It makes no sense that the M80 has a full interior and the Ares has nothing, even though the Ares is meant to be a long range fighter. There is a ton of wasted space in that chassis

I genuinely think CIG thought this was good after 12 years of development and over a billion dollars in funding. It’s like there is a disconnect between CIG and the pledge base, most players accept server issues as they work on dynamic server meshing now, however as many have pointed out there were still many issues here even when it was on a private server with 4 people, which will run infinitely better than a server even with dynamic server meshing.

Real worrying times for the long term viability of the PU ever reaching 1.0

Thought I‘d post this as I see many posts where people seemingly talk themselves into thinking their usages warrants more RAM. a lot of people post back saying they often hit X of RAM usage however I’ve always known that RAM allocation is not true usage and the side by side testing I’ve seen supports that.

MacOS hardware accelerated RAM compression really is great, they deserve massive kudos for it. basically increases your RAM by 50% with pretty much zero performance loss.

in side by side tests I have seen, for many apps (Final Cut Pro etc) when you have more RAM then MacOS will allocate more, it doesn’t actually run any different, even on intense testing. RAM allocation is different from RAM usage!

The only slight benefit you get is the “pre-loading”of applications which MacOS thinks you will use (my first link below shows that), which I would say is of negligible benefit considering the cost.

From all the testing I’ve seen you only get benefit from the additional RAM if you 1) use Blender (it seems unoptimised) and/or 2) you want to run largish LLM models locally. For anything else, save your bucks, you don't need more than 24GB RAM now, nor will you for years.

EDIT: Two more use cases have come out that regularly need a lot of RAM, handling large databases/datasets and multiple VM’s. I still think this fails into that very small subset of MacBook buyers.

some reference material, the first video is an excellent video actually showing comparative performance:

https://youtu.be/yaMmKy8lJwE?is=LHV46UulnRqDnfep

https://youtu.be/4G4nCLHFv5I?is=GHiS48QsS0abtdO_

https://youtu.be/mrYiM2DOw-I?is=4AIWylcLBRDcdbEE

the previous version is still available for one month at legacy.erkul.games

EDIT: Forward G figures are now on SPViewer, the Railen has notably worse forward acceleration than both the C/M2 and Hull B. Railen is VERY sluggish out of Atmo

Some observations:

• Railen slightly faster the other ships in SCM and NAV (Hull B seems a little slow?)
• Railen has the lowest quantum range of all (apologies for the rounding here!)
• Pilot DPS on Railen is competitive, only beaten by the M2
• Shield performance is good on the Railen, matching the M2
• Railen has the lowest Total Hull HP of all the ships here
• Railen armor HP is "OK", lower than C2
• Railen deflection values are poor for the size of ship, around Corsair levels
• Hull B is the most maneuverable ship here by quite a margin

All round quite a balanced offering from CIG, I think they've slotted the ship in well.