Portal

The Portal is a material introduced with the Moonshot DLC in 2019. Its purpose is teleporting projectiles between a pair of linked portals. Similarly to the Repair Station, Portal is added by a standalone mod that the lobby host can enable/disable, provided they own the Moonshot DLC. In presence of the DLC, Portal is enabled by default.

## Portal

### Description

Teleports projectiles when two are connectedContext menu switches direction

## Stats

### Cost

50 metal and 62.5 energy/gridRuntime: 12.5 energy/grid

### Uses

Return to Senders. Opening up weapon angles. Unconventional strategies.

### Counters

EMP Rockets, Swarm Missiles, Moonshine's active ability.

### Overview

Portals are capable of teleporting projectiles and laser beams to another linked portal. This makes them a vastly flexible material, with a multitude of applications. Some examples are: Placing a portal in front of a weapon in order to improve its available angle - even allowing a weapon to be placed in a spot otherwise impossible to fire from (such as the inside of a base), "Return-To-Sender" portals, which deflect incoming projectiles back towards the opponent, or creating clever missile silo spots which would not function without a portal.

Projectile momentum and flight angle are preserved between linked portals, i.e. a projectile entering a portal at an angle will emerge out of the exit portal at the same angle, and at same distance from the center of the brace (relative in size).

Unlike Energy Shields, portals will not pass wind through (deactivated or not), and will NOT let projectiles to phase through when deactivated, behaving like Foreground Bracing.

   While active, portals will pass ALL friendly projectiles through, and nearly all enemy projectiles, with a few exceptions.

Typical counters to portals are Swarm Missiles and EMP Rockets. Both collide with activated portals of the opponent, Swarm Missiles will destroy the portal on impact, while EMP Rockets temporarily disable them. All other projectiles will phase right through, dealing no damage to the portal. Similarly to Energy Shields, splash weapons such as Cannons impacting next to the portal can also suffice. Buster and Moonshine commanders can take advantage of their active abilities, both of which provide additional sources of EMP effect to attack portals with.

A significant downside to using portals is their considerable energy consumption, which is higher than that of Energy Shields. This dictates a high focus on energy economy.

### Activating Portals

In order to function, upon being built a portal must be linked into another portal, creating a pair. The entrance/exit can be reconfigured via the "reverse-direction" option in the right-click context menu of the portal. The context menu also contains an option to make the portal pass-through, making it act like a deactivated energy shield. It has to be kept in mind that both reversing the direction and turning the portal into pass-through are **not instant**, and take 10 seconds to complete, during which the portal charges up and is not operational. In this state it is vulnerable to direct damage from all weapons.

#### Return to Sender

A Return to Sender is a portal pair configured to send the projectile back towards the direction it came from. This is the simplest, and typically the most common use for portals.

When backed by proper anti-air protecting against missiles and rockets, Return to Senders can serve as a formidable line of defense, though hampered a bit by the high energy consumption of the portals.

#### Remote weapon exits

Portals can be used to relocate a weapon's output to another location. As demonstrated in the picture below, this allows to fire a weapon over obstacles (such as a tall friendly fort), without otherwise placing the weapon in a vulnerable position, or causing excessive weight stress on a structure supporting such an elevated position.

#### Internal weapons

Tying into the previous case, a portal may be used to allow a weapon to fire while being placed inside a base, even behind a reactor core, in a relative safety. When done well, this can make the valuable weapons harder to destroy, by the virtue of making the exit portal a smaller target, more difficult to land an accurate shot on. With skillful use, in a vulnerable situation (such as when a door covering the portal is destroyed) a portal can even be deactivated right before an imminent attack, minimizing the damage to a destroyed exit portal, as opposed to a total loss of a heavy weapon. In the worst case scenario, a weapon can be placed in a location where upon destruction it can explode safely, without damaging valuable devices or critical support structure.

#### Vertical fire weapons

A popular use for the portals is placing an entry portal in front of a weapon, while placing an exit portal horizontally on top of the base, such as it directs weapons fire towards the sky, without resorting to elaborate Rope contraptions. This is often nicknamed as "T3 mortar", and is typically used with Cannons and 20mm Cannons. While such an installation is significantly more difficult to aim, a Cannon shell or 20mm barrage falling vertically on top of the opponent's base can deliver serious damage, and is incredibly difficult to stop.

#### Portal Mortars

In a way the inverse of the previous point. By placing an entry Portal horizontally over a cluster of Heavy Mortars, and linking it to an exit Portal facing directly towards the opponent, it is possible to reorient the fire of Heavy Mortars sideways, over a relatively flat horizontal trajectory. The result is that instead of slowly arching across the sky towards the target to hit it from above, mortar bombs are now ejected straight towards the opponent's base, making the attack incredibly difficult to intercept with anti-air.

#### Portal Silos

Many maps only feature foundation spots tucked inside a cave, or otherwise obstructed, in a way that normally makes it impossible to utilize a Swarm Missiles silo. Portals offer a workaround - by placing an entry Portal directly over a silo in the cave, and an exit Portal somewhere on the outside of the fort allows the weapon to function. Even when unobstructed foundation spots are available on a given map, this can still be done in order to send the missiles on a more desirable path, possibly harder to intercept by the opponent's anti-air. In any case however, one should be wary of the energy consumption of the Portals.

#### Concentrators and Accelerators

Portals also have some more exotic uses.

A Concentrator (or "Concentratinator" as it's sometimes referred to) is an installation designed to focus fire from multiple batteries of Plasma Lasers into a single point. Such an attack allows for grouping the lasers, and releasing the damage from all weapons instantly in a single focused burst, giving the opponent no time to recover from the damage in between shots, such if they otherwise be fired one after another in a regular fashion.

An Accelerator is a similar contraption, instead focusing projectile weapons - typically Cannons and 20mm Cannons. It involves feeding the fire into a loop of several portals, juggling the projectiles in an infinite cycle until they are released into an exit portal. This allows to accumulate multiple salvos from the weapons inside the machine, and them releasing them all in an overwhelming barrage. Additionally, while looping in the portals, the projectiles are continously accelerated downwards by the gravity (hence the name of the contraption), dramatically increasing their velocity when they're finally released. It has to be kept in mind that projectiles have a limited lifespan and will eventually expire if held too long in the portal, putting a limit on how much damage can be stored.

While both applications are potentially incredibly devastating, they are largely impractical in regular matches taking place on typical maps, as the required resources, space, time, and effort required to deploy a Concentrator or Accelerator are prohibitively high. As such, their use is mostly relegated to modded over the top maps with a vast amount of space and available economy, and even then best done in a coop match - multiple players providing more APM available in order to both construct the elaboate contraption *and* maintain the base.

### Trivia

* Portals are most likely a reference to Valve's iconic Portal game series. The blue and orange colors of cursor-highlighted active portals in Forts mimic the colors of the portals produced by the Portal Gun in Portal games. Their mechanics in general also stay faithful to the source material.
* In the Moonshot campaign, it is stated that the portals were invented by combining a Plasma Laser with an Energy Shield.