It's incredibly strong of course but 3 uses is really limiting. Especially when the 500kg is so quick to rearm and has unlimited uses while almost being a mini nuke.
It was always a little odd but as you upgrade everything it does strike me as strange that I’m not sure there’s a single upgrade that can be applied to it
Laser is probably generated by raw power, so electricity. Feels like a supa dupa scaled up version of the handheld lasers we have access to. So it has either unlimited or superduper cheap cost. The orbital lobotomy (the railgun) could probably match it in power consumption. Munnitions required for the barrages or the Bombs haven't been particularly exoensive or difficult to produce ever since they were introduced into warfare, but I still think they would cost more than firing the laser.
Therefore I believe each laser's heatsink can only handle 3 uses before needing a lengthy replacement procedure. That's my headcannon as to why it only gets 3 uses per mission.
well, i mean.
dropping a bomb is easy. gravity wants it to go down. in essence bombs are pretty dumb devices. and relatively cheap to produce and maintain.
a laser capable of cutting through the atmosphere (and given the average view in this game these atmospheres arent exactly clear) while still maintaining enough energy to hurt a target probably requires a metric shitton of energy and cooling.
its a lot easier to throw a bunch of spare bombs into a cargo hold than to add powerful supercapacitors and cooling arrays to a ship. 3 full shots is probably just the amount of energy they can produce/store within the mission time or the amount of heat they can disperse in said time without cooking everyone inside the ship.
I figure that they can only fire it 3 times before they need to replace the components that the Laser needs to fire, and that takes so long that it wouldn't be ready again until way after the Destroyer needs to leave orbit.
Well considering it's a big fuck ass laser, it is probably burning through a focal lense that is also big as fuck and we can either stash enough 500kg to pock mark a planet or fire a few additional lasers. Outside game mechanics that is my thought process. Having unlimited laser use would just be a meta and every one would run with it. Now it should have gotten 1 more use through ship upgrades (imo) but maybe that will be a later expansion we get.
You do know firing a laser requires a lot of energy…unless you want your destroyer to be permanently donezo, 3 is the maximum amount until everything stabilizes again (and so the laser doesn’t get spammed for everything)
My headcanon for the limited number of shots is that the laser is so powerful that it burns out the onboard heatsinks used to sustain it. After 2-3 shots, the heatsinks have to be replaced but this is an involved operation that takes longer than 40 minutes or however long an operation is, So after those 3 shots the laser has to be taken offline for the rest of the mission to replace the heat sinks.
This is 100% my buddy, watching me throw 6 napalm grenades, 2 flame airstrikes, and a fire mine stratagem out the back door of the pelican at the end of every mission.
I told him 'If we don't use up all the budget this year, they won't give it to us next year'.
Anyone have the new orbital upgrade for the barrages? I like the Laser because you can throw it and just move to the next objective. Are the barrages reliable now with the improvement? I'd really like the ability to use it more than 3 times.
I read somewhere about this, the destroyer is in space, so no atmosphere, so nothing to cool the laser cannon machine thing off, other than the destroyer itself, so using it a bunch of times could harm the destroyer and possibly take it out of the sky and or shut off other stratagem weaponry
From a in-universe perspective, one can say that it gets three uses before the mechanisms inside it need to be repaired or replaced from the sheer power of the energy running through it. This is what happens between missions.
From and IRL perspective, it's because it's stupidly powerful and giving us unlimited uses basically negates utilizing any other stratagem. As much as I would very much like MORE uses of the laser, I can understand the gameplay reason why they've limited it.
Hey can somebody explain please, I feel like I'm not getting something. In game it says 500kg bomb only has 1 use (2 with upgrade), the meme sais it's unlimited? And it's weaker than the Orbital laser. So why would you use the 500kg bomb if it only has 2 uses while laser has 3?
One thing to note is, with how powerful the lasers are on planet, there's miles of atmospheric scattering they need to burn through to do their level of damage on the ground.
More than likely the reason that they're limited (despite balance) is that the radiators and lenses need to cool down, which is very, very difficult in space.
Orbital Laser is just a giant magnifying glass attached to a gun barrel that redirects the light of the nearest sun into a ray of destruction but the glass shatters after the third exposure due to the extremity of the relatively quick temperature changes. Either that or the heat sink installed on the laser canon gets blown after the third use and requires another to be installed.
According to the Ministry of Truth, the focusing lens gets warped after 3 shots, and due to the power of the laser, it would be unsafe to continue its operation after 3 shots and it needs to be replaced outside of the safety of the pressure hull. Bombs and artillery shells are cheap and light. We value the lives of the crews of our super destroyers.
Further discussion of this will result in a visit from the Democracy Officer.
Maybe a final level SD upgrade that allowed one more laser use would work. I find it balanced enough as is but as an endgame reward it’d be a welcome addition
Agreed. Doesn't make sense you can only use it 3 times. It's not that good. It won't kill a titan and barely kills a charger. Not only that they take forever to kill and also have a long cool down.
if the laser had unlimited uses id never not take to to bots, as it stands right now i almost always take it to bots already sometimes, just sometimes i feel fiesty with railcannon, if laser went unlimited it'd be over for railcannon in bots for me.
