Hack or bug?

[ktekinay]

I just signed on to see Queen (Collective) with a damage of -2 billion or so. There was no way to kill him. What’s that about?

[2×4]

Pete helped me out and I spent some time looking into that. Galaxy class does that. If you have 40+ damage, over warp by hitting “W” then make a high speed turn like CAP L to increase damage you can induce the -2x 10^-9 damage. It is chancy, so you might get the damage and blow yourself up or just get the damage. You have to find your sweet zone. Just like the lyrics to “Suicide is Painless” performing this maneuver brings on many changes. First, if you save you will not retain any gold and when you sign back on you are reborn an out of the birth canal Galaxy. Second, you may not be killed outright but you can have your WE/IE reduced to zero from taking hits. This will leave you like a finned shark. You still lose WE/IE at the same rate as normal, just your damage does not kill you. So it comes to: Is it worse to get blown up or just stay online in the game unable to do anything?

[obit]

Certainly a bug (or exploit if players use it to grief each other). It’s been reported, and I still don’t have a permanent fix for it, but it’s definitely on my to-do list.

[2×4]

The bots showed a perfect solution to a user trying to exploit this bug. Preposition CV97 or Scout as they have minimum torp range of 300 while Galaxy is 500. Stay in the sweet zone of >300 and <500 and pump offending Galaxy full of plasma. The only way for an offending Galaxy to survive is to orbit a XTAL planet. The solution to that is to “chainsaw”. Hope this helps.

[Author]

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