Thanks Nuclear.
Now, im sorry to be on this topic again, but as far as gauss cannons go for PD, the smaller ones, with crappy accuracy, does their actual accuracy increases with faster missile tracking speed, racial tracking, gauss velocity speed and ROF or do they gets capped at lets say 8.5% accuracy or whatever they get from their size proportion?
Beam weapon accuracy is given by five factors (neglecting :
- Base weapon accuracy, which only matters for Gauss cannons, everything else has 100%.
- Tracking speed, which may be limited by the weapon or the beam fire control.
- Fire control range versus range to the target.
- Missile tracking bonus (only applies when the target is a missile).
- Target ECM vs. fire control ECCM.
The expression for beam weapon accuracy is therefore:
ACC% = (weapon_accuracy%) * [tracking_speed / target_speed * (1 - target_range / BFC_range) * missile_tracking_bonus - 0.10 * (target_ECM - BFC_ECCM)]
with some min/max limits omitted for brevity, and effects from commander bonuses neglected. It is important to notice that the effect of ECM is subtracted from the product of every term
except weapon accuracy. This is important, otherwise even a single level of ECM would make the 8%-accuracy Gauss weapon completely useless, but thankfully this is not the case.
So to answer your question: the accuracy of your Gauss weapon is going to be capped at its listed weapon accuracy. The effect of tracking speed, range, etc. is only to keep your accuracy as close to that maximum value as possible. However, remember that the 8% accuracy Gauss cannon may have only 1/12 the accuracy, but it is also 1/12 the size of a full-size Gauss cannon, so your
theoretical hit rate and damage output are not dependent on the size and accuracy of the Gauss cannon itself (again, there are some effects in practice from salvo overkill which make larger cannons a bit worse at least for PD purposes).
So Small gauss cannons for smaller crafts like FACs and patrol crafts are a bad idea then?
No, they are fine, just remember that Gauss cannons nearly always should be turreted with the maximum tracking speed you can get (based on BC tech), otherwise they tend to be less effective than other weapon types. If your FACs are actually very fast, railguns are usually going to be more efficient, but for a small patrol craft that moves at your normal fleet speed Gauss cannon turrets are perfectly fine regardless of what size you make the cannons themselves. For a small ship you might want to use the bigger cannons though just so you can get more value from using a single-weapon BFC.