From the Depths - APS Shell Tutorial

hello everyone and welcome to the aps shell tutorial now strap yourselves in this is going to be a longer video because it's such a big topic and i couldn't find a convenient way to slice this pie as usual there will be time stamps chapters whatever i can do for your convenience and also to spice things up a little bit i'm gonna try to answer a specific question this time around what is the best shell now i don't really like this question but i think it's going to be interesting to try to answer it also i'm curious to know what are your favorite shells what conclusion do you think i'm going to draw do you agree disagree let me know in the comments below and let's dive in alright let's start with kinetic shells the mechanics that these shells use are going to come up again so i think it's convenient but what do i mean by kinetic shells i mean technically all the shells can deal a little bit of kinetic damage but no i really mean pure kinetic shells and in almost every case you're going to be using either ace a bow head this one an armor piercing head or the heavy head and then you're going to be using either a solid warhead body or a sabot warhead body you can throw in some fin stabilizers and you can use pretty much any of the shell bases if you look here i've got a combination of a fin and a base bleeder now the fin cancels out the inaccuracy as you can see on the side here if i didn't use a fin i'm going to remove it just for the sake of example you can see i have an accuracy modifier of 135 this is bad this makes the shell uh disperse more and hit you know less accurately so it cancels out but because it's a kinetic shells the base bleeder gets a lot of value and essentially cancels out the loss of speed from the sterilizer fin body and this you know just gets a little bit more out of the shell eddie bass works really though tracers are really good for accuracy super cavitation bases are required for submarines and they're very nice for firing or for combat near the surface of the water because they prevent the shells from bouncing off the water so it's really good if you want to hit below the water line against the ship for example and graviton rams they're a bit of a meme but you know they work on kinetic shells now are kinetic shells the best shells though they do gain damage the faster they go and shell speed is really good for hitting fast targets and getting past lamps now if the accuracy thing makes you a little confused i recommend that you watch my video on that i'm gonna try to remember to put in a little card in the corner a link to that in the description because that's a pretty big topic but yes speed is good for accuracy now on top of that they have the most health out of all shells which makes them even better against lambs however they require a direct hit to deal any damage and they create pretty small holes overall and then again slopes can reduce their damage significantly if you hit at a shallow angle it's gonna deal practically no damage and bounce just like in real life so i wouldn't call them the best shells but they are still definitely top tier the icing on the cake here is that the shell itself is inert and gunpowder while explosive it has a very low risk of causing a chain reaction so they are very safe to use now how do you make the best kinetic shells you ask well they are probably the most finicky to set up along with things like pen depth which i'm going to get to the goal here is going to be really to maximize kinetic damage while having an armor pierce value that is as close as possible to the amount of armor you'll be facing i'll put the exact formula on screen so feel free to pause if you're not a hundred percent sure on the damage model anyway so if you have more armor piercing than you need it's essentially wasted so good values to target are going to be between 40 and 48 that's because metal is for the armor stacked alloy is going to be 42 stacked middle is 48 and a pleak is 50. so it's a really good middle ground to aim for now when you go to make a shell from scratch the damage model is going to be super important for choosing the size and length of your shell in general you should aim to have enough damage to pan your targets with each shot this is because you really don't want to need repeated hits on the exact same block to reach the juicy juicy internals that's their goal right that's how you kill your targets you destroy the internals on bigger guns and i mean really the gun itself not the shell you can afford to go a bit smaller because the overall dps would let you pen targets quickly anyway it's going to grind away the armor and it's going to give even more trouble for lambs because lambs need to have the fire rate and you know smaller shells are harder to detect so it makes it more difficult for the lambs to deal with if you have both a small gun and a small shell then you're not going to pierce the armor and you're hoping that the target or yourself don't move enough that you can't hit that armor anymore and then you're not able you know you have to start over again grinding through the armor so that's very bad so as counter-intuitive as it might be you probably want a bigger shell on a smaller gun just to make sure you have that chance to go through instantly now if you choose a big shell i don't recommend going too overkill either it's really satisfying to make holes that go