PvP Anti-Player Research

[StarWars1981]

So ... you're saying build a stick out 65km from the ship/station, build the ACTUAL ship guts ... and then delete 65km of STICK??? Ok, that's just unreasonable.
I'll stick with creating a ship designed to foil as many weapons systems as possible, while utilizing as many systems as possible to cause damage.

 

[Dire Venom]

Is explosive useful as an effect vs medium to large ships:? In what situations might you use/not use it :?

 

[Neoclad]

Anyone noticed that overdrive effect does not add up to block count of weapons? This makes it almost useless.

To be more precise, it does not add up to total block count when calculating damage. However, it does add up to block count when calculating power consumption.

 

[Matt_Bradock]

Overdrive does increase the actual damage, just weirld ynot showing in the stats. Will not increase block penetration. You can test the damage curve by shooting your overdrive gun at a shield target within the damage display range.

best use of overdrive is on small rapidfire beam or cannon setups like small turrets, that have plenty of power (coming from the main ship), to bump up the damage per shot so they can at least oneshot normal hull or system blocks, while still keeping a relatively low block count.

 

[nulitor]

Will not making a stick of 65km make the ship turn horribly slow and off center?

 

[Scypio]

Is explosive useful as an effect vs medium to large ships:? In what situations might you use/not use it :?

Yes, it depends.

On missile they're good as they increase the blast radius and will make much more damage to your ship if the weapon is strong enough. If the shield is down, ofc.
On cannons they're good to take out a lot of blocs in one shot and try to snipe auxiliary power on medium vessels. Also consider using punch-trough effect for that, depends on your weapon size and your second system auxiliary. Personnally i would use several barrels and punch-trough effect rather than explosive.

 

[AtraUnam]

Explosive can greatly decrease armor penetration but once it reaches systems its the second most efficient block killer after pierce; though unlike pierce it damages shields and doesn't overpen anywhere near as easily.

 

[Neoclad]

Overdrive does increase the actual damage, just weirld ynot showing in the stats. Will not increase block penetration. You can test the damage curve by shooting your overdrive gun at a shield target within the damage display range.

best use of overdrive is on small rapidfire beam or cannon setups like small turrets, that have plenty of power (coming from the main ship), to bump up the damage per shot so they can at least oneshot normal hull or system blocks, while still keeping a relatively low block count.

Ok Just tested again and calculations are ok, I must be stupid.

 

[nulitor]

Is 4 500 000 dps sufficient on a 500k ship?
I have no idea which kind of stats a 500k ship(in the servers in which I go) should have since most people who share 500k ship blueprints just make an awesome looking hull then place a huge cube of regular powergen and then put a huge cube of power storage and then put a bunch of other vital systems.
Anyway I think I am better off making 500 badly made 1k drones and then ordering them to go where I want them to be rather than using a badly made 500k ship

 

[MrFURB]

That's a rather open ended question nulitor due to the huge amount of variables. Raw numbers could put your weapons at a very wide range of effectiveness based on how your weapons are designed and what your opponent(s) bring to the fight. Ideally you will want to be able to overheat a copy of yourself (assuming good defenses) in less than three minutes of effective fire.

A good way to test the weapons of your vessel is to test them against a copy of your vessel, or an approximated enemy. I find most armor tanks at capital ship sizes are willing to devote between 30 and 100 layers of advanced armor for forward protection (+ punch/pierce passives) which usually includes some form of spaced armor to aid against missiles and might have some sloping to further increase the thickness from certain angles.
Making a test platform of advanced armor + passives is a good idea. Make sure that your weapons will either reliably punch straight through with damage left over, or can quickly shred the Armor HP bar of the enemy.

Shields are easier. I, erm, guesstimate that the average shield capacity of a shield tanked ship is somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 effective shield capacity per mass, which translates to a 500k shield tank having somewhere in the range of 150m shields to burn through. That's quite a bit, over 30% of the ship's mass devoted to shields, so if you build to that goal you should have no problem tearing down shield tanks whether they be focused on regen or capacity.

 

[StormWing0]

This thread may be old but it still has it's uses given the new systems coming into the game. It might help with figuring out a ton of things down the road.

 

[Az14el]

Is 4 500 000 dps sufficient on a 500k ship?

I say double it to be "reliable" for its mass (20;1 dps;mass, assuming accurate weapons), but if this is predominately missile-beam alpha then it's plenty threatening to most vessels you'll see it's own size as is, 10;1 not gonna do well against larger ships if they have remotely decent shields & mobility, good punching range above my own weight is important to me as a normally solo player but maybe not if you have a more organised faction or larger selection of ships at your disposal, could make use of more defensive ships & mobility/teamwork based tactics then which can be terribly effective.

