Author Topic: Gauss cannons  (Read 3762 times)

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Offline Barkhorn

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Re: Gauss cannons
« Reply #15 on: October 06, 2017, 10:55:31 AM »
Against missiles and when mounted on a slow ship, GC can outperform railguns all the way down to RoF 3 since they can be mounted in turrets.
 

Offline obsidian_green

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Re: Gauss cannons
« Reply #16 on: October 06, 2017, 06:59:21 PM »
Against missiles and when mounted on a slow ship, GC can outperform railguns all the way down to RoF 3 since they can be mounted in turrets.

I'm a Gauss cannon turret fiend already. My question (as opposed to the OP's) was about when reduced-size Gauss makes the most sense on fighters. I went dual, 25% accuracy Gauss on my very first fighter design, but was scared over to a single railgun by the number of misses in the event updates. I miss the lower tonnage, but look forward to actually hitting targets.
 

Offline Michael Sandy

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Re: Gauss cannons
« Reply #17 on: October 09, 2017, 12:50:47 PM »
As far as I can tell, accuracy goes does linearly with size, meaning that you get the same number of hits with 12 1/12 size gauss cannon as you do with one full size.  Which means you can put 1/12 sized quad turrets on a slow fighter.

Going with the reduced size also reduces the research cost, making it far more palatable to upgrade your turret designs every time you get a new gauss tech.

There are a lot of systems I have making the really big versions of, (like sensors), because the cumulative cost can end up more than simply researching the next tech advance in the tree.
 
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Offline Father Tim

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Re: Gauss cannons
« Reply #18 on: October 09, 2017, 02:46:47 PM »
Gauss cannon base hit chance IS linear to size.  Steve has said that -- for example -- although 1/6 size Gauss Cannons claim to have a 17% base hit chance in the description, it's actually 16.666...%

This means that absent any other modifiers, six size 1 Gauss Cannons will average the same number of hits as one size 6 Gauss Cannon.  Since most bonuses and penalties are multiplicative, these averages will remain constant in those cases.

Crew Rating, on the other hand, is NOT.  Highly skilled Fighter pilots/crew will ADD their flat bonus to hit chances, resulting in (for example) hit chance multipliers of 105% for one size 6 Gauss Cannon and 21.666...% * 6 for six size 1 Gauss Cannons (equivalent to one shot at 131%).

Therefore, with Conscript crews you want the largest size GC that you can fit, whereas with trained and/or experienced crews, the smallest.  Multiple smaller GC also have advantages in the 'at least X hits' category, redundancy, and -as noted by Michael Sandy - reseaerch/Tech costs.  They suffer in damage absorption (you have watch total HTK closely) and potential overkill (for example, when you are trying to cripple engines prior to boarding enemy vessels).
 
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Iranon

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Re: Gauss cannons
« Reply #19 on: October 09, 2017, 05:33:58 PM »
Also: turrets with more barrels need proportionally less overhead in turret gear for a given tracking speed... but a full-size quad may be more firepower than we want per fire control.
 

Offline Michael Sandy

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Re: Gauss cannons
« Reply #20 on: October 09, 2017, 05:54:12 PM »
There IS a scenario where fullsized Gauss may have an advantage.

If you have PD with a 100% intercept vs known enemy missiles, then you know exactly how much PD you need to completely defeat a volley.

If you have 10 times as many PD with a 10% intercept, the distribution may be such that sometimes you will actually intercept far fewer missiles.

But this is kind of rare, since you are more likely to have a 95%, allowing for a miss distribution, or 105%, meaning wasted accuracy.
 

Offline FrederickAlexander

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Re: Gauss cannons
« Reply #21 on: October 10, 2017, 08:53:37 AM »
So, how boring is it waiting for a 250 ton gauss fighter to nibble a 100kton freighter to death? LOL.
I never send a single fighter and perfer to send them out in squadrons... that being said, it still takes a long time to bring down a freighter half that size.