Gauss Accuracy And effect of salvoes size

[Jorgen_CAB]

My testing shows that the number of salvos is key here and that is why you need the really small turret to get a good results.

My testing using simulating the game mechanics showed that a single turret 1HS guns was by far the best option if you don't want to go smaller... going smaller you need turrets that have 0 HTK and the gain is so small that it is not worth that extra efficiency... not in my opinion.

You can of course add more weapons in the turret if you are up against someone with better technology as you will hit less missiles anyway, but that is another question entirely.

Sure the big high accuracy turrets will produce better result against single or very few really large salvos, such as from box launchers on cruisers or something... but the difference here are much smaller than when you look at the same thing fired from say 40 fighters firing 5 missiles each or something versus a cruiser lobbing 200 missiles. The 40 fighters are way more dangerous to the type of PD gun you have as the large salvo produce rather small differences in total missiles leaked while the difference can be huge against the fighters.

Example...

PD option A
80 100% Gauss turrets firing 4 shots, TS 16000km/s, Crew Grade +5%, FC hit rate 90%

PD option B
471 17% Gauss turrets firing 4 shots, TS 16000km/s, Crew Grade +5%, FC hit rate 90%

200 incoming missiles at speed 24000km/s in one salvo
Option A leaks 2.67 missiles
Option B leaks 4.7 missiles

200 incoming missiles at speed 24000km/s fired from 40 fighters in 5 salvos each.
Option A leaks 31.4 missiles
Option B leaks 7.7 missiles

For good measure I also added in a test of a quad Gauss with 20 turrets 100% size, that turret leaked 100 missiles in the last test...

Another good thing with the smaller turrets are that they fit better into the ship as the 17% turret is only about 60-70 tons and you can use them as fillers if you have the PD anyway. They are cheaper to research, cost less MSP to maintain and repair due to losses from combat failures. There are almost only upside to these very small turrets.

From a RP point of view it is perhaps a bit boring how inefficient max size Gauss cannons really are.

So from your test, if the missiles are even faster, quad turrets could improve their performance? Like in the situation of dreaded SPAMM?

I would say rarely...

If I take the above example and increase the speed of the missiles to 30000km/s

40 salvos of 5 missiles...
Then a 120 quad 17% leaked an average of 54.1 missiles and 480 17% leaked an average of 39.8.

2 salvos of 100 missiles...
Then a 120 quad 17% leaked an average of 35.8 missiles and 480 17% leaked an average of 36.4


The number of salvos are so much more important so the number of guns make a huge impact on these numbers.

[space dwarf]

This has been an interesting thread, I'll have to take this into account while designing my missile catcher ships!

[Kelewan]

This has been an interesting thread, I'll have to take this into account while designing my missile catcher ships!

I did the same and the design faild. I suspect a bug in low-to-hit cases.

 

[Iceranger]

This has been an interesting thread, I'll have to take this into account while designing my missile catcher ships!

I did the same and the design faild. I suspect a bug in low-to-hit cases.

I setup some scenarios to replicate your bug in the bug thread, and I think I figure out what went wrong.

In short, if the final hit chance is between 0.5% and 1%, the display will round it to 1, but the actual hit chance will be rounded down to 0. If the final hit chance is slightly higher than 1%, it seem to be working as expected.

My setup: incoming missiles at 100kkm/s, turret tracking speed 40kkm/s, missiles have ECM 6, BFC has ECCM 2, BFC 10kkm accuracy 98%, 10% size gauss

Test 1: Active range against 6MSP is 14,419,238 km, the missiles can traverse this distance in less than 29 ticks, so the final tracking bonus is 28%. In this case, hit chance can be calculated as:

Code: [Select]

( (40000*1.28/100000)*0.98 - (0.6-0.2) ) * 0.1 * 100% = ( 0.50176 - 0.4 ) * 10% = 1.0176%
The displayed interception chance is 1%. The interception used 16650 shots out of 18000 available shots to intercept 180 incoming missiles, which gives an accuracy of 1.081%

Test 2: Active range against 6MSP is 13,894,726 km, the missiles will spend less than 28 ticks in this range, so the final tracking bonus is 27%. In this case, hit chance can be calculated as:

Code: [Select]

( (40000*1.27/100000)*0.98 - (0.6-0.2) ) * 0.1 * 100% = ( 0.49784 - 0.4 ) * 10% = 0.9784%
The displayed interception chance is still 1%, however the interception hits 0 out of 18000 available shots.

[Iceranger]

While I still have the setup around, I tested a bit more.

Same setup: incoming missiles at 100kkm/s, turret tracking speed 40kkm/s, missiles have ECM 6, BFC 10kkm accuracy 98%, 10% size gauss. This time BFC has ECCM3.

With 28% tracking bonus, the hit chance is:

Code: [Select]

( (40000*1.28/100000)*0.98 - (0.6-0.3) ) * 0.1 * 100% = ( 0.50176 - 0.3 ) * 10% = 2.0176%
The interception showed 2% hit chance, 8832 shots fired destroying all 180 missiles, which gives an accuracy of 2.0380%

With 27% tracking bonus, the hit chance is

Code: [Select]

( (40000*1.27/100000)*0.98 - (0.6-0.3) ) * 0.1 * 100% = ( 0.49784 - 0.3 ) * 10% = 1.9784%
The displayed interception chance is 2%, while 18000 shots filed hitting 164 missiles, which gives an actual accuracy of 0.9111%. So the actual hit chance used in game is probably again rounded down to 1%.

