It did not, I was firing at a 1000m thick plate of standard armor in order to maximize efficiency for both weapons by making sure there would be no overpenetration. And while its true that an alpha weapon is meant for 'massive upfront damage' rather than DPS it fails at even that because despite a 16 seconds reload the C/P is only doing as much block damage as 2.3 seconds of fire from a C/C array of the same size.
Do you think it has to do with the armor HP mechanic? If so, that thing may have screwed up the damage on things even more than I thought.
No its a mechanic schema added shortly after the weapon update to prevent cannons causing massive amounts of block calculations. Essentially the amount of damage left in the projectile is automatically decreased for every block hit, the more blocks hit by a single projectile the more of its damage is wasted in this way, thus all cannons and beams are on a decreasing curve where higher damage weapons are increasingly inefficient. This is why metaguns are so ungodly in power at large scales, they split up the projectile into multiple small projectiles thus circumventing the increasingly massive damage penalty applied to single projectiles.
So that's what happened? I had thought about the calculation issue before but didn't want to assume. So if I understand correctly, what you're saying is that Schine used a mathematical shortcut to reduce lag and this automatic damage reduction is the side effect? If this is true, then virtually all bigger guns are at a disadvantage not only in DPS but in overall damage output as well. That would explain the numbers Napther provided earlier.
DAMMIT SCHINE!!!
Missiles are optimal at around 400k damage apiece and do not suffer from the same decreasing curve penalty as cannons and beams. Additionally waffled alpha weapons fired by AI or logic (to circumvent the power penalty) can avoid the damage penalty by splitting that big inneficient projectile into many small ones.DAMMIT SCHINE!!!
First missiles. Now this. Way to promote creativity guys.
So in theory, would you say a good combat loadout would be an alpha weapon to kill shields and a machine gun to keep the pressure on and cut through the hull? Are missiles even worth while anymore?
That sounds very promising.
On topic!? Herresy!
Missiles are funny. I LOVE missiles but their inter-sector performance is questionable and their damage is never consistent. Tactics-wise (Not raw DPS) I've had far better results with either C/C or C/B.
So you mean a 3+ meter-wide hole instead of a 1 meter-wide hole? It would be like the current explosion effect only potentially wider.
Actually, a properly scaling explosive effect might be better (more flexible, anyway) than directly scaling projectiles based on damage or group size. This way we could still engineer gauss cannon style weapons that rip holes right through a ship even several hundred meters long, or take the same weapon, add 75% explosive and see a larger projectile that hits with a 5 or 10 meter radius of damage in exchange for reduced penetration. Basically what it seems like Schine wants to do with explosive anyway. Some very small degree of scaling from size/dmg could be OK too, but they'd have to keep it super small otherwise people will go put 100,000 cannon modules on their ship for a projectile with a radius of like 50m or something.
50 meters is too extreme for my tastes. Damage pulse secondaries may need a buff but there's no need to get crazy. I was thinking of something more like this...
