Nick Starkey
Southern Cross Empire
Flying Dangerous
8
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Posted - 2013.12.18 19:54:00 -
[1] - Quote
Tracking and transversal only affect turret based systems. Missiles, bombs and drones use their own formulas (altough drones have a similar calculation to turrets).
Damage from turret weapons is not constant, it depends on your ability to control the engagement, and this will affect both your damage and chance to hit. Tracking is basically a measure of how well your gun can hit moving targets: just think of it as the speed as it can turn around to catch up with enemy movement. This speed is measured in radians per second, which is its angular velocity. The ability to track also depends on the target's size (in this case, signature radius). Smaller ships are harder to hit and vice versa. The other factor that affects damage and hit chance is the weapon's signature resolution, which is higher for smaller weapons and lower for bigger weapons. This basically means that larger guns have more difficulty at hitting smaller targets.
For best damage in turret weapons you want to keep angular velocity to a minimum. If the circunstances are right, even a large turret can hit small and fast moving targets reliably.
Reducing angular velocity can be done in several ways:
-slowing down the target's velocity means they can not create such wide angles with their flight
-increasing your distance to the target (assuming the target keeps its trajectory) will give you a smaller angular velocity (the further away you are, the smaller the arc created by the other ship is to yourself)
-match the target's flight. If both are moving in the same direction, angular velocity will be zero. This is why a small, fast moving ship can easily be destroyer by a larger weapon if it's flying straight to it.
There is also the factor of optimal and falloff ranges. Optimal range is the distance where your guns hit the hardest, and quickly start degrating as they enter falloff ranges. For reference, you deal full damage anywhere inside your optimal range, and it starts dropping to around ~50% damage and chance to hit as you approach the far edge of falloff. At optimal + 2x falloff, your chance to hit is basically 0%.
Each turret weapon has varying effective ranges and tracking. Autocannons have small optimal range and very large falloffs, and decent tracking. Artillery have larger optimal and average falloff but very poor tracking. Blasters have extremly short optimal and falloff, but the highest tracking and potential damage. Railguns have very long optimals and falloffs, with average tracking. Pulse and Beam lasers operate mostly within their very generous optimal range, but suffer from tracking issues. |