For sake or argument let's assume we are talking about cannons and/or a single weapon. What do you consider to be the minimum amount of acceptable DPS before the weapon starts becoming rather useless?
Minimum DPS for weapons to be useful?
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Raisinbat
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DPS isn't important, what matters is penetration. a 125 dps cannon is perfectly fine if it's can/pul, it can knock a 10+ block hole in whatever it hits, but a 125 dps can/can will accomplish nothing more than changing the texture on a few armor blocks. Keep in mind this is different for all weapons; missiles can be much heavier and still make use of all their damage, and beams deteriorate extremely fast vs armor.
Since explosive effect does 1/6 of it's damage to each adjacent block it remains effective with much higher damage as well.
You shoot at a ship to either kill or disable it; if your bullets aren't strong enough to penetrate armor they're effectively useless at accomplishing this.
Since explosive effect does 1/6 of it's damage to each adjacent block it remains effective with much higher damage as well.
You shoot at a ship to either kill or disable it; if your bullets aren't strong enough to penetrate armor they're effectively useless at accomplishing this.
Not sure I understand. You speak of penetration, are you talking about the ability to destroy blocks or the ability to damage blocks behind the block you hit?
What is the difference between damage and penetration?
Raisinbat
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It's a weapon's ability to destroy blocks compared to how much damage it does.
All weapons split their damage at certain thresholds; a 1000 damage shot splits into 10 if i remember correctly, but then a 10000 damage round only splits into 20, so each "bit" gets larger the bigger the weapon is.
When a bit hits a block the block breaks if the bit is higher than the block's HP, but no damage is carried over, so excess damage just evaporates. A 1.000.000 damage slug will destroy about 30 blocks, but 3 x 2000 damage shots will do the same, so 2k damage shots have great penetration, while a 1.000.000 damage round does not.
A weapon that is too weak for any of it's bits to go through a single armor block is not destroying the ship, and since there's no guarantee it's next shot will hit the same armor block you end up getting nowhere shooting at your target, but a weapon that's too strong ends up wasting >99% of it's damage because blocks have 25-200 HP so those 20.000 damage can only do that much.
All weapons split their damage at certain thresholds; a 1000 damage shot splits into 10 if i remember correctly, but then a 10000 damage round only splits into 20, so each "bit" gets larger the bigger the weapon is.
When a bit hits a block the block breaks if the bit is higher than the block's HP, but no damage is carried over, so excess damage just evaporates. A 1.000.000 damage slug will destroy about 30 blocks, but 3 x 2000 damage shots will do the same, so 2k damage shots have great penetration, while a 1.000.000 damage round does not.
A weapon that is too weak for any of it's bits to go through a single armor block is not destroying the ship, and since there's no guarantee it's next shot will hit the same armor block you end up getting nowhere shooting at your target, but a weapon that's too strong ends up wasting >99% of it's damage because blocks have 25-200 HP so those 20.000 damage can only do that much.
Still not sure I understand. How do you manage damage vs penetration? Is penetration something that you influence with other blocks?
And you said big weapons are useless. So there is no point in making giant cannons?
And you said big weapons are useless. So there is no point in making giant cannons?
Raisinbat
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You need to keep weapons inside "sweet spots" by controlling the damage per projectile, by keeping the size of the weapon appropriate. You said in OP you wanted to talk about single weapons, but you can stack multiple weak weapons behind each other for larger weapons, but there's a 10% power increase per output (so 5 outputs = 150% power usage for weapon). You can get around this by having multiple seperate weapon systems with their own computer controlled by logic or turret ai.
Big SINGLE output weapons are typically useless for destroying ships, but perfectly fine vs shields. You can stack weapons behind each other but if your penetration depth is higher than the length of what you're shooting at it's not a good idea. The game generally doesn't scale weapons up well at all.
Big SINGLE output weapons are typically useless for destroying ships, but perfectly fine vs shields. You can stack weapons behind each other but if your penetration depth is higher than the length of what you're shooting at it's not a good idea. The game generally doesn't scale weapons up well at all.
Dr. Whammy
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Rasinbat is correct that defeating armor should take priority over DPS considerations but there is more to it than that.
I've broken down my explanation in order of priority as applicable to most combat situations.