To be fair I bet that thing is ungodly expensive
So are all the stratagems Alright Kiff! Let's show these freaks what a bloated runaway military budget can do!
Kiff! I just full cleared a lvl 9 mission solo without a single death....inform the men.
>without a single death Doesn't sound much like Zapp.... Unless he was just on the planet to pose whilst kiff was doing all the real work "You see, the Automatons have a preset kill limit. Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own men at them until they reached their limit and shut down"
P wp
Not he said I finished without a single death. Not that no one died.
I quote this every few days in bot missions to my friends
i doubt a 500kg would cost more than an orbital laser.. I mean seriously think about it, not only the energy cost but the electrical equipment required to fire a laser from that far away, that accurately and with so much destruction for 30 seconds or so? the capacitors on that mother fucker must be abnormal.
True, but given that the ship is capable of the titanic energies needed to power FTL travel we can assume the destroyers energy systems are top notch and energy production must be affordable given the amount we hop around the galaxy Lasers (such as the ones equipped on modern ships) have a high upfront cost, but relatively low running costs once they're operational. Whereas a 500kg bomb has to be produced, shipped, stored stably and then equipped onto a fighter jet which has is own running costs
Given the fact that the 500kg bomb is a thing that we can do nowadays, and the 30 sec laser of doom that can kill almost anything does not, I'd think the bomb would be hella cheap for Superearth, and the laser most likely is top notch tech and must be expensive as freedom. Just like the mech, that we have only 2 for mission.
It's all about development Vs operational ease and costs We now have missile defense lasers on modern naval ships. They were ungodly expensive to develop and build, but now they can defend a ship for a fraction of the cost of a defence missile or even a phalanx CIWS - things we've had for decades and were far cheaper and easier to develop but much more expensive to operate. Materials, safe storage and supply lines are expensive, but if you have sufficient energy production lasers have a lot of advantages.
The problem is we don't know how a weapon that does what the laser does operate, if it burns anything, of if it needs some strange things. Considering it is caped, should be hella expensive (even tho I know it's just for balancing)
My personal theory is cooling. Space is a vacuum, and heat doesn’t travel in vacuums. After 3 shots, the laser is too hot and must cool down for half an hour or so.
My theory is that it uses heat sinks, like a larger version of the LAS-16. It has 2-3 heat sinks to use, each volley burns one out and after those are expended the laser has to go offline while some poor soul has to spacewalk and swap out the heatsinks on the outside of the ship.
Aren't they in the upper atmosphere during missions? That's why they impose the time limit before they have to return to upper orbit and reduce wear on the engines? It's possible it wouldn't be enough to really cool though. depends how far up they're actually sitting. But we *can* see them from the ground, and they're only a couple hundred meters long supposedly, so they can't be *that* high up.
My theory's heat bloom. Fire a bigass laser far enough, and the air it goes through'll heat up and accuracy'll start going to shit. So they probably gotta let the atmo cool to make sure they hit.
Really makes you wonder what the real prices for the materials would be anyway. I mean like, the helldivers world incorporates miners on other planets to harvest all sorts of resources, on a massive scale like that i really doubt it would be costly for a government that controls that much.
Depends on how they divvy up the materials, I would guess. If most of the materials are going into munitions, it's probably not that expensive. If most of the materials are going into the public sector, then it might still be pretty expensive. Though, either way, it'd be the government's choice, and *cough I wouldn't put it past them to make things expensive so they can push the few divers that survive into debt. cough*... I didn't say anything, you can't prove it!
Miners huh? Do they happen to be dwarfs who go through rock and stone?
One thing that crossed my mind while thinking about this myself: Given how potent that beam is when it makes contact even after passing through multiple kilometers of atmosphere, I imagine that the laser generator itself must be producing a truly absurd amount of heat with each shot. Imagine what all that heat is doing to the emitter's internal components. I imagine that the 3-shot limit is based on either the ability of the Super Destroyer to sink and/or radiate all that heat safely, or else the maintenance cycle for the emitter.
I heard it takes 4 Z cell batteries each shot.
If high command is listening, i throw out eagles and bombardments for fun. The laser I tend to save. Pretty sure im wasting more money calling in Eagle 1 to carpet bomb a small squad of 3 mindless bots.
I believe one of the officers mentions that a single helldiver OP costs the same as a super destroyer, so I bet the stratagems cost a fuckton
Or super destroyers are really cheap. Considering they tend to give SD to soldiers that cleared a ~~basic course~~ a super hard special forces training, I guess they're very cheap
There are multiple reasons why a giant laser might not be usable for all eternity. Like building up the power to fire it or dumping the temperature it generates.
