I’ve been fiddling around with rigs and found that Core defense capacitor safeguards seem to be…useless?
Try putting an oversized shield booster on a ship, and put nothing else on it that uses capacitor. Then put 3x copies of core defense capacitor safeguard rigs and note how well your capacitor is doing.
Then try putting 3x capacitor control circuit rigs on your ship and it seems as if the rig that reduces cap needs of shield booster is worse than just using the rig that boost cap recharge rate.
They help, they do not solve the whole problem. For pve batteries are the way to go and if even with the right battery it’s still “not great” then (perhaps) one of those rigs might nudge the fit into a more useful one, but if you’d need more than one you probably need to rethink the fit as a whole.
Use 3x capacitor control circuit rigs and enjoy cap stable fit.
Maybe the Core defense capacitor safeguards are good for pvp when people suck cap and cap boosters are a way to go, and they work by just adding cap in a surge, but I dont know. Theoretically you could do some more shield boosting with those rigs.
This is a perceptive point. It seems like the use case of these rigs would be ships where the limiting factor on their tank is the amount of cap booster charges they hold.
The ship(s) I’m most familiar with where this is an issue are blingy active-shield black-ops. The greatest solo Sin pilots fit Expanded Cargoholds for this very purpose (Sin | MasL | Killmail | zKillboard). However, as you can see, he goes for EM and boost/s rigs to maximise the peak active tank (and thus increase his engagement window).
This is generally the issue, peak active tank is more valuable than longevity for these fits. But let’s compare for science.
[Sin, local shield rep]
Federation Navy Drone Damage Amplifier
Federation Navy Drone Damage Amplifier
Federation Navy Drone Damage Amplifier
Syndicate Damage Control
Nanofiber Internal Structure II
Expanded Cargohold II
500MN Quad LiF Restrained Microwarpdrive
Caldari Navy Warp Scrambler
Heavy F-RX Compact Capacitor Booster, Navy Cap Booster 3200
Pith C-Type X-Large Shield Booster
Dread Guristas Multispectrum Shield Hardener
Dread Guristas Multispectrum Shield Hardener
Dread Guristas Cloaking Device
Dark Blood Heavy Energy Neutralizer
Dark Blood Heavy Energy Neutralizer
Dark Blood Heavy Energy Neutralizer
Corpum C-Type Medium Energy Neutralizer
Corpum C-Type Medium Energy Neutralizer
Corpum C-Type Medium Energy Neutralizer
Large Core Defense Operational Solidifier II
Large Core Defense Operational Solidifier II
'Augmented' Ogre x5
Curator II x5
Heavy Shield Maintenance Bot I x5
Hobgoblin II x5
Mid-grade Crystal Alpha
Mid-grade Crystal Beta
Mid-grade Crystal Gamma
Mid-grade Crystal Delta
Mid-grade Crystal Epsilon
Antipharmakon Thureo
Agency 'Hardshell' TB7 Dose III
Navy Cap Booster 3200 x10
This baby gets 1650ehp/s against omni damage (2577 with all tank heated), but only for a short time. Assuming the fight goes on longer, and you turn off the MWD, it’s stable at 875ehp/s until cap charges run out. However, also turn off 2 heavy neuts and it goes up to 1240 ehp/s.
Swap the Operational Solidifiers for CDCS rigs, and you get 1050 ehp/s max (1650 fully heated). but it’s stable at that for as long as cap charges last with only the MWD turned off.
In general, I’d still take the Operational solidifer fit against most targets, but I’d estimate against passive rattlers or carriers that can take an age to chew through, CDCS rigs might have a place.
Here’s a post from 8 years ago also saying that these rigs are useless. Also states that the devs reduced cap drain on shield boosters, which made these rigs useless.
It depends. Depending on your ship and fit, either
Capacitor Control Circuits,
Semiconductor Memory Cells or
Core defense capacitor safeguards
could make your ship last longest.
As Katya noted, the Core Defence Capacitor Safeguard seems to be a viable option to make the most of your capacitor booster charges in cargo, for example.
And my first Pyfa check (Osprey Navy Issue with just an X-large shield booster) the Core Defence Capacitor Safeguard seems to be better than Capacitor Control Circuits and equally strong as the T2 Semiconductor Cells.
Except the T2 Core Defense Capacitor Safeguards are only 3.4M instead of 18.6M, which saves a lot of money on a cruiser hull.