Priority 1; drop their shields: Before we even have a discussion about armor penetration you need to think about shields. At this stage, DPS often takes priority because you need to be able to inflict damage to the shield at a rate that is faster than the shield recharge rate until their shields fail. Rapid fire tends to cause a slow but constant drain while hard hitting alpha strike weapons tend to take away large portions of a shield at once. Which method you use is a matter of personal preference. If you can't build a weapon that can overcome their recharge rate, your only chance is to destroy their shields with a single hit. In this situation, your weapon of choice will be a cannon/pulse, cannon beam, beam/pulse, beam/beam or some kind of heavy missile. Use the ion effect to increase damage against shields but be aware that effectiveness against armor and systems will be reduced.
Priority 2; penetrate their armor. This is where you need to listen to raisinbat. Due to the new armor HP system, armor is ridiculously strong. I'd recommend skipping rapid fire weapons as an armor counter unless you can do more than 1400 damage per projectile. Reason; despite advanced armor having only 250 block HP, it has an armor value which negates 75% of incoming damage. Take into consideration the fact that armor HP further reduces incoming damage, and you end up having to deal somewhere in the neighborhood of 1350 damage just to destroy one block of advanced armor. If your weapons cant pierce armor in a single hit, you need to shift your focus from DPS to raw damage per shot. Cannons with punch through effect are your best option here. The piercing effect can help bypass armor but you lose effectiveness against shields.
Priority 3; destroy their system blocks to disable the ship. This is where things get tricky. System blocks have very low block HP so destroying them is easy. Unfortunately, most beams and slow fire cannons don't destroy systems at a rate that is fast enough to end a fight quickly unless the weapon is strong enough to penetrate armor but still capable of rapid fire. Missiles are the most devastating anti-system weapon by a wide margin but they fire more slowly than other weapons and tend to do poorly against armor.
I'd highly recommend having a balanced loadout so you can be effective against shields, armor and systems without handicapping yourself against any of the above. If you absolutely must use one single output weapon against a ship; I'd recommend a large rapid fire cannon that can destroy at least one block of advanced armor with every projectile it fires. That way, you can wear down shields, pierce their armor and destroy system blocks at a decent rate.
Be warned; It will be a VERY tough fight...
My ship is on the left. As you can see; I've taken missile impacts as a result of being forced to use only rapid fire cannons to fight the other ship armed with ion beams, cannons and missiles.
However, if you don't want to end up looking like swish cheese...
Once again, I'm on the left. In this match, I had a more balanced armament; a hard hitting, long range cannon and some decent missiles. This fight lasted a fraction of the previous match and I sustained almost no damage. My cannon dropped the opponent's shields with only a few shots then punched straight through the ship from front to back; destroying a lot of its systems and some of it's weapons computers, As Raisinbat predicts, some weapon damage was wasted due to the complete front to back pass-through but scoring some missile hits to key systems allowed for a quick kill.
I've broken down my explanation in order of priority as applicable to most combat situations.
Priority 1; drop their shields: Before we even have a discussion about armor penetration you need to think about shields. At this stage, DPS often takes priority because you need to be able to inflict damage to the shield at a rate that is faster than the shield recharge rate until their shields fail. Rapid fire tends to cause a slow but constant drain while hard hitting alpha strike weapons tend to take away large portions of a shield at once. Which method you use is a matter of personal preference. If you can't build a weapon that can overcome their recharge rate, your only chance is to destroy their shields with a single hit. In this situation, your weapon of choice will be a cannon/pulse, cannon beam, beam/pulse, beam/beam or some kind of heavy missile. Use the ion effect to increase damage against shields but be aware that effectiveness against armor and systems will be reduced.
Priority 2; penetrate their armor. This is where you need to listen to raisinbat. Due to the new armor HP system, armor is ridiculously strong. I'd recommend skipping rapid fire weapons as an armor counter unless you can do more than 1400 damage per projectile. Reason; despite advanced armor having only 250 block HP, it has an armor value which negates 75% of incoming damage. Take into consideration the fact that armor HP further reduces incoming damage, and you end up having to deal somewhere in the neighborhood of 1350 damage just to destroy one block of advanced armor. If your weapons cant pierce armor in a single hit, you need to shift your focus from DPS to raw damage per shot. Cannons with punch through effect are your best option here. The piercing effect can help bypass armor but you lose effectiveness against shields.
Priority 3; destroy their system blocks to disable the ship. This is where things get tricky. System blocks have very low block HP so destroying them is easy. Unfortunately, most beams and slow fire cannons don't destroy systems at a rate that is fast enough to end a fight quickly unless the weapon is strong enough to penetrate armor but still capable of rapid fire. Missiles are the most devastating anti-system weapon by a wide margin but they fire more slowly than other weapons and tend to do poorly against armor.