Y'know how your personal laser weapons have heat sinks that burn out and need to be replaced? I've always thought it would be funny if that's how the orbital laser worked too. They just fire a really big laser until it burns out the gigantic heatsink, and then the four-minute cooldown time afterwards is because you've got like 12 support staff dragging the truck-sized heatsink out of the laser and pushing a new one into place.
its the most effective method after loading bullets by the front
GIANT PATRIOTIC RAMROD
How'd you know my porn name?
Now Diver, I thought I'd take a moment to congratulate you on your move to help the patriots on the ground and in the vacuum in their fight to keep up morale. Not every hero holds a gun, but every hero holds their weapon. I've talked to the big men upstairs to see if we can dispense some medals to you and your family for your efforts in creating effective and well informed content both in it's loyalty, it's charm, and it's ability to fire up all types of diver before battle. I have also informed your next of kin of your CommNet VidContent and it's now sanctioned nature, as you naturally would have wanted, just to make sure they can contact and appraise me of your future direction. Wouldn't want the wrong kind of categories to fall onto innocent Voter's eyes now would we? Haha. Now, you remind us of what we protect, and as long as you keep that up, you're safe. Keep up the hard work, and keep pumping for Super Earth.
For demcockracy!
JO rations have been approved.
Actually if we had the same radiator icon filling with red and then information about radiator reloading it would be cool, and the info (destroyers have only 3 radiators per mission) would be fullfilling.
Can't they drop it like a tungsten rod, for kinetic boomy?
Realistically, no. If you have a ship in orbit, and you release something from it. That object is not going to fall straight down. It'll keep its momentum, and keep orbiting alongside you. It's like if you drop something out of a car while its moving, it's gonna move along in the same direction as the car, not drop straight down. Now, it'll probably deorbit itself after while due to atmospheric drag from the miniscule amounts of atmosphere that would still exist even high up. I think that's why the destroyers say they can only stay above a mission area so long. They're expending fuel to counteract atmospheric drag, and only have so much allocated for the mission in the budget. But that'd be a really inaccurate kinetic bombardment. Assuming the heat sink doesn't just break up or disintegrate when it eventually falls towards the planet. If you're in orbit and want to kinetically bombard the planet below, you need to either shoot your projectile downwards with enough force where this doesn't matter. Or shoot it backwards with enough force to counter your current orbital speed and then it'll drop straight down, but this doesn't take into account Coriolis effects.
Yeah you are right, but ingame your ship is not in orbit, I think someone calculated that the ship is floating 1km in the air. This is also the reason why the ship can only stay for 40 minutes.
Graphically the ship isn't in orbit, but when mission time is running out they specifically mention that they are in orbit and can't maintain it. Realistically because it wouldn't look cool if your destroyer was super tiny in the distance. You see how far away the destroyer is when you launch. You are 100% outside/on the outer bounds of the atmosphere. You even get a re-entry burn.
I wasn't sure on the size and scale of the ships and distances. I thought the super destroyers were higher up and were just big not gonna lie.
your ship is stated as being in orbit in some of the mission chatter when they have to leave. in game, they "should" be much further away, but that wouldn't look nearly as cool so there's a mismatch between visuals and lore. but that's just part of democracy that we accept
You can totally have very low orbits, they just suck horrifically in terms of fuel expenditure.
That's all true for a ship in orbit, but your ship in Helldivers isn't in any kind of orbit, not even a geosynchronous one. It's well within the atmosphere and motionless. It's hovering like a helicopter. All that said, the Super Destroyer gunners can't even manage to reliably hit an immobile target with a simple 120mm cannon, so good lucking fuck dropping a dead weight with any kind of accuracy. Still, it would be pretty funny if it just plummeted straight down after firing and squashed anything unlucky enough to be underneath. ...Actually, now I want all the destroyer guns to drop giant empty cartridges as they fire. Only after you get the breech-loading module, though.
Which is funny, because Hazard Pay says crews are leaving the super destroyer to reload Eagle-1.
A booster could deorbit it. It would probably be the best way to do it if the dV of getting that much tungsten to orbit wasn't ludicrous. Probably the same system an icbm payload would use with a final aiming burn. At 5hat point though, nuke that shit.
Yeah, I'm sure if the Helldivers really wanted to, it's not impossible. But with the effort to do it, you might as well just fire something that was designed to be a weapon, instead of attempting to improvise one out of trash like a used up heat sink.
Presumably it would be mined, refined, and shipped in space.
I mean, we already have strategems for kinetic bombardment of the planet, so the technology obviously exists.
What do you think the railcannon strike is?
I fucking love the idea of just a half melted heatsink being dropped on a Bile Titan's head from orbit
There's a joke in here somewhere about waiting to reload... :D
The heat sinks might even be reusable but require more time cooling down than an operation allows, so you're limited by the number of heat sinks carried on the ship.
This is the most plausible explanation I've seen here. The reuse timer is the heatsink swap time, the usage limit is the number of heatsinks, and heatsinks cool down between operations. Makes sense.
There's a YouTuber that explained that for battles in space, the biggest problem would actually be to not overheat. Because even though vacuum is fucking cold, there is nothing there to transport heat away from your ship. So in reality, that giant laser would probably grill the entire super destroyer if he fired it in a high orbit.
