Is there a issue with current energy consumption of weapons?

[GRHayes]

Ok, So my ship has 1.4 million energy storage and a recharge of 140K.
I have one weapon system that uses 90,000 per each of its 4 missile launchers. That should total 360K energy.
But I notice it drains the entire 1.4 million and only fires 2 of the missiles.

I worked in power production in real life. Nuclear RO and more. The weapons system should be drawing off the banks or capacitance and the energy recharge should just be recharging at the rate it can.
I would assume the game is modeled something along the same lines.

It seems either the indicators of power levels of what each weapon is using drastically off or the indicator of how much power is available is wrong.

I didn't see it in the bug tracking. I wanted to make sure it was an issue before filing the report. Is anyone else checking the energy consumption and noticed the values aren't making sense?

 

[Comr4de]

Its an issue with the weapons tab, I believe. It doesnt display the correct power consumption

 

[Edymnion]

There is also the fact that each additional array you attach to the same computer increases the overall energy needed to activate it. I think its 10% additional energy per additional array.

So if you had 1 array that required 1k energy to activate, it would be just 1k energy.
Two of those arrays would be 2.2k energy. Four such arrays on one computer would be 5.6k energy.

I don't believe that extra energy "tax" is calculated into the individual array energy consumption displays.

But still, that should only be working out to just over 500k energy...

 

[Krougal]

How big are your launchers?
Some missile examples that use ~90k power per shot:
M 120
Mb 20/20
Mbe 30/12/25

I bring that up since I don't have the game handy, but I do have spreadsheets.

For the most part I've found the ingame displays to be accurate (other than that you may need to open/close them several times for them to refresh). The thing is different weapons/systems display the same info differently sometimes so you have to pay attention to what you are looking at, and make derivative calculations to get apples to apples comparisons.

Missiles I don't remember 100% offhand, but I remember for some reason early on I was looking at the wrong number and surprised when my missiles power use per shot is 10x what I expected, but double-checking everything was correct.

The 10% shows up if it is applicable, because of a bug it isn't always even when it should be. I think it was Cyber who explained this to me, but I forgot the specific conversation...weapon with no slave, weapon with itself as slave...I think that's when it gets applied...different slave it doesn't, even though it is supposed to.

I have a Cc 50/50, with each system as a seperate primary (unslaved) it uses 5k power per sec, slaved it uses 5.5k per sec.

 

[Malacodor]

Are all weapons and reactors on your ship or is a part of that on a turret?

There is also the fact that each additional array you attach to the same computer increases the overall energy needed to activate it. I think its 10% additional energy per additional array.

That's displayed correctly.

 

[Keptick]

Manually calculate the power cost of the missiles.
1 damage = 10 energy
1 weapon block = 5 damage per second

Here's a formula:
(total weapon system block count)*(reload time in seconds)*50 = energy required per volley

 

[GRHayes]

There is also the fact that each additional array you attach to the same computer increases the overall energy needed to activate it. I think its 10% additional energy per additional array.

So if you had 1 array that required 1k energy to activate, it would be just 1k energy.
Two of those arrays would be 2.2k energy. Four such arrays on one computer would be 5.6k energy.

I don't believe that extra energy "tax" is calculated into the individual array energy consumption displays.

But still, that should only be working out to just over 500k energy...

So I did a good bit of testing. It turns out it has to do with the overdrive effect. It doesn't display the correct damage level or power when used.
It will show the same damage level as the explosive effect however it is quite a lot larger.
I used 1x4x10 of each to test
missiles+pulse+explosive
missiles+pulse+over drive
If you look at the following images there are 2 targets made of orange advanced armor. 31x31x20
The target on the right was using the explosive damage. (Not including the damage on the corner.)
The target on the left was made with the overdrive. It also created the damage on the corner of the other target.
I also tested it against copies of the same ship I am using where the overdrive version tends to be massively more effective.
The ships both have 100K of shields only. The ship on the right which was hit with two explosive type missiles.
The ship to the left was hit with two overdrive missiles. The ship to the right took no damage while the ship to the left took massive damage.
I also noticed something funny when it came to the explosive missiles. When I fired just 1 missile it did 70K damage to the shields. When I fired 2 it did around 60K. It actually did less damage to the shields. Made no sense at all to me. I repeated it several times with the same results.
That number 6 key in the image is where I built the test rig where I could swap stuff out from on to the other.
So in conclusion over drive does a lot more damage just doesn't show you the damage level or actual power use.

