How do you program ion prisms? Is there a tool or something? In the ship editor I can't seem to find the right way to click on the prism and change anything, in many videos I see, it's apparent that other people can just right click and get it to work, but I'm unable to.

Whenever this game gets the attention it deserves, I hope your channel will too.

Very nice breakdown! I have been following the game for 3 years and still learned a bunch about blasters, things i just felt intuitively - and learned just how powerful shields are when empathized by logistics

I love this game, and these guides with specific numbers are right up my alley. Looking forward to more Cosmoteer math content!

.....Also I really appreciated you mentioning and crediting Captain Redstone's amazing Ion guide. It really helped me learn *(Almost)* all the juicy details about these amazing red lasers that I simply can't get enough of. Great video overall as well, I hope you keep on making more amazing Cosmoteer, or any other game-related guides/any other content. Your editing is top notch for such a small and un-recognized channel

A very informative and helpful video! These tips and stats have really helped me build up my early ships

As weird as it is, honestly I'd love to see an analysis of engines / Engine rooms / shields / PD. Basically all the NON weapon stuff that requires crew / energy / etc. and how best to optimize that sort of thing So like a Defenses Video, on because like in my resarch on flack cannons info was so sparse And then for like shields everyone seems to have vastly different ideas on the best ways to actually use the

Hey Cap'n! Thank you for these guides! I am a bit surprised there was no mention of the structure elements (no armor, low hp ones). They can be put in front of prisms and they protect it. They also mitigate EMP hits (at least in current patch). I find it especially important because building a "barrel" makes the precise tracking of prisms pointless. This method makes it a worse railgun as it won't fire if it would hit any part of your ship. I find your content awesome as I am bad at crew management, but you might find the above worthy of consideration. Thank you for the videos!

Thanks for the video Captain! I was wondering, do you plan to post non cosmoteer related content further down the line? I'm sure you would love Oxygen Not Included and Rimworld. Both of the same caliber for how awesome they are!

Crazy level of content !! Thank you Captain :D

It would be pretty awesome and fun to see cosmoteer lets play! Great tutorials

Very cool and fast explanation. Thx

I just started playing Cosmoteer and I was very interested in Ion. I wasn't expecting a maths lesson but I love it.

8:08 lmao “that reactor is looking mighty volatile today.” im stealing this

THX Captain good infos

A good series. 🙂

6:49 you can have very exposed blasters, as long as you put them separate from your reactor / command room, at least in career mode because the ai only targets those.

Just re-found this game through you!

Thanks for guides!

extremely underrated channel

Nice guides!! Like them! Can you do a video about overall ship construction / design? Would love to see that.

one thing I would like to note just incase you haven't realized yet, is that you can combine two starting ion beams with just two prisms. both two prisms will have ion beams firing at them, and one aims at the other to combine the laser. Just wanted to point that out since prisms can get quite expensive and it's important to be economical as possible with them. 14:25 for example, this ship shown here can actually work with 5 prisms, not 7. you can remove the two prisms closest to the front that arent the central prism and get the same result (and have space to put something else there instead)

Very nicely explained!

Good video, thx.

Very off topic question, do you think "swarm" playstyle is viable in this game? As in having a lot of smaller ships ganging up on bigger ships? It seemed quite fun in Reassembly (another quite similar game to this one), but just the cost of the most basic reactor alone is making me wonder if it's ever worth, as losing even just one ship is a huge blow in the early game. Also controlling a lot of ships without pausing and giving individual commands is quite a lot of effort (That might just also be my inexperience in the game, maybe there is a decent way to order all of the ships together and surrounding the enemies without making them crash on each other) But really good and informative videos, I hope you keep making these guides!

as a little plus/minus, if a mining laser takes out a system on the enemy it wont explode but drop more recaurces

I suggest you add bright outlines to your text to make them more visible. Thank you for the informative video!

Great video Can you make a quick update too it where you show the used "crew typs" and how many you need? Your amazing thanks for your great videos

the part about crystals resetting the damage falloff and range intrigues me, i wonder if it might make sense to have a sacrificial crystal at the front of your ship that is, designed to explode mid way into the fight, maybe a few large shields to protect it if you can make that happen, from my testing it is quite possible to have a crystal just inside large shields, have it explode but, cause no major damage to the ship itself, it might not make a massive difference in the grand scheme of things but. I'm going to try it out anyway

Consideratenator! I'm using 5 16x prisms with binary concentration. There is nothing that I can't cut in half. I am curious about the damage fall off though, is there a way to reduce this by adding more prisms to remove travel distance? For example of you have yo cover 1 16m gap, can you put in 8 crystals to reduce it to a zero metre gap?