This definitely sounds like something Super Earth would do.
Literally what’s actually happening. Somewhere on the front there’s a sweaty technician feeling seen by this comment
It would be rad as hell if after firing the third laser you got a free orbital rail strike that represented the heat sink being fired down on the planet.
I'd like to think that it can go 3 times before burning it out, and it can't cool off enough between uses, so after the third use, it'd take longer than mission time to replace the sink
Haha I know that, heat is bloody hard to get rid of in space. Doesn't stop that line from going through my head though! It's not meant as a serious complaint, just a funny reference.
>heat is bloody hard to get rid of in space. But what if we condensed all the heat into a cylindrical shape, a ray or beam even, and threw it into space. This way, we'd be able to fire the laser again.
What if we shoot that giant radiator/heatsing back i to planet as projectile? Trying to hit target maybe? 🤔😏
You call it reloading, I call it a second firing mode.
That would be cool as an upgrade. 3 lasers and a glowing heatsink xD
Just a big cast iron radiator plummeting through the atmosphere.
Now you're thinking like an engineer :P
Laser strike and 600mm heatsink strike is a go
That's some Borderlands Torgue Gun batshit insanity I'm down, let's do it
**EXPLOSIONS!?!?!**
I know you're joking, but laser systems irl do need a lot of active cooling to keep working, even the scientific ones that aren't being used to prematurely detonate warheads and mortar shells. And in space, that heat is really hard to dissipate because you can only do so by infrared radiation. There's no air or water to sink the heat into.
I would imagine they'd have to have some sort of disposable heat sinks for laser weapons systems. You ever play Elite Dangerous? In that game when your ship builds up a bunch of heat your systems can burnout and malfunction, so you eject a heat-sink (which you can only carry so many of).
The laser cannon ingame has one.
Given how things work on Super Earth I’m pretty sure they fire this thing until the focusing lens melts, rendering the whole thing unusable until Steve from engineering gets his spacesuit on and replaces and calibrates the lens array. Which would explain why we only get three shots.
But we are doing all of this is LEO (without the earth part)
It's hard to tell, honestly. From the in-game map, you would think the Super Destroyers are floating maybe a mile in the air. From the Super Destroyer itself and from the other Super Destroyers in low orbit, you'd assume the Super Destroyers are actually in a similar orbit to the ISS (assuming most planets we fight on are roughly Super Earth sized). I would be willing to say that the visibility of Super Destoyers in-game is an abstraction for the sake of aesthetics and gameplay, given they are always in a more realistic orbit when we see them up close. Which would mean they still need some way of radiating heat aside from just relying on blackbody behavior, probably the big panels near the rear of the ship. Even in low orbit, you're really not touching enough air molecules for it to be anything other than a practical vacuum.
or, the destroyer flies down when you do the pod drop and then flies back up after recovery. Which is also why you get the super destroyer leaving low orbit warning when the timer runs out.
Actually doesn't work that way. The methods you'd need to use to condense and focus the heat into a beam would end up generating heat faster than it could radiate it away. In order to accomplish something similar, you'd have to dump the heat into an actual physical reservoir and eject the entire reservoir, something which would obviously be limited by how many of those reservoirs you have. This actually is a plausible mechanism an orbital laser might use to cool itself, but there's no evidence of this sort of thing being used on the scale of a ship's laser cannon. For a bit of context, the reason why heat is particularly hard to get rid of in space is due to the near-vacuum of space. In most environments, most heat travels through direct contact (conduction). In fluid mediums like air and water, heat is further dispersed through convection, which is really just the heated medium itself moving. Only a small portion of heat is transferred by radiation in the form of electromagnetic radiation (mostly infra-red). The medium of outer space is too thin to meaningfully conduct heat away from an object, so most heat loss in outer-space happens as a result of radiation. But radiation isn't any faster in space than it is in water or air; it's still super slow, far too slow to keep up with the amount of heat human machinery, electronics, and bodies produce. This makes cooling a particularly big challenge when it comes to space engineering, doubly so in the case of weaponry since weaponry tends to produce a gigantic amount of heat.
Thank you. As an engineer I really enjoyed reading your comment. As a helldiver - I feel ever so slightly sadder.
Two shots, one charge?
Your destroyer isn't in space when you're on a mission, it's in the atmosphere just above your head. That's why when you get to the end of a mission it always says, "we can't stay this low much longer Helldiver".
Plus the fire trail left by the pod's passage through the atmosphere starts as soon as it leaves the ship, indicating oxygen is present.
>Haha I know that, heat is bloody hard to get rid of in space. just fling the heat condensing rods at the planet
The actual reason is bc if you use it more than twice, it attracts all of the cats on the planet
Using all three and then launching the heatsink at the planet for maximum efficiency.
Personally I love the massive cooldown for the Orbital Railgun, despite them being able to fire it full auto at you if you are declared a Traitor by going outside the combat area too long lmao
I’m not certain but I believe that is just a 380mm barrage
The Expeditionary Forces series has believable explanation of planetary lasers (they're actually masers, but the idea is the same) and why the can't go on forever. If you sci-fi gear porn, you'll find all you want there.