through your target and come out to the other side but it's even better if you have a bit less damage and a higher rate of fire because you really want to poke as many holes in your target as possible to and hopefully kill it at some point more holes is better than fewer holes moving on next up we have hollow points which are named after the shell cap that you absolutely need to use to make this type of shell are hollow points the best shells though well they're really similar to kinetic shells speed is great on them they have health on par with kinetic shells which makes them really accurate and good against lambs however they deal a bit less damage per shot and the damage is applied differently you'll notice instead of kinetic damage it says thump damage now thumb damage is a bit more like an explosion still very safe in your guns though if you get hit it's not gonna explode it's inert the gunpowder is gonna explode but it's unlikely to chain react now this might not sound amazing yet but thump damage ignores the angle of impact and armor stacking this makes hole points crazy consistent and reliable a bit like particle cannons now how do you make the best hole point shells though it's a balancing act again very similar to kinetic shells now in this case you might as well just go straight for sub warheads as you'll notice down here i don't quite have 40 ap which is a really good target for these because they ignore armor stacking as i said you could use solids if you expect high amounts of wood and stone not going to be the best for that but you can do it fins are fine again same thing with shell bases as kinetic shells for example super cavitation and it will lose a little bit of damage but again it's not going to bounce off the water uh bass bleeder is really good for enhancing damage tracer is good for accuracy and well grab it on ramps for the meats right the main thing to remember here is that you can't really expect to deal internal damage with a single shot this means hollow points are just generally bad on small guns because if you make a big shell you might might deal enough damage to break something functional but it'll take forever to reload and it's not going to be super reliable in terms of internal damage small shells with a small gun are going to suffer just the same way kinetic shells though and on a big gun with good dps however anything works that's because big shells will either rip off wide chunks of armor and on a big gun you're gonna be able to keep firing and keep digging into those big holes or you can use small shells and they will burn their way in pretty quick so my verdict is it's probably the best shells on big guns probably it's it's definitely a high up there but it is really quite meh on smaller bills then we have frag shells are frank shells the best i'm gonna commit for this one and say frag is gonna be the best option in most cases when you don't know what your targets are gonna be like frags don't care about their muzzle velocity beyond accuracy anyway and you can't really make an overkill frag shell you can also use either a timed fuse like here or inertial fuses or both to deal some damage even on a miss or through shields if the shell bounces an inertial fuse will trigger it and cause the fragments to spray even better if flams pop frag shells the fragments still fly a decent distance and can still deal damage a lot of damage too how do you make the best frag shells it's really hard to go wrong here frags scale white well though it's probably still a good idea to make sure each shell has a decent amount of damage per shot the main choice is going to be the fragment cone angle though as you can see here i pick 23 degrees generally speaking if you want to dig deep you should use a cone between about 20 and 30 degrees to focus your damage or you can go the other way and go somewhere between 90 to about 135 degrees to make more powerful fragments that are gonna fly all over now you do get more damage the wider you go but i don't really recommend going for a full 180 degrees though and that's because a lot of the time you're gonna send half of that damage flying away from your target so you know losing half your damage even though it's more damage overall you can see you know you know where i'm going with this it's not ideal the verdict well the only thing keeping frag from being the best general purpose shell is how absolutely ludicrously devastating it can be to yourself if the gun blows up you should strongly consider using emergency fuses and shell ejectors if you want to use big frag guns you were worn up next i'm gonna tackle itchy and flak together are they the best kind of shell long story short no the best thing about these shells is the area of effect they're gonna be great against wooden or stone targets fragile planes and not much else generally the best he and flax shells are going to be high gauge and with a timed fuse such as here inertial fuses are okay and it's worth considering using emergency fuses with injectors for safety though it's not quite as bad as frag if the gun explodes it's still quite bad but anyway you want big shells because you need that critical mass of explosives to have a big explosion that way you can break fragile blocks without hitting them directly and you maximize your chances of breaking off chunks of armor though it's really hard to stack enough hg on aps shells to get through stacked metal