[Ulzgoroth]

Maybe the rolls to hit are integers from 1-100? Same effect either way.

[Iceranger]

Maybe the rolls to hit are integers from 1-100? Same effect either way.

That makes a lot of sense if Steve views these as rolling dices

[amram]

Just in getting missiles to match up very closely in excel it was necessary to truncate via rounding in several places, and sometimes by flooring, others by ceiling.

That Steve would round chance to 2 places wouldn't surprise me, it seems that more often than not what we are shown and what the game is using are sourced from the same value, such that if aurora only shows you two digits of precision, it likely only has two digits of precision when it uses it.

[Droll]

My testing shows that the number of salvos is key here and that is why you need the really small turret to get a good results.

My testing using simulating the game mechanics showed that a single turret 1HS guns was by far the best option if you don't want to go smaller... going smaller you need turrets that have 0 HTK and the gain is so small that it is not worth that extra efficiency... not in my opinion.

You can of course add more weapons in the turret if you are up against someone with better technology as you will hit less missiles anyway, but that is another question entirely.

Sure the big high accuracy turrets will produce better result against single or very few really large salvos, such as from box launchers on cruisers or something... but the difference here are much smaller than when you look at the same thing fired from say 40 fighters firing 5 missiles each or something versus a cruiser lobbing 200 missiles. The 40 fighters are way more dangerous to the type of PD gun you have as the large salvo produce rather small differences in total missiles leaked while the difference can be huge against the fighters.

Example...

PD option A
80 100% Gauss turrets firing 4 shots, TS 16000km/s, Crew Grade +5%, FC hit rate 90%

PD option B
471 17% Gauss turrets firing 4 shots, TS 16000km/s, Crew Grade +5%, FC hit rate 90%

200 incoming missiles at speed 24000km/s in one salvo
Option A leaks 2.67 missiles
Option B leaks 4.7 missiles

200 incoming missiles at speed 24000km/s fired from 40 fighters in 5 salvos each.
Option A leaks 31.4 missiles
Option B leaks 7.7 missiles

For good measure I also added in a test of a quad Gauss with 20 turrets 100% size, that turret leaked 100 missiles in the last test...

Another good thing with the smaller turrets are that they fit better into the ship as the 17% turret is only about 60-70 tons and you can use them as fillers if you have the PD anyway. They are cheaper to research, cost less MSP to maintain and repair due to losses from combat failures. There are almost only upside to these very small turrets.

From a RP point of view it is perhaps a bit boring how inefficient max size Gauss cannons really are.

So from your test, if the missiles are even faster, quad turrets could improve their performance? Like in the situation of dreaded SPAMM?

I would say rarely...

If I take the above example and increase the speed of the missiles to 30000km/s

40 salvos of 5 missiles...
Then a 120 quad 17% leaked an average of 54.1 missiles and 480 17% leaked an average of 39.8.

2 salvos of 100 missiles...
Then a 120 quad 17% leaked an average of 35.8 missiles and 480 17% leaked an average of 36.4


The number of salvos are so much more important so the number of guns make a huge impact on these numbers.

This is interesting, it might behoove oneself to use different sizes of gauss then. Large Gauss weapons perform better against large salvos but the smaller ones can engage multiple smaller salvos much better. From a roleplay perspective I find it interesting to have ships with both 17% and 100% gauss weapons. You could RP and say that the larger ones are flak cannons and the smaller ones are autocannons.

[Gabethebaldandbold]

I wonder how this influences the railgun PD vs GC PD discussion, and wether the smaller Gauss Canons are better suited than railguns for pd at an earlier tie than the full size ones...

[DFNewb]

From my own ingame testing I am finding smaller Gauss cannons to not perform as well as bigger ones (equal total tonnage).

[Iceranger]

From my own ingame testing I am finding smaller Gauss cannons to not perform as well as bigger ones (equal total tonnage).

Citations needed  any data that you can share?

[DFNewb]

From my own ingame testing I am finding smaller Gauss cannons to not perform as well as bigger ones (equal total tonnage).

Citations needed  any data that you can share?

I tested smallest size gauss and full size in quad cannons with fire rate tech level 2 and range 20000. my BFC and turrets research were both at 4k/s. The enemy was precursors. On their ASM missiles the guns did roughly the same but the very big noticeable difference was against the AAM's. The smaller cannons miss them so much more than the larger ones, and in turn the ships get hit more.


Also I haven't read the whole thread but it seems like the reduced size accuracy does more than I originally suspected as the max chance to hit something is 100 + modifiers (I believe, the highest to hit I have seen in C# is 116 percent, at 0km range) making it always multiple by 0.17 afterwards makes it so it can potentially miss against even really slow targets if you are not right on them (and missiles are not shot at 0km range like you can do to enemy ships but always at 10k range which means you will pretty much always have a max chance of 0.17 to hit and in most cases much lower.