Hi,
There\'s a few different ranges to consider.
The first (shortest) is the render distance. This depends on how you\'ve configured your client (which probably depends on how well your video card can handle StarMade). Anything beyond this isn\'t drawn.
The second is the radar range. For anything between the render distance and radar range, you can still fight and target using the radar\'s \"targetting diamond\" even though the ship/target isn\'t drawn. Radar range is about 2.5 km. For manually controlled AMC, anything beyond that is a waste of time.
Bobby AI is different - the AI is done on the server and not on the client, so things like render distance and radar range aren\'t relevant. What is relevant is how many nearby sectors the game loads (if something isn\'t in the server\'s memory then the AI can\'t/won\'t target it). I think the server tries to keep a \"4 sector square\" cube in memory with a player in the middle. This would mean that, depending on where it is in the \"middle sector\" and which angle, bobby AI might be able to hit something that is up to 4.5 km away (e.g. a diagonal line from bobby AI to the furtherst corner of the \"4 sector square\" cube calculated using pythagoras\' theorem).
However; if the target is another player, then there\'d be a \"4 sector square\" cube where you are and another \"4 sector square\" cube where the target is; effectively doubling the max. range bobby AI can use (4.5 km near you, plus 4.5 km near the target). That gives a (relatively unlikely) maximum range of about 9 km.
However (part 2)! What if there were a line of players between your bobby AI and the target? In this case, it may or may not be possible for bobby AI to hit something much further away. For example, imagine 100 players spaced 3 km apart, creating an unbroken \"line of loaded sectors\" reaching from bobby AI to a target 300 km away...
However (part 3)! I\'m not actually sure if the sectors inbetween actually need to be loaded. It\'s potentially possible that bobby AI can hit a player 300 km away without any players in between, just by hoping that nothing in sectors that aren\'t loaded will get in the line of fire.
Mostly what I\'m saying is that I don\'t know. I have seen turrets attack things 4 km away though (they miss the target a lot more at that range). Of course this is probably \"bad (tm)\" - it means people flying through empty space can be killed by turrets they have no hope of seeing (and might increase server load); so I\'d recommend restricting your bobby AI (e.g. turret AMCs) to not more than 3 km range.
A better idea would be to spend points on speed (because more speed reduces the amount of time that the target has to evade) or on reload or damage (more DPS).
