The thing is it didn't. Acid loses to output spam in pure block damage. If not for armour it would not be worth it to use big guns most of the time. Mostly it comes down to the time it takes for the acid to apply which is not exactly zero and couldn't be. But there are also pretty big losses. Sometimes up to 3/4 of damage could go out the window. Though most of the time it is around 30%. As in 700k damage will destroy 450-500 mass.
Guns that kill 1-10 blocks per shot work much better if you want just to destroy a ship block by block. Armour stops that. There is no difference between 40 fighters per 4k mass of the ship and a 50k ships with 400+ outputs. And due to the same creative nature of the game there is no way to work around this. Either we allow armour to be armour and stop small guns fire or we will need supercomputers to calculate all the shots.
In past versions of the game (as well as real life) small craft thrived due to pretty heavy weapon lead over defences. Unless defences were done by someone who really did go all in into engineering part - like PVPers. After the weapon update it was even worse with most defensive features being severely outclassed. Thus allowing for small craft to deal good damage.
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Currently mini-drones will need a lot of work to make them, well, work. Though they do still have a hefty advantage over large ships in how much energy they can put to their weapons due to thrust curve. As in 50k in drones will have more percentage of reactor allocated to the guns than a single 50k ship (unless this ship is really, really slow or has no defences to speak of).
I may suggest to try and mix CC or maybe BM (i think it should work with AI) fighters for large DPS to bring down shields with a small contingent of bombers armed with MB (1 beam block for lock on) or full 100% MB launched later in the fight after shields were dropped.
EDIT: But yeah, the scale is a little too small for missiles to be able to work properly destroying good chunks of armour.
Regarding Acid Damage vs output spam: My tests with acid damage have shown that (like missiles) if you fire a single weapon and it pierces the armor, you break through and cause a "crater" on your target depending on how powerful the weapon is and how much of the radius encompasses nearby blocks. I don't recall ever losing damage unless...
- firing multiple projectiles at the same spot on a target. Much like missiles, the acid/explosions will hit empty space; wasting damage.
- striking an isolated block with few blocks near enough to receive acid damage.
- crossing sectors... (face palms)
I agree with everything you've said about "waffling",
with regard to builds above a certain size threshold. But I'm not building 50K mass ships, ships with 5m advanced armor or anything large enough to throw
effective "waffle" damage.
Considering that my above ship is 4400 mass (basic hull) and actually has it's own fighter bay, your idea of "small" is undoubtedly different than mine.
In any case, I've been working on this on my end to try and find a solution. I've made some interesting combinations but to be honest, I'm starting to wonder if maybe large and small build styles are simply incompatible with one another. This size issue is part of the reason I never came back to multiplayer (especially after the release of power 2.0). I'm not interested in playing a game where
every ship I encounter outguns me by more than 10:1 due to sheer size alone.
Like I said, I'm not telling anyone here how to play the game. I just want to be able to enjoy the game in single player and those few servers that encourage smaller builds.
Dr. Whammy I think that the issue might just be your drones. Mine have no problem taking out ships if the total mass is equivalent... I haven't tested them against targets with lots of armor, will do that tomorrow. Against targets with 1-2 layers of armor they work fine though.
I also did a bunch of tests with different weapons, will also post the results soon.
I don't think the problem is their mass; but more so the fact that the escort has a reactor capacity 70 times greater than the fighters.
Your mass can be increased via armor, docked entities or excessive decorations; as is the case with my partial RP interior and chamber effects.
To give my escort better survivability, I over-sized my reactor to over 1400 blocks, adjusted its reactor alignments, gave it full stabilization and built for a 2:1 shield capacity/regen ratio. The fighters have 20 reactor blocks, with adjusted reactor alignments and full stability. As it stands now, they simply don't have enough output to drop the escort's shields due to their size.
I'll admit; I
am building for aesthetics as well as combat effectiveness. With that having been said, I'd be interested to see the specs of your fighters if you don't mind sharing.