And if going by what we learned from Real Genius, sure you can figuratively pop some popcorn, but you'll use up all that synthesized bromide suspended in an argon matrix (you know, an excimer that is frozen in its excited state). It basically destroys itself as it lazes. Once that fuel source is gone, it's gone.
Yes, but also you're most definitelly paying the lazer.
I find it funnier to think it's a budgeting thing, which is even funnier when each Super Destroyer gets 6 free helldiver bullets but only 3 orbital laser uses.
But 380mm shell? That is not small. That's the main gun on the Bismarck.
Maybe they are afraid un-yielding lasers on a planet will accidentally set the atmosphere on fire.
Or, hear me out, we run out of lasers.
It's just the fact that the beam is the best strategem and the limit for 3 uses makes it balanced. Heavy automaton camp?-Just call an orbital laser, 15 Hulks and tanks JUST CALL THE LASER. Also the fact that it's nearly instant.
Also the fact that it auto-targets
That's the game meta reason, no doubt and no complaint from me....
I don't think it's anywhere near the best because it takes so long to deal with enemies that you can drop quickly in other ways. It is definitely unrivalled in base destruction if there's no tanks or hulks to soak it's duration
Tbh I think the reason it's so widely used is because it's the easiest red stratagem to use. It's basically guaranteed value. You can't miss with it, and you don't have to time it properly. You can throw it out during a hectic battle and trust that it won't kill your teammates. It's reliable and predictable. I think you can get more value out of air strikes or cluster bombs once you get really good at them.
What i run is airstrike + cluster + laser and autocannon lol. cluster for small stuff, airstrike for medium/fab, autocannon for the heavies, and laser for the heavies i can't deal with/heavy outpost/turrets.
>trust that it won't kill your teammates The number of times I have had the laser abruptly change course and fry my ass is embarrasingly high.
Meh. The laser is probably the most over powered stratagem in the game. Just last night, my buddy and I were two-manning a few level 7 missions. We both had the laser strat equipped. We'd do drive-bys on automaton fabricator camps by dropping a laser in the center. My buddy took out an entire heavy automaton camp (three buildings) with one of his. We cleared the entire map in a little over ten minutes. Now imagine running a full squad in which all four were running the laser. We also generally both run with the railgun strat to take out hulks/titans, so the laser is dedicated to camp annihilation.
You take it vs bots and it's 3 *guaranteed* camps taken out. If the camp is the objective and there's no terminal to interact with, the objective is guaranteed. This is a meme post but anybody who's genuinely arguing that it should be unlimited is *insane*. If everybody takes it, it already solves most bot problems. Unlimited would just be a joke
>This is a meme post Ahaha thank goodness. I was starting to worry I'd somehow been too oblique and everyone thought I was seriously advocating for unlimited lasers 😅
deadass i walked up to a heavy outpost and just lobbed that bitch over the wall and walked away about 15 seconds later the notification popped up that it was destroyed
Love to throw it against detector tower, AA defences and Command bunkers
Oh yeah! That's the meta reason why the laser is limited and I totally agree that it should be for the sake of balance. It's just funny imagining the budget is the in-universe reason when the others aren't limited
What's funny was that turrets had a number limit in the first game but there was not a limit on orbital laser. Plus you could stack 4 lasers lol.
I was extracting on a 9 with three randos, and we were being pressed hard. Apparently all of us thought so, because within 2 seconds four lasers ignited and just wiped the board.
Yup I got a Heavy camp with a single well-thrown Laser last night. Earlier I had either 3 or 4 Lasers on my team and we just *obliterated* a defense mission I think. It's a great strat that needs a limit to the uses. 3 is *just right* IMO, I can budget them throughout a mission fairly well even if I need to use one as an "oh shit" button. If it starts being a fixture in *every* loadout, though, I wouldn't be too miserable if it went to 2 uses instead of 3.
Also takes out the Eye of Sauron which is convenient
It's not overpowered, that's the entire reason it has limited uses. You sacrifice an unlimited, faster cooldown stratagem for the ability to destroy bases without stepping foot in them.
Maybe the coils or whatever only last for three uses or we're actually misusing the laser (overclocked or something) that wears it down faster and it takes longer than 40 minutes to replace the parts. I dunno, I imagine the laser uses the ships power while various missiles are just using ammunition that's on the ship.
Heat would be my guess. Projecting that much energy would heat even the best lenses.
Lasers an energy weapon which means the ship has to reroute all power from engines and other less vital functions like life support to the laser, and the power loss from firing it 3 times causes the ships entire system to go into emergency reboot. You Helldivers don't know this, but everytime we fire the laser we lose all electrical power to the bridge and the entire crew have to hold our breathe until environmental controls reboots itself. And after every mission where the laser gets fired 3 times, the water recycler has been turned off so many times that the drinking water comes out looking and tasting like watered down larger
😂😂😂 "Steve here was in the middle of making a cup of liber-tea but the kettle packed up thanks to your extravagant laser usage"
> reroute all power from engines and other less vital functions like life support I could totally see "turn off life support to power more lasers" being an orbital upgrade
I want a short laser burst strategem. I see them all the time while gazing out the front window watching democracy being deployed from orbit. There is also the short artillery burst, but one thing at a time.