I'd highly recommend having a balanced loadout so you can be effective against shields, armor and systems without handicapping yourself against any of the above. If you absolutely must use one single output weapon against a ship; I'd recommend a large rapid fire cannon that can destroy at least one block of advanced armor with every projectile it fires. That way, you can wear down shields, pierce their armor and destroy system blocks at a decent rate.
Be warned; It will be a VERY tough fight...
My ship is on the left. As you can see; I've taken missile impacts as a result of being forced to use only rapid fire cannons to fight the other ship armed with ion beams, cannons and missiles.
However, if you don't want to end up looking like swish cheese...
Once again, I'm on the left. In this match, I had a more balanced armament; a hard hitting, long range cannon and some decent missiles. This fight lasted a fraction of the previous match and I sustained almost no damage. My cannon dropped the opponent's shields with only a few shots then punched straight through the ship from front to back; destroying a lot of its systems and some of it's weapons computers, As Raisinbat predicts, some weapon damage was wasted due to the complete front to back pass-through but scoring some missile hits to key systems allowed for a quick kill.
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Raisinbat is absolutely correct. DPS is something to consider only academically when comparing the damage output of your ship versus the shield regeneration of a potential opponent. Of far greater concern is meeting certain crucial thresholds necessary to break blocks. The blocks most important to plan to break of course are armor blocks. Any weapon capable of breaking armor blocks will mess up a decent number of system blocks.
Damage thresholds that are useful to keep in mind:
One point of damage is all you need to destroy a missile. Anti-missile turrets are best as 1 cannon slaved to 1 cannon, which will result in 1 damage per hit, ten times a second. (Do not use anything but such cannon for anti-missile defense. Nothing else harms missiles.)
After that, do not build a weapon that doesn't hit for at least 200 damage per shot. 200 is enough to break a couple of system blocks or a single unenhanced (no pierce, punch defensive effect) standard armor block. However 200 is only sufficient to break a standard armor block 'after' it has run out of armor hit point reserves. Prior to that, it will do some block damage to the standard armor block, but insufficient to actually break it. I would consider this to be woefully insufficient.
400 damage is enough to break an unenhanced standard armor block even though it still has armor hit point reserves. This might be sufficient if going up against standard trash NPC ships. They do not typically use advanced armor, nor do they currently use defensive effects like punch or pierce defense. This could conceivably be sufficient per round damage for turrets intended to engage torpedoes and maybe light drones.
1000 damage is sufficient to break an advanced armor block with no armor hit point reserves and no defensive passive effects.
2000 damage is sufficient to break an advanced armor block with no defensive passive effects but that does have armor hit point reserves.
4000 damage is sufficient to break an advanced armor block with both full defensive passive effects working and armor hit point reserves. This is what you should expect a player's ship to be protected by.
If building a small weapon, one might boost this damage to maybe 6000 to give it some carryover damage effect to system blocks beneath the advanced armor block. However if building much larger, one should seriously consider staggering multiple rounds doing 4000 damage each.
My own offensive cannon weapons tend to be staggered arrays of cannon/beam, with each bullet doing 4000 damage. These will punch large and deep holes in heavily armored ships. Versus unarmored ships, these will punch large holes clean through the ship.
I have smaller cannon/cannon turrets which fire 2000 damage bullets 10 times a second for anti-drone defense, given that such drones cannot use defensive passive effects. I work on the assumption that such drones will have a frontal plate of advanced armor. If they don't, I loose a bit of system block penetration by having rounds that large, but if they do have such a frontal plate and I have 'not' gone for 2000 damage, my anti-drone cannon will be quite ineffective.
I never build any cannon smaller.
Missiles are a bit of a grey zone for me. I am far less certain what the optimum warhead strengths are for missiles. I generally make offensive warheads of at least 100K damage, and sometimes will go to as much as 250K, depending upon the size of their explosion radius. You do not want to make missiles too powerful as they can only break blocks within their damage radius. Once all those blocks are gone, doing more damage is completely wasted. It would still hurt shields, but the shields would take the same damage if you split the damage between more warheads, and also punch more holes. Do NOT build 10 million damage missiles. Build more missiles with smaller warheads.
... Ninja'd by Dr. Whammy.
Damage thresholds that are useful to keep in mind:
One point of damage is all you need to destroy a missile. Anti-missile turrets are best as 1 cannon slaved to 1 cannon, which will result in 1 damage per hit, ten times a second. (Do not use anything but such cannon for anti-missile defense. Nothing else harms missiles.)
