I wonder if there’s a ceiling? Maybe the lesser upgrades make a difference, but only up to a certain level? I must do some testing.
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I’ve also found that how you configure upgrade models can further affect adjacency boosts, so it pays to try a few variations, as swapping can often make a difference.
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Yes and it is difficult with the space being taken up by all the different components.
The damage potential seems to be driven by how many types of weapons are installed, the upgrades to the weapons have only a small affect.
So trying to boost so many abilities is tough. You have to pick and choose. Warp ship, battle ship or efficient planet hopper? There is no way to have it all.
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The class of ship determines the maximum number of slots it can have.
If you have lots of money (units), you can buy and scrap class A and class S ships - this will give you installable expansion slots and upgrade modules. It’s much cheaper than buying them. If you upgrade your target ship to class S, you can then install extra tech slots, up to the maximum. In class S ships, this process will often reveal extra supercharged slots.
If you maximise the upgrades in a class S, you get more than enough tech slots. The only problem then is the arrangement of the supercharged slots - unfortunately you can’t change that.
(edit) I just counted them - my Starborn Phoenix (fully upgraded) has 60 tech slots.
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And the damage potential is better than SheralMyst’s asymmetric one.
What’s the relationship? Too many types of weapons lowers max damage?
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He has S class upgrades. I have just been shuffling upgrades around between ships and using what I already have.
One thing I find irritating is not knowing the value an upgrade adds until placing it. So when I remove one, I can’t remember how much it added
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Sorry for any confusion. The Starborn Phoenix I posted hasn’t really been tweaked for maximum performance. I use it as a workhorse, because I think it’s pretty - not for any performance considerations.
I’ve kind of sorted the various functions for adjacency, but nothing beyond that. I only posted it because it was handy at the time to show how many tech slots you can have. It’s certainly not part of my hyperdrive experiments.
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I think this would be a suitable basis for some serious experiments. It’s a native class S - it wasn’t upgraded to be that way. Plain vanilla jump range is 216 - not bad. Shame there’s only two useful supercharged slots, but I’ll see what I can do with this one.
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See now, I just acquired this - it’s a class S exotic, but it only has a starting jump range of 184. I’ll scrap this one for parts.
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Alright, I think I’ve done enough groundwork, and gathered enough experimental subjects. Time for some actual empirical testing.
This is the ship I’ve chosen to be the first subject. It’s a fairly high-level class A explorer. Decent jump range for its class, but relatively easy to find.
Here you can see the out-of-the-box specs. Jump range is 185.6 - class A explorers don’t seem to come much higher. It has two supercharged slots, in close proximity - that was an important factor in my choice.
The first thing I want to do is upgrade it it to class S. That’s going to cost me 50,000 nanites. Here we go…
OK. The upgrade to class S has increased the jump range to 199.1, and we’ve gained another supercharged slot in close proximity to the first two - which is exactly what I hoped for. Next thing is to add some more tech slots.
I’ve added 15 or so tech slots. As you can see, that’s opened up a new supercharged slot. Unfortunately, it’s far over on the right of the tech block, and nowhere near the others. Now we’ve got space to move things around.
I’ve rearranged the existing tech to make space, and to make it easy to see what’s going on. You can now clearly see the supercharged slots outlined in blue. I’ve added the three original drive upgrades, cadmium, emeril, and indium. I have deliberately not placed them adjacent to the hyperdrive. Interestingly, even though these drives are installed in the tech bank, and arranged to be adjacent to each other, they make no difference to the hyperdrive range, which remains at 199.1.
Added the Atlantid drive, which also make no difference to jump range.
Now I’ve arranged the base drive upgrades in an adjacent configuration - and that does make a difference to jump range. Range has increased from 199.1 to 238.8. Not a huge difference, but an improvement, all the same.
Now I’ve temporarily removed the cadmium, emeril, indium and Atlantid drives, and nstalled the three class S upgrades. I have deliberately avoided adjacency and supercharged slots - so we can see what the unenhanced effect is. As you can see, even in this configuration, they make a huge difference. Jump range has increased from 199.9 to 1602.1
Now I have replaced the cadmium, emeril, indium and Atlantid drives in non-adjacent locations. As you can see, it makes no difference to jump range.
Now I have arranged the hyperdrive and upgrades in an adjacent configuration around the supercharged slots. It makes a big difference - Jump range has increased from 1602.1 to 2217.9.
There are still a couple of little tweaks I can add. Installing the emergency warp drive adjacent to the most powerful class S upgrade gives a small but useful boost, from 2217.9 to 2254.6. Every little helps.
The final tweak is the Atlas bobblehead, which you can purchase from the quicksilver vendor. When installed, this also gives a small boost to drive range. The thing to know about the Atlas bobblehead is that it doesn’t have adjacency. It gives the same boost, wherever you install it. Well, nearly - that’s except if you put it in a supercharged slot. Now, remember we had an extra supercharged slot, over on the far right, and no good for adjacency? Well that’s the ideal place for our bobblehead.
And there we have it. The jump range has increased from 2254.6 to 2378.4 - and I think that’s probably all we’re going to wring from this ship. Given that we started at 185.6, and ended at 2378.4, I think that’s a fair improvement.
I’ll be trying the same experiment with some different ships. In future, I won’t go through the whole methodology - I went through it once, step by step, so people could see what I was doing, and why. Future experiments will be more of the same, so there’s no need to show how it’s done. I will, however, present the results, and I’ll finish with some conclusions.
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Nice work!
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OK, same trick, different ship. This ship was an as-found class S explorer. So far, I’ve found that there’s a limit to how much you can improve the jump range of a class A ship - they seem to have a maximum range of around 186, and upgrade to class S with a range of around 200. That limits how much they can be improved.
On the other hand, explorers found in the wild as class S can have jump ranges approaching 220, which gives much more scope for improvement.
The particular ship I’ve chosen for this experiment was found as a class S, and has a baseline jump range of 216.6. That’s not the largest range I’ve seen, but the supercharged slots were a consideration, too. Class S explorers are not common. Versions suitable for upgrading even less so. Sometimes you have to take what you can get.
This is the same ship after installation and tweaking of upgrades. It’s gone from a jump range of 216, to one of 2510. Pretty good.
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Very interesting.
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Thanks for sharing these experiments! HG did well making upgrades storable and moveable, instead of having to destroy them (or reloading without saving).
I looked at my configurations (which I haven’t touched in a long while): I placed the upgrades around their main component, and I stopped caring at that point. 
My misunderstanding was, I had always moved the components (drive, shield, weapon) onto the super slots, never any upgrades! Because I wanted to “supercharge” the component (I want to “charge the drive, the shield” etc.)… My reasoning was, why would I “charge” an upgrade?
So supercharging means, “multiply a multiplier”, is that it? And components (shields, weapons, drives, colour drives) don’t carry multipliers, so they don’t benefit from supercharged slots. Am I getting that right?
Guess it’s time to properly supercharge ALL the things!
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I believe at least some of them do benefit but not as much. It is best to put an S class upgrade in there
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Supercharging Rule of thumb
- If weapons (and sentinel ships, except antigravity well), then prioritize supercharging the core tech first, then if you’re using more than 1 SC slot, the upgrade modules (exceptions: neutron cannon)
- If not weapons, supercharge upgrade modules
- Do not supercharge stuff like personal refiner, launch auto recharge, launch thruster core tech etc
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