 

[Krougal]

Oh, yeah, overdrive does triple damage, but 6x power use.

 

[GRHayes]

Thanks everyone for the replies sorry to those of you I didn't get back to.

Oh, yeah, overdrive does triple damage, but 6x power use.

They should have set it to 3x power use. Otherwise it is far more efficient to just build the explosive ones and use 3 times as many.

About the only thing that it offers as a benefit is reduction in the size a weapon needs to be but it then increase power usage by 6 times meaning you need even more blocks there. In short you pretty much loose out unless you use over drive for anything but boosting the power of small systems such as on some turrets. If you are going to build a ship capable of firing a large system you might as well build the large scale rocket.

I guess there is another way of looking at it if you are building 6 times the power you can use it for other stuff while not firing those weapons.
Trade offs

At least I know now.

thanks everyone

 

[Malacodor]

They should have set it to 3x power use. Otherwise it is far more efficient to just build the explosive ones and use 3 times as many.

That would be overpowered. Overdrive is intended to be good only in certain situations.

 

[Krougal]

That would be overpowered. Overdrive is intended to be good only in certain situations.

I agree with Malacodor, normally everything weapons are (more or less) even trades, but triple damage for same amount of blocks is pretty powerful. Less blocks means more thrust/mass for same amount of thrusters, less power needed for radar jammer, faster jump-drive charge for same amount of modules, etc, etc.

You're upping DPS in the same space, but yes, it's only situationally useful. Just remember to get apples to apples weapon system comparisons you have to use the TOTAL module mass. So like C-150 vs Cc-75/75 vs Cco-50/50/50 vs Cce-50/50/50 (assuming you get the shorthand). Also bear in mind you can't overpower a master. So if the master is 50, then you can have 100 slaves and 100 effect modules, but that's a waste of 100 blocks.

The big thing with missiles as you've seen are they are an alpha-weapon, high alpha damage, high alpha power use. So the amount of power caps you have is a limiting factor on missiles. Whereas rapid-fire cannons are strictly pps, so reactor constrained. Also the way the effects work, different weapons get different effects from the same module. Explosives on missiles are great, other weapons not so much. Overdrive is probably better on cannon and beam if you've got the spare power.

 

[Malacodor]

I agree with Malacodor, normally everything weapons are (more or less) even trades, but triple damage for same amount of blocks is pretty powerful. Less blocks means more thrust/mass for same amount of thrusters, less power needed for radar jammer, faster jump-drive charge for same amount of modules, etc, etc.

You're upping DPS in the same space, but yes, it's only situationally useful. Just remember to get apples to apples weapon system comparisons you have to use the TOTAL module mass. So like C-150 vs Cc-75/75 vs Cco-50/50/50 vs Cce-50/50/50 (assuming you get the shorthand). Also bear in mind you can't overpower a master. So if the master is 50, then you can have 100 slaves and 100 effect modules, but that's a waste of 100 blocks.

The big thing with missiles as you've seen are they are an alpha-weapon, high alpha damage, high alpha power use. So the amount of power caps you have is a limiting factor on missiles. Whereas rapid-fire cannons are strictly pps, so reactor constrained. Also the way the effects work, different weapons get different effects from the same module. Explosives on missiles are great, other weapons not so much. Overdrive is probably better on cannon and beam if you've got the spare power.

Thank you for explaining in detail for what I was too lazy.

 

[Edymnion]

Yup, the main advantage of overdrive for me is on turrets. Slap overdrive in there, and suddenly a relatively small turret (that is pulling all that crazy power usage from the mother ship) is spitting out damage far beyond what it's size would indicate it's capable of.

No real point in Overdrive on weapons on ships as far as I'm concerned, because its more energy efficient to simply drop more blocks in there to increase the size of the array (heh, I like to build big, so doubling the size of a weapon array generally isn't an issue for me). For turrets though? Hell yeah, Overdrive everything and your little pinger suddenly turns into a deathstar.

 

[AtraUnam]

On ships below the power cap it is likely more space efficient to use overdrive and increase the box-dimensions of the reactor(s)