Ok, *now* its starting to make sense to me what you have been trying to say. I want to use the Gauss Cannons because they are small, what screws any type of decent usage of them is the accuracy chance, wich means that for instance, if i have a quad gauss cannon with 33% accuracy, i will hit one in 3 shots of each gun, but being 4 of them, i will actually be landing around 4 shots per salvo i think. Wich is not terrible, but as this gets lower and lower it gets harder to protect the ship. Wich defeats the point of having the smaller weapon the game can put. Especially if i have to turret it. I will use bigger ones on my corvettes, because it will have the tonnage for it, but still... At this point im thinking why bother and just go with a laser turret for both PD and offensive capability. They will have bigger range anyway.
How do i actually use gauss cannons?
If i put a 0 km/twin gauss cannons, then what is going to be its accuracy based on the size? Will still be around the 3%? And... Wich one of those 3 based on my design would the gun actually have as tracking rate?
Gauss cannon base accuracy is always going to be fixed based on the size. The component design screen tells you exactly what your accuracy will be, but as a list:
- 6 HS: 100% accuracy
- 5 HS: 85% accuracy
- 4 HS: 67% accuracy
- 3 HS: 50% accuracy
- 2 HS: 33% accuracy
- 1.5 HS: 25% accuracy
- 1.0 HS: 17% accuracy
- 0.75 HS: 12.5% accuracy
- 0.6 HS: 10% accuracy
- 0.5 HS: 8% accuracy
You'll notice that to within a slight precision error, the accuracy of a Gauss cannon is proportional to its size, so there is no
theoretical change in accuracy per HS (there are some salvo overkill effects in practice which tend to make the smaller cannons better for PD). Any size of cannon will work as well as another, but your base damage/number of hits per HS will be a constant at any given tech level.
As for how to actually use Gauss cannons, nearly always the way to use them effectively is to put them in a turret with maximum tracking speed (4x racial tech level). For the sake of example, let's look at an early ion tech fleet with a fleet speed of 4000 km/s and a BFC tracking speed tech of 3000 km/s (max 12000 km/s). We will compare 10 cm railguns, 10 cm lasers, and 50% accuracy Gauss cannons with ROF 3 tech - neglecting reactors, all of these take up 3 HS each which is close enough to do a rough comparison. We will consider a weapon with 12000 km/s tracking speed to possess "optimal" damage per increment (DPI), since for example against a fast missile this would be the best performance you could get at your tech level.
- The railguns on a typical fleet ship will have 4000 km/s tracking speed (33% of optimal DPI) and fire 4 shots per increment, for a net 1.33 effective DPI.
- The lasers if just mounted on a hull will also have 4000 km/s tracking speed, but only fire one shot per increment, for a pathetic 0.33 effective DPI.
- Therefore it is better to mount the lasers in a turret with 12000 km/s tracking speed. We still only get one shot, for a net 1.0 effective DPI - still worse than railguns.
- Now we consider the Gauss cannon. If we mount it on a ship with 4000 km/s tracking speed, and fire 3 shots per increment at 50% base weapon accuracy, the effective DPI is only 0.5. Better than lasers but much worse than railguns.
- But if we put the Gauss cannon in a turret with 12000 km/s tracking speed, out effective DPI jumps up to 1.5 effective DPI - even better than the railguns! However, the turret adds additional mass, about another 1.2 HS, so at this tech level the Gauss cannon is still not quite as effective per ton as the railgun - but it's close, especially since the railgun needs a reactor as well.
Of course against a real missile moving much quicker than 12000 km/s your real DPI will not be as high, but the ratios will be the same. Please be cognizant, I've tried to compare between weapon systems of similar tonnage here (though not identical). If you change the Gauss cannon accuracy or the railgun number of shots, the above numbers will change - but so will the tonnages involved. Don't put a 6 HS Gauss cannon in a turret and come tell me it's better than a 3 HS railgun, the difference in tonnage must be accounted for.
There are a couple of corollaries here:
- Gauss cannons will become more effective compared to railguns as the ROF tech increases. At ROF 4, they are roughly even depending on tech levels and fleet speed/doctrine. For ROF 5+ turreted Gauss cannons are the best PD money can buy.
- The difference in performance between railguns and turreted Gauss cannons shifts in favor of the railguns as the speed of the ship they are on increases (relative to the maximum BFC tracking speed, of course). IN the above example, if we put our 10 cm railguns on a ship moving at 12000 km/s, they would have a net 4.0 effective DPI, leaving our Gauss turret in the dust. This is why Gauss cannons make poor weapons on fighters - they used to have a niche for very small fighters, but now with reduced-size railguns we can put a single-shot 10 cm railgun plus a reactor and SW BFC on a fighter with less than 100 tons of space used, which is good enough for everything except really hardcore small-fighter RP canons.
It is also worth noting that if you are expecting to fight targets which are slower than your maximum tracking speed (such as enemy fighters or FACs), railguns also gain an edge over Gauss cannons since you do not get bonus damage for having a faster tracking speed than your target's ship speed. Of course lasers are also good here due to dealing 3 damage per shot instead of 1 (and having good armor penetration). This highlights one more important fact about Gauss cannons - they generally are very weak weapons for anything other than point defense, because they are too heavy to compete with other light weapons and the extra speed from a turret is not as helpful against most ship-type targets.