How much damage do your turrets do?

[KiloZulu]

I'm building a turret for a new ship, and so far each of its two guns deal out 184k damage per shot (can+beam+punch.) It's the heaviest turret I've ever built, and it made me curious as to how it compares with other peoples' designs. It might help give me a feel for how to define the ship class.

 

[Panpiper]

That's a DPS of 46K, which is good for an offensive turret. I will usually make my own offensive turrets in a similar range, preferring to add more of them at that range than to simply make the output bigger. My 100K battleminer has eight similarly scaled turrets, while my 350K variant has 24 of them in addition to hull mounted weaponry. (I should note that I 'also' have 8 and 20 respectively smaller 20K DPS rapid fire cannon for anti-drone work.)

Much however depends on how you have configured the weapons in the turret. For a most obvious example, having a single large turret firing a single massive missile is likely to be 100% ineffective as such single missiles will easily be shot down by any sort of decent point defense. By the same token having all 184K of that damage in a single cannon/beam projectile will likely be substantially less effective than having that broken into several firing apertures (each with it's own computer to spare the energy cost). 184K is vastly more than you would need to penetrate armor defenses, except if it is like ten layers of spaced armor. In the vast majority of cases, you'd be better off punching a much larger number of slightly shallower holes.

 

[Raisinbat]

Got a few red flags from your description, and would like to make sure you aren't running into any big errors, so please give more information about your turret:

• If it's really just 2 bullets @184k damage that's a really bad setup for two reasons: Your punchthrough effect is basically worse than no effect because it reduces the amount of damage that goes into armor. Your bullet damage is broken down into several hits of fixed damage, like 10.000 for the first, then 9000, etc (not accurate numbers) but when you hit an advanced armor block for 10.000 damage, the damage is split between the block and the armor HP with 25% damage going into the block's HP and 75% going to the armor HP pool. Since Punchthrough reduces armor absorbtion by 25%, it's instead 50% damage to block HP and 50% to HP pool, but there's no benefit to dealing more damage to the block than it's HP, 250, so you're just overshooting the block more and reducing the damage you're doing to the armor HP pool. Punchthrough is for much smaller weapons with many projectiles that have trouble penetrating armor, not massive slugs like yours. Consider switching to explosive effect instead and you'll do 4-5x as much damage.
• Cannons and beams are extremely poor at inflicting massive shock damage when turreted, because the ai focusses it's damage into a single point, making you overshoot all the time. Split your damage into multiple outputs (You can have multiple computers, one for each output, to avoid the increase in power consumption) Even with explosive effect your bullets should not exceed 100k damage (probably not 50k either, don't remember optimal number of the top of my head)

But that's just general advice for turrets that are typically decent, if your turrets are supposed to be the main focus of your ship, you should consider what tactics your ship is built to use, and most importantly, what kind of target the turret is supposed to shoot at.

A turret shooting at huge ships should have very high penetration (100-200 blocks) to make it into the juicy bits, while fighter defense turrets are just wasting damage that way. You want to hit hard enough to get into control systems and dockers for what you're shooting at, without going clean through the ship. Punch-through and ion effect are great at dealing with larger targets, because punch-through will cripple your target faster, but is a slower killer than explosive effect, while ion helps you get through superior shield regen. Keep in mind you can have multiple weapon systems on a turret, the ai doesn't mind.

Here are a few examples of mine:

Spoiler: Example Turrets

This is a medium/small size anti-fighter turret that also uses can/beam @15k dps.

The % of slave systems is staggered so they all have different reload times, which makes the turret gradually space out it's shots, while keeping most of the range and projectile speed advantage from can/beam, might be useful for your own turret.

Another one i made is this inline turret for an armor tanked ship:

These are 150k base dps turrets intended for close range ship to ship fighting, against targets of similar or higher mass. They total 200k DPS from having ion effect on 1/3rd the weapon systems, and the remaining 100k dps is split across 4 groups of can/beam/explosive guns doing 100k damage each per shot, also staggered like the anti fighter turret.

These were designed primarily for survivability since armor tankers tend to lose turrets extremely quickly. The entire boxy section of the ship below the turret head is actually the base, with the turret sticking deep into it:

This allows both turret dockers to be located right in the middle of the ship, and covered in at least 5 layers of advanced armor and another 15 of regular hull. Also gives turrets nearly universal coverage, with only the ships rear not being covered by turret fire, which makes the ship really dangerous when knife fighting, since it's really hard to avoid being in it's firing arcs.

My point being you should consider what kind of tactics you want your ship built for, and what targets the turret needs to engage.

 

[KiloZulu]

Got a few red flags from your description, and would like to make sure you aren't running into any big errors, so please give more information about your turret:

• If it's really just 2 bullets @184k damage that's a really bad setup for two reasons: Your punchthrough effect is basically worse than no effect because it reduces the amount of damage that goes into armor. Your bullet damage is broken down into several hits of fixed damage, like 10.000 for the first, then 9000, etc (not accurate numbers) but when you hit an advanced armor block for 10.000 damage, the damage is split between the block and the armor HP with 25% damage going into the block's HP and 75% going to the armor HP pool. Since Punchthrough reduces armor absorbtion by 25%, it's instead 50% damage to block HP and 50% to HP pool, but there's no benefit to dealing more damage to the block than it's HP, 250, so you're just overshooting the block more and reducing the damage you're doing to the armor HP pool. Punchthrough is for much smaller weapons with many projectiles that have trouble penetrating armor, not massive slugs like yours. Consider switching to explosive effect instead and you'll do 4-5x as much damage.
• Cannons and beams are extremely poor at inflicting massive shock damage when turreted, because the ai focusses it's damage into a single point, making you overshoot all the time. Split your damage into multiple outputs (You can have multiple computers, one for each output, to avoid the increase in power consumption) Even with explosive effect your bullets should not exceed 100k damage (probably not 50k either, don't remember optimal number of the top of my head)

But that's just general advice for turrets that are typically decent, if your turrets are supposed to be the main focus of your ship, you should consider what tactics your ship is built to use, and most importantly, what kind of target the turret is supposed to shoot at.

A turret shooting at huge ships should have very high penetration (100-200 blocks) to make it into the juicy bits, while fighter defense turrets are just wasting damage that way. You want to hit hard enough to get into control systems and dockers for what you're shooting at, without going clean through the ship. Punch-through and ion effect are great at dealing with larger targets, because punch-through will cripple your target faster, but is a slower killer than explosive effect, while ion helps you get through superior shield regen. Keep in mind you can have multiple weapon systems on a turret, the ai doesn't mind.

My point being you should consider what kind of tactics you want your ship built for, and what targets the turret needs to engage.

Thanks for the insights, Raisinbat. This turret is meant to deal damage at extreme-range to large ships. The high damage is meant to hurt shields when they hit, and hopefully provide sustainable damage to overcome shield recharge. The punch-through is meant to core the ship with every hit and hopefully disrupt systems. My ships typically have multiple turrets to cope with different sized ships and different ranges, and this one will be no different. It will have several turrets that open fire at medium ranges and are better for dealing with smaller ships and fighters (missiles and rapid-fire cannons.) There will also be missile defense.

I would consider the ship I'm building to be a "cruiser" based on my limited experience on public servers. It wouldn't survive in sustained combat with a titan, so its only hope is to either get a "critical hit" or punch the shark in the nose before it bites (if it has to fight at all.)