let alone heavy armor verdict 80 and flack have their uses but they are pretty limited then we have heat shells are they the best shelves no but they can be really good in some cases heat shells use pen metric down here as per the formula which i might explain you know in text on screen so you can pause anyway they use pen metric to go through armor until it hits either an air gap or a functional block or runs out of pen metric technically they should be able to jump air gaps with enough pen metric but i've never seen it happen in testing anyway if it has enough pen metric to reach that gap or something soft it creates fragments in a 20 degree cone these frags now how do you make the best heat shells the trick here is going to be to use relatively big shells the cool thing about heat is how tight the cone is for the fragments that means even if there is a gap in the armor you can make a shell big enough for the fragments to go through a layer of metal or two on the inside and then some and you know tickle those juicy juicy internals that you want to destroy to kill your target now the main problem with heat is lambs and era era can negate a large heat shell on impact and lambs can zap them out of the air overall heat might not be the best but if there are no lambs or if you have a way to distract or damage lamps heat can be pretty nasty the best shell no but still quite useful and threatening hash shells hash has been pretty overpowered at times during the game's development but is it the best shell today no but it's still a really viable option that's kinda similar to heat hash goes through the armor until it hits a gap or something soft but instead of having a pan metric the fragments it spawns get weaker the more armor it has to go through i'm gonna display my amazing art skills here and put up a paint diagram to show you exactly how hash works because it's kind of hard to put in words now as you can see fragments can spawn in really sneaky ways because no matter the angle of impact they're gonna spawn in the same spot because of this hesh works wonderfully well against turret caps it's also really good if you can hit awkward angles basically anywhere where there might not be any internal armor and it's really good against compact builds that use thin layers of heavy armor for example now since the trick to hash is hitting the right spot using burnt hash or you know small shells at a high fire rate can work quite well but big boom boom hash can potentially overpower internal armor so it's hard to go wrong with hash shell designs is it the best shells again no but era and lamps can still negate a lot of the damage and a good armor layout will limit its potential but if you can get around those it's a really good option m p o e m p i'm gonna say it right now i don't like emp it's especially awkward to talk about right now because it's getting tweaked but let's do it anyway is emp the best no but it is extremely deadly to small vehicles and it can larger vehicles by destroying weapon controllers detection lam nodes and maybe even destroy the ai if you're lucky if you're struggling in the campaign emp can be really good because it can let you capture vehicles instead of destroying them how do you make good emp shells well definitely don't go the bird way a thousand paper cuts is definitely not the way to go here because wood stone and rubber reduce the damage by a flat amount for example if you fire 10 shells with 500 emp damage it has to go through one meter of wood you lose 900 emp damage total using the current values anyway if you use one shell with 5000 emp you'd only lose 90. now emp has changed in the current version of the beta so specific target values aren't as relevant anymore but generally bigger is better and it's even more true because surge predictors have also changed in the past sometimes they would lower the entire emp charge more so than what they need to be destroyed so for example if you had a million emp damage and you went through one surge protector it would negate 95 of the whole thing instead of 95 of what it takes to destroy it a bit complicated but generally speaking there aren't any target values anymore just bigger is better moving on emp might not be the best shell but what about disruptors i think disruptors are incredibly underrated especially as secondary weapons now if you look here scroll down i know it looks like a weaker emp shell but disruptors have the unique property of reducing the strength of any planar shield they go through right here as you can see this one shell can just about cut in half the strength of shields given maximum strength shields will bounce about a third of the shells thrown at them on average you can essentially increase the output of your other guns and other shells by about 50 percent against shielded targets by using disruptors on a big build where a secondary gun using disruptors can negate shields this is a lot of added value now how do you make a good disruptor shell well it's hard to go wrong because the effects on shields scales so a lot of small shells or a few big ones will achieve mostly the same thing the main thing to think about is going to be lambs lambs will love to eat your disruptors so using a bunch of smaller shells to overwhelm lambs and making them harder to detect is a viable strategy not the best shell by a long shot but an amazing support shell to improve your damage and finally that