After downloading "Polaris Collector" from the addons pages, I went off to buy a Collector and make my fortune mining asteroids. I noticed that while the Mining Laser by itself was pretty lethal against the asteroids, if I used the Grappling Beam (which in itself does no damage) at the same time as the Mining Laser then the asteroids would disintegrate instantly with a loud bang. It seems that somehow the combination of the two weapons at once causes much greater damage. I haven't done much experimenting with it yet but I thought it would be interesting to find out exactly what it is that's causing the behaviour and see how it may be exploited.
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I noticed that one myself, actually. I think it's the exponential-beam-damage bug at work. Since there are two beams at work, then the second beam deals twice as much damage as it should... or something. I seem to recall it being fixed for the Mac 1.0.8 update, but I'm not sure. Still, it is fun flying around with the grappling beam going, and then just tapping the space bar to watch the asteroids detonate.
P.S. Whoever it was that made the Polaris Collector plugin, if you reading this, good job. Only thing is, the way the ship spins like that is a little disconcerting.
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I don't know why, but when I downloaded the plug (I use a Mac), it never worked. Yes, I know how to use plugins, I've made many of my own, but the Colletor never worked. I could never find it, I searched everywhere, I opened the plugin with resedit, and removed all availablilty tags (to make it available by default), changed buyrandom to 100%, changed the tech level to 1, but I could never find it in any shipyard. I cannot say that I've been able to actually use this plug.