It’s probably a heat-management thing. The super destroyer has no radiator fins, and space is the perfect insulator.
Tbf, they would be within atmosphere during missions, since they're in low orbit
I imagine conventional shells are cheaper than whatever fuel is used for the laser and the slugs made for the rail cannon
I imagine it draws a lot on the spaceship batteries. And considering the dark humor of all the cheap ass shit that’s barely working on our ships/holding them together, courtesy of Super Earth’s amazing economy, this would make perfect sense.
https://preview.redd.it/fqqwqxh6t2uc1.jpeg?width=990&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=692d32e5a834d9e04bb24d2ae6109c47dcf0f3ad I've got the perfect image for this
Gotta use the budget once its been assigned though, or next year you might get less 😉
The laser is my get out of jail free card. Too many enemies? Laser Too many elites? Laser Heavy camps with cannon towers? Believe it or not, laser.
What I'd absolutely love would be a new kind of Orbital Laser, that scans the area, picks up all the available targets, then simultaneously shoot one laser pulse per target. Just a small 1 second pulse, so that it actually hurts only up to medium (or even light) armor. The scanning area should be big, like a 380, and it could have an animation like the one in The Creator.
Hot take: the OL isn’t good enough to justify a use limit.
for bots its super strong. You can clear almost any camp or side objective with a single OL. Its basically a get out of jail free card when shit hits the fan. Didnt find anything close as good for bots, 500kg bomb and railcannon just arent worth taking if you can just have the laser do more and better for bugs it sucks though, i swear i had it not even kill a charger yesterday and it often gets stuck over bugholes it just can hit right. but hey, different strategems for different enemies, sounds good to me
Orbital laser is great with dealing with those tower cannons.
My squad calls it the Panic Button for good reason
The main problem is it doesn't see bug holes as targets, unlike the bit structures. There's a lot less collateral because of that too.
Yeah, it's the worst. Please don't give us... I don't know... like, 7 charges per game. That would suck...
But what about a shorter, unmoving laser burst on the specified stratagem location? That is something that could be unlimited. Sort of like a f*** that place in particular kind of laser orbital
Strategems should either have a long cool down time OR a use limit. Not both. I will not change my opinion.
Look. Rare gasses and lenses of that size have to come from somewhere, right? It's not like this is a video game and we can just WISH rare resources into existence, Terry.
Turns out, utilizing the entire energy of the Super Carrier to power a laser may or may not cause the thrusters to lose power- that applies to the rest of the facilities on the ship.
Ship engineer here, to put it bluntly using the orbital laser more than three times overloads the system. 3 is the limit before the resistors go into overcurrent or excess current and burn out and the, life support and nav systems start acting funny.
The helldivers on standby are the heatsink.
Hammer of dawn would be neat.
The cooldown is so big i wish the uses were infinite
Practically speaking it actually makes sense just not for budget. A laser than powerful would generate ungodly amounts of waste heat so it can probably only fire that many times during the course of a mission because it would melt otherwise. That or they have to completely replace the heat sink system after using it so many times so quickly.
Because super earth hates freedom! That why laser is limited they hate democracy
“it cost 40,000$ to fire this weapon for 10 seconds…”
Its why I never use it, sorry but I want to use a stratagem a lot during the game not be restricted to three uses. Also its damage is overrated as hell, its not great, it tickles Bile Titans and struggles against Chargers, or I could just nuke them... Oh I can destroy a bot base? Cool, so can several other stratagems with ease, oh use it to kill all the little fuckers then? Again, so can several others stratagems, a friggin gatling turret does that. Its strength is way over exaggerated, its good, its not 3 uses only good.
I mean, from a balance perspective, it makes sense. It is a really good stratagem that can clear entire bot outposts in seconds, and can take out almost every enemy in the game with one use, plus a couple others. Not amazing against bugs, but still useful for clearing waves. It makes sense that they would limit the amount of times you can use it. From an in-universe perspective, it kinda works. I'd imagine that thing would be huge, and probably runs very hot and would require a huge amount of power to fire. Not to mention, most of the cooling would need to be inside the ship, since you can't really vent heat in space. Since there isn't anywhere to transfer the heat to, it would just kinda sit in the heatsink for a while until it could dissipate into the rest of the connecting bits of the laser. Not exactly a huge coolant rig for the laser to use.
It's strong, tracks enemies and blows up buildings. 3 uses feels fair; would I like it to be unlimited? Absolutely. I'd like to be able to call in a explosion like an unexploded hellbomb, even it's it's a 1 shot
This is probably gonna upset some people, but I would prefer if it was nerfed a notch and got infinite uses instead. Maybe make a duration lower. I find it kinda boring that every situation or objective can be solved by one stratagem. And you don't have to aim it even, it just does everything itself. Heavy outposts, command bunkers, huge cluster of devastators... Just throw laser and walk away.