just about covers most of the pure shells but what about hybrid shells for example hollow point ht have been pretty good in the past but that era is gone now in fact i don't recommend mixing shells these days most hybrid shells are just going to be worse than a specialized shell there is one exception though and that's pen depth now i call it pen depth because historically you needed a penetration depth fuse to make it work at all if you didn't use one it would just blow up on the first block that it hit which is not what you want for this now these days you can skip the fuse or you can use a timed fuse like i did here depends how confident you are and you know you should probably test these things but here is the real question are pandep shells worth it are they the best shells well hell yeah they are worth it but are they the best shell that's a bit trickier penta shells should be fast and big which means they're gonna have a lot of health they're gonna be well very fast so they're really hard to defend against uh and lambs it's gonna really gonna hurt it's really gonna be hard for lambs to pop these shells before they hit you they might bounce on shields every now and then as i said earlier about one third of the time but really hard to defend against usually now the goal is to get inside the target but instead of poking a small hole you detonate either explosives or fragments on the inside inside the soft internals very very deadly but very finicky so how do you make a good pendant shell well you're pretty much going to want an armor piercing cap by default because it's really hard to get a high armor piercing value on these shells because of the payload but if you use a sibo a simple cap where is it it's over here here as you can see it really really lowers your payload it destroys it most for most part it's just it's not going to be worth it if you use a simple head is what it boils down to so armor piercing cap and about two to three solid bodies you can maybe swap one for a fin and a base bleeder or you can use a super cap base if you are going to be fighting close to surface as i mentioned before you might want to use a fuse but it's not mandatory anymore the shell will naturally explode when it runs out of kinetic energy now the payload is where it gets interesting generally i recommend about two modules of either he or frag for best results using more will really hurt your ability to penetrate targets because that's what reduces your armor-piercing value now which of the two you pick is mostly personal preference um hg gets a damage bonus in enclosed areas so it's going to be nice but fragments can bounce around and reach further so really personal preference in terms of gauge and length penetration depth starts working more or less at about 250 millimeters but it's better at higher gauges it's also really hard to make a good pen depth shell that's short so usually you'll be between six and eight meters long um i'm just going to mention really quickly you can make a pandem shell with a secondary shaped charge and that's mostly if you expect really thick armor what's going to happen is you're going to hope to penetrate the first layers of armor reach an air gap fail to penetrate the second layer of armor but the heat will go through so it can work it's doable it's potentially gonna end up in disappointment but if you know what you're doing it's a possibility and now time to talk about railguns for a minute i'm gonna make a dedicated video about the differences between gunpowder and railguns but for the sake of completion let's take a minute here for most shells even if you plan on using absolutely no gunpowder at all you should not use the gunpowder casings these things right here it's just not worth it for most shells the shell itself is going to hold enough charge to perform well even without them if you need more oomph you can actually use gunpowder casings instead because those essentially have power in them by default right they work perfectly fine you can make hybrid railgun gunpowder shells and why am i bringing this up now because pandab shells can only pen so much armor even at maximum length and the only way to push those shells further is by adding rail charge on top now it can be worth using shorter shells and get the speed through rail charge instead of gunpowder specifically for those shells because the longer of the loaders can be hard to work around especially on smaller or even medium sized builds but yeah that's basically it about railguns right you can use railguns for any of those shells you don't necessarily need railgun casings but it's especially interesting for pen depth and that about covers all of the shells i'm gonna cheat a bit and say that the best shelf depends on the situation but i'm gonna commit to a holy trinity and say that kinetics hollow points and frags are gonna be your most versatile and powerful shells in the vast majority of cases they're very reliable shells usable at almost any size versatile all of that good stuff anyway i hope that helps you pick your shells and your bills please leave a like comment and all that if it did thank you for watching and i'll see you in the next one bye bye

Channel: Ohm is Futile

Views: 4,051

Keywords: ftd, FTD, tutorial, tips, tricks, From the Depths, gaming, shells, shell, APS

Id: ZjfAUJoBTBA

Length: 25min 19sec (1519 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 09 2021