Since lasers have a longer range, do they pair well with railguns? I was thinking of making a kiting ship as part of a combat fleet

which weapon of every one in the game would you call to be suited best against swarmes? thus a lot of unarmored ships with lasers. about 5-10 ships.

ive always used 2 ships, one cannon ship with tons of armor, shields, and pd systems for defense, and a low defense, high mobility laser ship that can flank behind the enemy and destroy everything from the behind. and i use lasers because they are low cost medium range damage that use 0 ammo.

from my experience blasters work very well against point defense and are good for take those out so more damaging weapons can hit the enemy more easily

When something gets destroyed by a mining laser, do you get more resources out of it as compared to being destroyed by other weaponry? I feel like this is the case but am not 100% sure

Yea don't disregard the mining lasers they have on plenty occations saved me a lot of time / repairs and sometimes even my whole ship. Trying to kill off that slightly open reactor or that ion prism through the small gaps in armour and or shields my other weapons open up is exsedingly useful.

i like to place one more prism at the end of the long barrel, YOU WILL LOSE THIS, however, it makes its firing arch infinite untill they kill it. after that u need to rotate the ship but hopefully the one free aiming was able to get a good first strike!

I use emp missiles and disruptors to disrupt my enemy's disruptors... Do I get a cookie with that bonus point? No. For real though, I genuinely thought that the only way to counter disruptors at the start was to use either an emp missile or another disruptor. 😅

Noice

So it's better to not merge the lasers?

laser blasters outrange cannons though. that's the only use I ever find for them. they are good for fighters if you order them to maintain range and also give them enough thrusters to keep distance you can have one chunky boy eating damage and fighters taking out enemy guns. it's NOT a one trick pony like you said but they can be useful. very early game you can use them to take out pirate bases without having to unlock and build rail guns.

hey Captain Caffeine i Love 7:41 thanks captain enjoyed the joke

Disrupt a disrupter that is trying to disrupt you Noice

wild west style disrupter duel when?

Efficient....8 prisms....16 ions..... Nervous sweating as I look at my 128 prism (256 ion) mega deathstar

There are no problems a bigger laser can't solve

Honestly, I don't completely agree with you about how many disadvantages you named for the blasters. They might not be as armored and strong raw damage-wise like cannons are, but they also cover up less surface area, and their niche-seeming yet incredibly unique advantages like a huge firing arc and thus ability to be put on the side of your ship, tilted 90 degrees and their insane accuracy more than make up for their more practical downfalls. The video is still really really cool though, and it covers all the important things really well. Other things I have to disagree on: Point defences- Yes, Energy weapons (Things that PD physically can't shoot down) and nukes are the things Flak is decent at, but they are also *the only things* where flaks are at least remotely useful. I already rambled on about flaks for unnecessarily long in your cannon guide, so I won't bother anybody with all that crap. Aaaand Ion Beams. Oh boy are they a doozy. They are like Quantum Mechanics (Or Trigonometry, you choose) of Cosmoteer- Unnecessarily overcomplicated yet absolutely amazing. Because I have too much free time at hand, I have read the entire Captain Redstone's Ion Prism guide and think I know them really well, and yet I still can't make a proper 5 output array :c. Prism-making is basically a separate art of its own in the Cosmoteer community and a thing I absolutely suck at, and I think they and they specifically require a guide on its own, but for now, I'll only ramble on about how I think you didn't give Ion cores as a whole all the justice they deserve. I myself am a huge Ion Beam apologist. I mean they're the perfect weapon! They can concentrate insane amounts of damage in a singular tiny area, they can be defended very well, they can single-handedly carry a flagship with their truly mental DPS potential, and they simply just look *so cool!* Especially the giant diagonal ion cores which might just be the most aesthetically pleasing motherf*ckers ever created! I've made one myself as well :>. Also, they are indefinitely stackable, meaning you can make a titan with some 144 beams, or a monumental behemoth of absolute proportion with 15 output beams each with 32 beams combined! Sky's the limit and one can do whatever they want, plus with the advantage of having it fittable into a relatively protectable nozzle, or maybe multiple dedicated nozzles that merge into one after passing through dedicated ion tunnels. The only restriction isone's imagination. One thing I disagree with is how you said that they can't be used as their own things and need synergy *15:34**.* Yes, they indeed d synergize very well with Disruptors and most of my giant ion beam ships have them plastered inside of the barrel, but there's a point at which they become so powerful (Take any of Hatter's creations as an example. Anzu, Ace, Amazon, the joke ship ''Amazion''...) that they are practically useless and the beam itself can substitute for a shield-obliterating tool. One last thing that I think needs mentioning is how you can (And it is highly advised to) have multiple output prisms. This will increase the size of the your firing barrel, thus the vulnerable profile exposed to your enemies, but it will minimize Part Overkill which is a gigantic issue to beams and also allows your laser itself to have a larger profile *and* because there will be less combinations in total, the beam won't get diminished by much and be much, much stronger. That's the design philosophy used in truly giant Ion Core ships.

13:00 5 comma 33? 🤨

Hello Captain Caffeine: I've done few test about ion merging recently, And i found some thing in different. The first thing is that by merging 128 ions together as a single output, we can get one maximized beam, that is, it kills double-block armor instantly, regardless to the distance (even at 300m). thus it drills fastest. The Second thing is that the beam is becoming more and more thick, 8->16->32->64->128, and even 256.. there seems to be no limit at this.

This doesn't work anymore, shields need to be exposed to work. Armor blocks shields. Which is lame imo.