After that, do not build a weapon that doesn't hit for at least 200 damage per shot. 200 is enough to break a couple of system blocks or a single unenhanced (no pierce, punch defensive effect) standard armor block. However 200 is only sufficient to break a standard armor block 'after' it has run out of armor hit point reserves. Prior to that, it will do some block damage to the standard armor block, but insufficient to actually break it. I would consider this to be woefully insufficient.
400 damage is enough to break an unenhanced standard armor block even though it still has armor hit point reserves. This might be sufficient if going up against standard trash NPC ships. They do not typically use advanced armor, nor do they currently use defensive effects like punch or pierce defense. This could conceivably be sufficient per round damage for turrets intended to engage torpedoes and maybe light drones.
1000 damage is sufficient to break an advanced armor block with no armor hit point reserves and no defensive passive effects.
2000 damage is sufficient to break an advanced armor block with no defensive passive effects but that does have armor hit point reserves.
4000 damage is sufficient to break an advanced armor block with both full defensive passive effects working and armor hit point reserves. This is what you should expect a player's ship to be protected by.
If building a small weapon, one might boost this damage to maybe 6000 to give it some carryover damage effect to system blocks beneath the advanced armor block. However if building much larger, one should seriously consider staggering multiple rounds doing 4000 damage each.
My own offensive cannon weapons tend to be staggered arrays of cannon/beam, with each bullet doing 4000 damage. These will punch large and deep holes in heavily armored ships. Versus unarmored ships, these will punch large holes clean through the ship.
I have smaller cannon/cannon turrets which fire 2000 damage bullets 10 times a second for anti-drone defense, given that such drones cannot use defensive passive effects. I work on the assumption that such drones will have a frontal plate of advanced armor. If they don't, I loose a bit of system block penetration by having rounds that large, but if they do have such a frontal plate and I have 'not' gone for 2000 damage, my anti-drone cannon will be quite ineffective.
I never build any cannon smaller.
Missiles are a bit of a grey zone for me. I am far less certain what the optimum warhead strengths are for missiles. I generally make offensive warheads of at least 100K damage, and sometimes will go to as much as 250K, depending upon the size of their explosion radius. You do not want to make missiles too powerful as they can only break blocks within their damage radius. Once all those blocks are gone, doing more damage is completely wasted. It would still hurt shields, but the shields would take the same damage if you split the damage between more warheads, and also punch more holes. Do NOT build 10 million damage missiles. Build more missiles with smaller warheads.
... Ninja'd by Dr. Whammy.
Edymnion
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Yeah, basically what they're getting at is you should look at "Will one shot break a block?", not raw DPS. A shot that doesn't destroy blocks doesn't really do that much, because the odds of you hitting the same block twice are fairly low.
So, you could say "blocks destroyed per second" is a much better measurement.
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Imagine a given block takes 100 damage to break it.
Now imagine you have a Cannon that does 100 damage per shot and fires every 1 second. It will break a block every single time it hits, and does 100 dps.
Now imagine you have a Cannon/Cannon that does 10 damage per shot, but fires 10 times a second. It will only break a block if it constantly hits the same block 10 times, but its still doing 100 dps.
Against a moving ship, or being fired from a moving ship, you're going to be strafing around, and even at a very high rate of fire you're unlikely to hit the same block all 10 times in a row. Say you hit one block 5 times, and then move over to the next block and hit it 5 times. Other than some armor hp damage, you haven't accomplished anything. The target ship's armor is still holding, none of it's blocks have been broken.
So you want to have it set up so that each shot from your weapon, no matter how fast or slow it is, can destroy one or more blocks hit every single time.
Take this old turret I made:
Punchthrough/Stop Combo Cannon Turret
You can see that the primary weapon on it is a Cannon/Punch Through, and that every shot it fires does 4,000 damage. If you look at Atraunam's chart, you can see against undefended advanced armor that 8740 dpp will break 6 blocks. So half that and you get 4370 damage per shot should break 3 blocks. From my testing, I know each shot of this cannon breaks 2 blocks of advanced armor per shot and almost destroys a third. Which is exactly what you would expect to see from the chart above.
So even against fairly heavily armored targets, I know that it will destroy multiple layers of even the heaviest armor (or if its got full passive defenses up, it will still destroy 1 block entirely and nearly a second).
That should be your goal, figure out what kind of target you expect to be shooting at (if its just pirates, assume standard armor), and make your guns big enough to break at least 1 block of it with every single shot.
So, you could say "blocks destroyed per second" is a much better measurement.
