Missile Damage?

[Winterhome]

So, I got bored and decided to try to figure out how the heck missile damage works.

200 x 100-block BB missiles dealt roughly in the vicinity of 665,000 damage (didn't bother trying to calculate the actual amount since regen threw that off quickly. This works out to around 3225 damage per missile.

100 x 1000-block BB missiles dealt around 750,000 damage, according to my co-tester, Puck. This works out to roughly 7500 per missile, of course. (just checked the actual math, make that 7687)

It seems that when missiles DO damage to shields, the formula for Seeking missiles (KB and BB) is Damage*Radius/2 or some such. I want to say that I've heard that d1000s have double the stats in weapons comps, so they might just be Dam*Radius.


Of course, I've been unsuccessful in determining what the requirements are for missiles to do damage in the first place. I would not be surprised if a combined missile strike needs to do a certain percentage of your shield capacity in damage with one shot to break through and do more than one damage per missile (not a graphical bug - I've been getting shot by AI while staring at the shield counter in build mode for two hours here).

At first I was thinking that it had to break past the shield regen rate, but that's obviously not the case, since a target with 3 million shields has around 52k regen, and a 56k damage (according to formula) strike (consisting of 126 groups of 5 BB missiles) caused... Dun dun DUN, 126 damage total. Not 126k. 126.

Anyone else able to figure out what the qualifiers for actually damaging shields are? I'm thinking that it could be determined by using two differently sized targets, then gradually increasing the amount of theoretical damage the missiles are doing (ie: adding more missiles) until the person sitting in the target starts seeing damage in the thousands instead of hundreds, and following up by comparing the numbers, getting the proportions, etc. I'd do it myself, but I'm short on time.

 

[Lt_Duckweed]

I don't know how they shields vs missiles work, but I do know that in large numbers, d1000's can be frightening. I've made launchers that can chew trough 1.5 million shields and then the entire ship and out the other side, in one volley. My strategy is a couple hundred 10x10x10 cubes of d1000's.

 

[Unnamed25]

I don't know how they shields vs missiles work, but I do know that in large numbers, d1000's can be frightening. I've made launchers that can chew trough 1.5 million shields and then the entire ship and out the other side, in one volley. My strategy is a couple hundred 10x10x10 cubes of d1000's.

The hard thing is to aim them to a moving target and them hitting.

 

[Lt_Duckweed]

The hard thing is to aim them to a moving target and them hitting.

Very true, I usually try and hit capitals or planets. Plus they are good for scaring the living s**t out of a fighter pilot.

 

[Winterhome]

Very true, I usually try and hit capitals or planets. Plus they are good for scaring the living s**t out of a fighter pilot.

A KB spam a day keeps the fighters away.

 

[Lt_Duckweed]

A KB spam a day keeps the fighters away.

Then loops around and crashes into my turrets. :/

 

[Winterhome]

Then loops around and crashes into my turrets. :/

Faction blocks, mate. :P

 

[ltmauve]

Faction blocks don't work for KBs anymore. I found that when they missed the target right in front of them (which they often did) they would proceed to ignore all hostile targets and hit a turret on my home base. I removed them from my fighter after that

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

I remember hearing in the recent Q&A that the nerf to missiles was due to their damage against shields increasing with radius. Dialing up the radius would increase damage more than it was decreased by dialing down the damage per shot (because when you increase radius, area goes up by pi*r^2...that's O(n^2) scaling, so it'll always eventually beat a linear counteracting factor). As a result, missiles would utterly annihilate shields and thus were severely lowered in shield damage.

 

[Winterhome]

I remember hearing in the recent Q&A that the nerf to missiles was due to their damage against shields increasing with radius. Dialing up the radius would increase damage more than it was decreased by dialing down the damage per shot (because when you increase radius, area goes up by pi*r^2...that's O(n^2) scaling, so it'll always eventually beat a linear counteracting factor). As a result, missiles would utterly annihilate shields and thus were severely lowered in shield damage.

I seem to remember that missiles previously didn't account for radius or volume in their shield breaking attempts, and were just doing the listed damage on the computer. Perhaps the "nerf" schema was referring to was that multiple missiles were capable of penetrating shields simply by hitting in rapid sequence, or that we got damage*radius instead of damage*volume.

Or perhaps schema was referring to the nerf to missile radius? It used to be gigantic. Missiles that currently leave a 10x10 crater used to leave 20x20 or more, and the scaling simply kept going up much, much higher as the missiles got bigger.

With a 1,000 block missile, I'm pretty sure that the rough potential for total block damage is somewhere in the neighborhood of 15,000,000 against an unshielded target (if it hits inside of a one block hole and is surrounded by unarmored blocks completely). Of course, this is ignoring the fact that the majority of the blocks it'd strike are unlikely to have enough HP to take the full missile damage, so the more realistic numbers would just be 100*volume instead of damage*volume or some such (so maybe 3mil instead of 15mil)