It may be a niche rig, but I’m sure someone can come up with a good use-case for it.
This seems like the best answer. Seems like cap control circuit rigs are the better option 99% of the time, even when the shield booster is the only module using capacitor. I thought I was missing something but nope. Thanks for confirming, and also outlining an edge case scenario where this rig does indeed have a useful function. So technically it isn’t totally useless.
And my first Pyfa check (Osprey Navy Issue with just an X-large shield booster) the Core Defence Capacitor Safeguard seems to be better than Capacitor Control Circuits and equally strong as the T2 Semiconductor Cells.
Yes also this seems like a potential use for it too. Only issue is you really gotta sacrifice a lot to get an oversized booster that’s 2 sizes larger than the class of the ship. Doable though!
Energy management also depends on size of capacitor, bonuses, implants, skills, modules, battle opponents using capacitor warfare etc. Its quite a complicated thing, and what eventually is best is only for a given conditions. Rigs used is only one thing.
What is cap stable for one person will not be for another. And eventually if it comes to tactics in a PVP battle, one may find its best to use fits more focused on energy surges from boosters than from innate regeneration, and then its important how much of the available energy can be created into tank, even in one impulse, because some may be already gone to enemy nosferatus or other modules. Bigger shields are energy hungry in that specific way that they take big chunks of energy from capacitor and create big chunks of tank. Economizing that energy use by rigs, in a shield boosting focused ship, that may be kinda more survivable than using regen with batteries.
I wonder if one would combine: shield boster oversized, cap battery, cap booster, rigs for cap use by boosters, and few noses. That could be pretty universal for providing enough cap to tank for a loong time. But obviously the tank itself would be somewhat weaker.
U can use a Safeguard rig to push your initial cap drain of the most important defense modules (Shieldbooster+Invuls) to the next lower amount a capstick can provide.
Example:
your tank consists of
Dread Gurstas XL-Shieldbooster (360 cap use on all V)
2x Invul II (64 GJ on all V)
= 424 cap you need every time to activate your full tank.
But that means you would need an Navy800er Capstick to activate if you are fully neuted out. You can fit 6 Navy800 into a Heavy Capacitor Booster, which means you can activate your full tank 6 times before you need to reload capsticks and 376 of that 800 cap would be wasted every time, because its neuted again very fast.
Use a Safeguard Rig II:
Dread Guristas XL-Shieldbooster (306 cap use on all V)
2x Invul II (64 cap use on all V)
= 370 cap u need every time to activate your full tank.
That means you can go down to Navy400 Capsticks, of which 13 will fit into your Heavy Cap booster. Which again means you can now activate your XL-Booster and the Invuls 13 times (!) before you need to reload capsticks. You could even do dual-medium capbooster shenanigans on BCs and run them with 400s, having not even a downtime for reload while constantly able to shieldboost every time a new capbooster hits in.
Requires quick activation, but it basically enables you to run quite some tank even under complete neut pressure. As long as your weapon system does not require cap, you are pretty fine with such a tank. Of course in times of dual Ancillary Shield Booster Setups this tactic has less use, but it can still be viable and pretty surprising for opponents that thought bringing a Curse to the fight would ensure them victory.
IDK about nowadays but in the old days half the rigs were useless. Markets gave hints on useless stuff too, you’d have a few sells that never moved for a gagillion ISK and a few buys that never moved for a tiny fraction of the sells price.
@Boozbaz I agree most things in the market are very useless to me. I am an alpha, and most of the gear is rigged to work for omegas… thus the pay to cheat to beat the system. I use YouTuber Aceface and others who do alpha builds to show me The Way. I also take recommended omega builds and scale them back to fit a near-beer alpha build.
As for your particular rig and depending on your ship size; I don’t use the shield booster but prefer the Medium Shield Extenders. These are passive and increase the shield HP +800 and consume 28 MW of power. If I need more power, I add to the rig slots the Ancillary Current Routers the power output is +10% on the small tech 1 . However these do cost a chunk of ISK.
Meanwhile the Small Core Defense Capacitor Safeguard reduces the need by 10% and has a 10% drawback. To the best of my understanding this rig is only reducing the cost of your shield booster power drain. Using the Large Shield Booster drawing 160 GJ to activate, 10% is 16 and you still need 144 GJ to activate it. Sometimes I feel we need a degree in electronics just to understand all this hogwash.