---
Imagine a given block takes 100 damage to break it.
Now imagine you have a Cannon that does 100 damage per shot and fires every 1 second. It will break a block every single time it hits, and does 100 dps.
Now imagine you have a Cannon/Cannon that does 10 damage per shot, but fires 10 times a second. It will only break a block if it constantly hits the same block 10 times, but its still doing 100 dps.
Against a moving ship, or being fired from a moving ship, you're going to be strafing around, and even at a very high rate of fire you're unlikely to hit the same block all 10 times in a row. Say you hit one block 5 times, and then move over to the next block and hit it 5 times. Other than some armor hp damage, you haven't accomplished anything. The target ship's armor is still holding, none of it's blocks have been broken.
So you want to have it set up so that each shot from your weapon, no matter how fast or slow it is, can destroy one or more blocks hit every single time.
Take this old turret I made:
Punchthrough/Stop Combo Cannon Turret
You can see that the primary weapon on it is a Cannon/Punch Through, and that every shot it fires does 4,000 damage. If you look at Atraunam's chart, you can see against undefended advanced armor that 8740 dpp will break 6 blocks. So half that and you get 4370 damage per shot should break 3 blocks. From my testing, I know each shot of this cannon breaks 2 blocks of advanced armor per shot and almost destroys a third. Which is exactly what you would expect to see from the chart above.
So even against fairly heavily armored targets, I know that it will destroy multiple layers of even the heaviest armor (or if its got full passive defenses up, it will still destroy 1 block entirely and nearly a second).
That should be your goal, figure out what kind of target you expect to be shooting at (if its just pirates, assume standard armor), and make your guns big enough to break at least 1 block of it with every single shot.
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what is the damage per projectile that is needed to break an advanced armor block. Should a ships armor stat be at 100% This would be 2000 dpp, and if they include a defensive piercing effect it would be 4000 dpp Panpiper . With no armor buffs just native block stats it should be 1000 dpp as the effective hp of the block is the hp divided by the armor stat. You guys seem to be breaking blocks with much less dpp. The reason I say so is that a 4140 dpp cannon shot does 464.9 damage to the first block because of the native punch through effect AtraUnam . Edymnion your turret does 449.2 damage to the first block. I am very confused on how to calculate this stat and how you guys get these results.
AtraUnam
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I get these results by actually going into the game and shooting targets with incrementally larger guns until I find the exact damage needed to kill a given block.
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Trying to make sure I understand this!
From the above table, it takes 530 damage to break 1 Standard Armour block. So, if I want to create a Cannon which fires 10 rounds per second, for each round to be able to break one Standard Armour block it would need to be constructed from Cannon 1060 blocks? 530 Cannon blocks to do the 530 points of damage, and then 530 slaved Cannon blocks to get the 10 rounds per second firing rate.
Is that right?
From the above table, it takes 530 damage to break 1 Standard Armour block. So, if I want to create a Cannon which fires 10 rounds per second, for each round to be able to break one Standard Armour block it would need to be constructed from Cannon 1060 blocks? 530 Cannon blocks to do the 530 points of damage, and then 530 slaved Cannon blocks to get the 10 rounds per second firing rate.
Is that right?
AtraUnam
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Slaved blocks count towards total damage, so you would need 530 cannon blocks total, imcluding the slave.
AKA 265 cannon blocks and 265 slaved cannon blocks
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Doesn't anyone fly around in non-armor tanks? To save weight and thruster power?
For that matter, don't cannons have inherit punch through?
For that matter, don't cannons have inherit punch through?
Dr. Whammy
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Yes and yes...
Example: my aforementioned Lancer class.
The newest version of this craft has one meter of advanced armor and has just over a 1:1 thrust/mass ratio so, while it's not fast enough to work as an interceptor, it's quick enough to get out of it's own way when in combat.
Its primary weapon fires a single high damage projectile with an explosive effect. The shell does high damage to shields and tears through enemy armor; leaving behind a jagged cavitational effect as it passes through the target's armor and systems. It is overkill for armor but the damage to shields and systems is substantial the gun fires fast enough to keep the shields down long enough for the missiles (or the rest of the task force) to hit.
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Does this still result in a 530 damage projectile? It would seem from the wiki that this gives a 265 damage projectile. Blodge 's firs calculations would be correct as at 100% slave you only gain 1 damage per master block. so you'd need 530 of them to get to the right dpp.
AtraUnam
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Yes this still results in 530 damage per projectile, damage uses the whole weapons size not just hte master.