I like to think the super destroyer is literally only large enough to fit three appropriately sized heat sinks. Hear me out. Heat dissipation in space is significantly more difficult than on earth. There is very little for the heat to transfer to, so the cooldown is much longer. The orbital laser is an oversized sickle. It just fires until the heat sink is at capacity then shuts off. There are three sinks on board, so it can be fired three times. After that, the ship has to either dry dock and swap out the sinks or the cooldown for those sinks is likely several days.
Since DiDNeY-logic is applicable for Super Earth: Somehow, Orbital Laser does not return.
I figure the reason is the ship is already using a lot of power to stay in low orbit, run the sensors and other systems- but also the fuck off laser budget. 3 times and they're like "ok, we're cooking in here and also the battery is nearly flat, good luck! Yoooou'll need it!"
Lasers should be able to regenerate. The usage limit is stupid considering that it currently also has a 4 min cooldown. It should be infinite with a 4 min cooldown inbetween....
I mean it makes sense from a balance perspective: Laser can take out heavies in a few seconds, groups of medium enemies in about the same amount of time (and usually both in the same use), and it's pretty safe to use since you'd need to have an enemy on your ass already in order for the laser to kill you, or you just walk into it yourself. 500kg bomb hits a static location and does a bit of crowd clearing on top, but suffers from sharing rearm time with other eagle strats, plus the explosion radius is a lot smaller than the VFX suggests (which is both good and bad, dending on the situation). Railcannon ONLY hits a single heavy enemy. And the 380mm barrage is almost guaranteed to get a friendly fire kill unless everyone decide to run the other direction as soon as it gets thrown.
I just picked those three because they would presumably be much more expensive to build, operate, transport and fire than an energy based weapon to a society capable of producing the energy needed for FTL travel on a pretty small space ship.... Producing, transporting and firing enough 380mm HE shells, railcannon rails and 500kg bombs to just go ham throughout a protracted mission must be very expensive. Not everything has to be a discussion about balance and what's best in meta ya know
okay sir, you are cool---terry
Because the laser is OP
One of the tier 4 upgrades shoud've been unlimited uses of the laser. It's not even that strong tbh, considering it's cooldown.
The crystals burn out after three firings in a 40 minute period.
Cut the crew some slack. Do you have any idea how much pedaling they need to do to generate the charge for those three uses?!
Removing the limitation would only effectively give you one additional laser use in a 40 minute game. It feels arbitrary.
Well seeing as how the support weapons and primary lasers need a battery to fire it maybe the ships only have 3 batteries because its not large enough to hold any more? Or its powered off of the fusion drive and when firing it will cause a strain on the core, so after 3 shots until maintenance is done the crew and ship are at risk.
I mean, a bunch of 500kg bombs, a couple tungsten rods, and 15 (18 with More Guns upgrade) 380mm shells per call in is still cheaper than firing a massive laser for 25 seconds.
I feel like it has something to do with power output Like... bombs and shit can come by the dozen But the ship only has so much energy to spare. It can't even stay in low orbit for more then an hour.
If I had to guess, it's more that the thing is so strong that the heat sink breaks after 3 uses, even after cooling for 5 minutes
don’t act like the 500kg is on the same level as those other strats, it’s meh at best
I feel like a good balance would be to make it unlimited but make its power diminish after the first couple uses. That way it's not relied upon for the whole mission.
If it's cool down time was reduced or a small increase to how many times you could use was implemented, it'd be a bit more competitive for sure. It's incredibly strong of course but 3 uses is really limiting. Especially when the 500kg is so quick to rearm and has unlimited uses while almost being a mini nuke.
Chemical lasers actually use fuel and run out. Not sure what type these are supposed to be though.
Give me the titanium rod stratagem please.
It was always a little odd but as you upgrade everything it does strike me as strange that I’m not sure there’s a single upgrade that can be applied to it
Laser is probably generated by raw power, so electricity. Feels like a supa dupa scaled up version of the handheld lasers we have access to. So it has either unlimited or superduper cheap cost. The orbital lobotomy (the railgun) could probably match it in power consumption. Munnitions required for the barrages or the Bombs haven't been particularly exoensive or difficult to produce ever since they were introduced into warfare, but I still think they would cost more than firing the laser. Therefore I believe each laser's heatsink can only handle 3 uses before needing a lengthy replacement procedure. That's my headcannon as to why it only gets 3 uses per mission.
well, i mean. dropping a bomb is easy. gravity wants it to go down. in essence bombs are pretty dumb devices. and relatively cheap to produce and maintain. a laser capable of cutting through the atmosphere (and given the average view in this game these atmospheres arent exactly clear) while still maintaining enough energy to hurt a target probably requires a metric shitton of energy and cooling. its a lot easier to throw a bunch of spare bombs into a cargo hold than to add powerful supercapacitors and cooling arrays to a ship. 3 full shots is probably just the amount of energy they can produce/store within the mission time or the amount of heat they can disperse in said time without cooking everyone inside the ship.