 

[StormWing0]

Isn't there a DPS (Damage Per Shot/Tick) chart for all weapon combos floating around? Been wondering what the min value for each weapon combo is to break a fully protected armor block?

 

[Calhoun]

Isn't there a DPS (Damage Per Shot/Tick) chart for all weapon combos floating around? Been wondering what the min value for each weapon combo is to break a fully protected armor block?

For cannons and missiles it's simply DPS multiplied by recharge rate. Beams are weird because they do their damage in an odd tick rate thing.

 

[Matt_Bradock]

Anyway I think I am better off making 500 badly made 1k drones and then ordering them to go where I want them to be rather than using a badly made 500k ship

For the sake of maximized power efficiency, 50 well made 10K drones would be your best bet, as that's around the biggest size you can get away with without using too much space for reactors/aux power.

But for a 500K ship, I pretty much agree with MrFURB on defense, but also on the fact it's not the raw DPS, it's which setup it is on, and which approach to a fight do you prefer. Obviously, if you're a close quarters guy, beam/cannon and cannon/cannon is your friend.

Cannon has a good hit detection and better range than beam, but requires you to lead your shots - if your server has greatly increased sector sizes and your enemy tries to keep at range, that might prove to be a problem even for a 500K mass range ship. However, if you close the distance, wapid fire cannons can shred an enemy with good efficiency.

Beam is easier to aim but has problem with long-range hit detection and hit detection across sector borders or between main and docked entities. Docked armor, especially with defensive effects, makes beam-based weapons drop off in efficiency, and you'll never be able to deliver your full DPS unless you almost ram your ship into the enemy's. Lag makes this even worse (and capital combat causes quite a lot of it) However, if the stars align just right, and you have the right setups, you can deal a lot of damage with them. I personally recommend 4-5 beam/beam/ion setups to strip the enemy of their shielding. Due to beam slave's increased range and high alpha, you don't ened a lot of blocks to deal a lot of burst, and having 4-5 of these on your ship means you can fire one every couple seconds, giving you a good versatility and preventing overkill.

My usual tactic is not having to rely on a single weapon setup; simply because you can't expect to know your enemy. A pure beam setup will perform extremely poor against an armor tank with defensive effects, a pure cannon setup will fail against a mobile enemy that can keep a distance and make leading your shots extremely hard, and a pure missile setup will fail against an ioned up shield tank with some docked spaced armor and a decent point defense grid, due to them being able to kick the shield recharge in between 2 volleys of missiles.

In addition, the weapon setups can be classified by multiple attributes.
Alpha-DPS
Shield removal-armor removal-sysblock removal
Depending on what you want from your guns, you need to take different approaches. For example, Explosive effect on a grid of outputs of a Beam/Cannon is great for block removal but it really sucks as long as the enemy still has armor remaining.
Cannon/punch shreds armor well, but once armor is gone, the projectiles might just go through the ship and lose the remaining damage potential.
Beam/Beam performs excellent against shields if you use ion effect and single outputs, or against unarmored blocks with Explosive and multiple outputs.
Missile/cannon can be great for block removal, but falls off against shields and heavy armor, and requires you to get close to actually land your shots. Can be used to gut a ship once you puched through the shields and layers of armor, provided you can ram a few missiles down the hole you cracked open.
Missile/Beam used to be the jack of all trades and still is huge in capital ship combat. Current longest ranged weapon in the game (with full Beam support) and delivers great alpha damage against both shields, armor and systems due to Piercing or Punch effect not causing damage penalty on shields. The fact that Beam slave missiles also are the fastest missiles, helps against enemy anti-missile turrets. These kinds of guided missiles are best used on large missile turrets (like on Vaygr's feared Despoiler) to abuse AI getting an instant lock on the target opposed to the player's lock-on timer, and don't require you to turn your entire ship to face the enemy. Best paired with multiple beam/beam setups to keep the enemy under fire between missile volleys and not let them recharge their shields, while still keeping at range to make returning fire more difficult. Also, using small missile/cannon or few block missile/beam setups set to the same range will help to occupy enemy point defense and ensure your payload is delivered.

So, 4.5 million DPS can be more than enough, and can be way too little, it all hangs on what weapon setups you put it into.

 

[Scypio]

Isn't there a DPS (Damage Per Shot/Tick) chart for all weapon combos floating around? Been wondering what the min value for each weapon combo is to break a fully protected armor block?

Ask AtraUnam she has a small chart with most used combos.
There is also excel sheets with formulas to play with on the dock.