About
This tool allows you to determine the theoretically-best combination of shield generator and shield booster engineering for an Elite Dangerous starship.
It is based on Down to Earth Astronomy's shield tester PowerShell script, as demonstrated in this video. It gives typically-identical results, but runs in milliseconds instead of minutes without compromising on result quality.
Technical Information
This tool is written in the high-performance buzzword systems programming language, Rust, with a frontend written in Javascript (using Sapper) and a little PHP.
To avoid having to perform a fully exhaustive search, only resistance boosters for damage types actually being received are considered, and all remaining possible pairs of boosters are filtered using a k-d tree to eliminate combinations that will always be beaten by other pairs.
Source code for both this web frontend and the backend command-line tool is available on Github, and contributions and bug reports are welcome.
Acknowledgements
This website and the backend tool is written and hosted by Thomas Hurst.
Special thanks to:
- Down to Earth Astronomy for the original PowerShell implementation which inspired this tool.
- Jamie "Entity" van den Berge for the novel pairwise filtering algorithm which provides some very impressive speedups.
- Sebastian Bauer for his Python port, which I used to help generate the data files this tool currently uses.
- Andrew van der Stock for his Go version and bug reports.