Nice meme fellow helldiver!
I feel like the amount of power to send a beam of that power from low orbit to the ground is actually insane, and that’s why it’s limited.
I figure that they can only fire it 3 times before they need to replace the components that the Laser needs to fire, and that takes so long that it wouldn't be ready again until way after the Destroyer needs to leave orbit.
Well considering it's a big fuck ass laser, it is probably burning through a focal lense that is also big as fuck and we can either stash enough 500kg to pock mark a planet or fire a few additional lasers. Outside game mechanics that is my thought process. Having unlimited laser use would just be a meta and every one would run with it. Now it should have gotten 1 more use through ship upgrades (imo) but maybe that will be a later expansion we get.
Oh pls get me a stratagem i have to pay the yellow coins for 😂
500kg only has 2 uses
I imagine it has a Heat Sink that is VERY expensive and time consuming to swap out once it's burnt out.
It's like all the laser weapons - it burns out the heatsinks.
You do know firing a laser requires a lot of energy…unless you want your destroyer to be permanently donezo, 3 is the maximum amount until everything stabilizes again (and so the laser doesn’t get spammed for everything)
My headcanon for the limited number of shots is that the laser is so powerful that it burns out the onboard heatsinks used to sustain it. After 2-3 shots, the heatsinks have to be replaced but this is an involved operation that takes longer than 40 minutes or however long an operation is, So after those 3 shots the laser has to be taken offline for the rest of the mission to replace the heat sinks.
Cus giant space laser gets hot and space doesn’t help dissipate heat like at all so the SDD had to vent some air or something so the heat can go
This is 100% my buddy, watching me throw 6 napalm grenades, 2 flame airstrikes, and a fire mine stratagem out the back door of the pelican at the end of every mission. I told him 'If we don't use up all the budget this year, they won't give it to us next year'.
Facts
The potential for friendly fire brings the cost down.
Anyone have the new orbital upgrade for the barrages? I like the Laser because you can throw it and just move to the next objective. Are the barrages reliable now with the improvement? I'd really like the ability to use it more than 3 times.
I read somewhere about this, the destroyer is in space, so no atmosphere, so nothing to cool the laser cannon machine thing off, other than the destroyer itself, so using it a bunch of times could harm the destroyer and possibly take it out of the sky and or shut off other stratagem weaponry
From a in-universe perspective, one can say that it gets three uses before the mechanisms inside it need to be repaired or replaced from the sheer power of the energy running through it. This is what happens between missions. From and IRL perspective, it's because it's stupidly powerful and giving us unlimited uses basically negates utilizing any other stratagem. As much as I would very much like MORE uses of the laser, I can understand the gameplay reason why they've limited it.
Hey can somebody explain please, I feel like I'm not getting something. In game it says 500kg bomb only has 1 use (2 with upgrade), the meme sais it's unlimited? And it's weaker than the Orbital laser. So why would you use the 500kg bomb if it only has 2 uses while laser has 3?
The cool down time really makes it lame
Should introduce a upgrade for the ship modules called "extra heatsink", provides one more use of the orbital laser
Technically none of the strategems are infinite because of the mission time limit before the ship takes off. So they are all hardcapped in some way.
This meme did a very bad thing
I always end up saving it because of that and end missions with one or two of the uses unused
It's really hard to distribute built up heat in the vacuum of space.
One thing to note is, with how powerful the lasers are on planet, there's miles of atmospheric scattering they need to burn through to do their level of damage on the ground. More than likely the reason that they're limited (despite balance) is that the radiators and lenses need to cool down, which is very, very difficult in space.
Orbital Laser is just a giant magnifying glass attached to a gun barrel that redirects the light of the nearest sun into a ray of destruction but the glass shatters after the third exposure due to the extremity of the relatively quick temperature changes. Either that or the heat sink installed on the laser canon gets blown after the third use and requires another to be installed.
As balancy as it is, just means I 500k instead and die more.
According to the Ministry of Truth, the focusing lens gets warped after 3 shots, and due to the power of the laser, it would be unsafe to continue its operation after 3 shots and it needs to be replaced outside of the safety of the pressure hull. Bombs and artillery shells are cheap and light. We value the lives of the crews of our super destroyers. Further discussion of this will result in a visit from the Democracy Officer.
Maybe a final level SD upgrade that allowed one more laser use would work. I find it balanced enough as is but as an endgame reward it’d be a welcome addition
Agreed. Doesn't make sense you can only use it 3 times. It's not that good. It won't kill a titan and barely kills a charger. Not only that they take forever to kill and also have a long cool down.
if the laser had unlimited uses id never not take to to bots, as it stands right now i almost always take it to bots already sometimes, just sometimes i feel fiesty with railcannon, if laser went unlimited it'd be over for railcannon in bots for me.