To me this just says keep your magazines and power plants at 1 HS. Anything bigger and you have to trade extra space to get the same effective HTK. Hmm I wonder if this even gets better for larger magazines when you start adding armor.
Everything I've seen says it's best to keep magazines at 1HS with current mechanics. The problem I have is that I don't know the algorithm for calculating magazine explosion size - is it the number of warhead points stored? The magazine size? Something else?
HS HTK capacity cap/HTK
1 2 14 7 -- same effective HTK?
2 4 27 6.75
3 6 39 6.5
4 8 51 6.375
5 10 62 6.2
5 9 63 7 -- same effective HTK?
6 10 75 7.5
These were taken from a game with compressed carbon armor and base missile techs.
Is this better for the 1 HS magazine or worse? If I understand what you were saying correctly a 5 HS magazine can get the same effective HTK for one less HTK but is that actually a good thing? I really don't know what to make of this.
I'm not trying to say you are wrong or anything, its just when I read it the first thing that popped in my mind is smaller is better and I think I might be missing something as I'm not really sure what to think about the table above.
This is a GREAT table. It took me a while to understand it, but your "same effective HTK" label is perfect.
Yes, those two magazines have the same effective HTK, because the HTK/HS are the same. Since each HS should have the same chance of blowing up and do the same damage (assuming it's full and the algorithm cares), then the actual HTK/HS will be the same for both magazines.
The difference is that
you need more magazines to get the same number of missiles with the 5/9 design. So you're better off using 63*5 size-1 HTK2 magazines than 70 size-5 HTK 9 magazines (same number of missiles) or 63 size-5 HTK 9 magazines (same number of HS). While the 70 size-5 configuration gives you more HTK, that's because you burned an extra 35 HS on magazines, which you could have used on armor instead (either external, or internal by replacing some size-1 HTK2 magazines with size-1 HTK3 magazines).
[Pause while sitting in design window]
Ummm ok. size-1 HTK3 also has a capacity of 14, with a cap/HTK of 4.666, so no one should ever build the HTK2 version for these stats (another one of those rounding things....). Let's look at two "pretend" possibilities, though, both of which are worse magazines that the "real" one: capacity 13 and capacity 12.
For a pretend size-1, HTK3 Capacity 13 magazine, the cap/HTK would be 4.333, which means better effective HTK per missile. Plus you could fit 65 missile points into 5 of them, which beats the 63 missile points of the size-5 HTK 9 magazine.
For capacity 12, the cap/HTK is 4, but you can only fit 60 into 5 of them. But if you use 2 HTK2 and 3 HTK3, then you have 64 missile points (2*14+3*12), the same number of HS, and 2 with same effective HTK/missile and 3 with better HTK/missile.
So it's better to put more armor on a size-1 magazine than to create bigger magazines with the same HTK.
John