This is a pretty funny: I’m here since 2009, but …
I see my drones (mediums, used from Gila) missing their targets including battleships.
Yes, I understand there’s mechanics of shooting. However…
Imagining cruiser-sized vehicle (medium drone) missing a battleship-sized hull when the drone is already orbiting?
And now, It’s not a complaint but a theory.
What if at the same server tick my drone actually hit the target, but the target used repair? Thus having by the end the same/more HP that at the start of the tick? And the server simply reports this as a drone miss? Could it be possible?
Sounds unlikely. Why would a drone miss be reported if the drone had hit? Surely drone misses aren’t logged based on the hitpoints of the target, but on the miss/hit status of that attack.
I heard that drones can have trouble hitting if their speed is too high for their tracking speed, either through navigation modules or because their microwarp drive is still on which they can use to move to the next target. Maybe that’s what happened against those battleships? Drones were orbitting a big easy target too fast and missed because of that?
Also hit mechanics still have a rather large random component. It’s always possible your weapons hit when they have a large chance to miss, or miss when they have a large chance to hit.
Yeah the tracking is funny. I got graze on a shuttle approaching me on sort of direct line while stationary at 24km when my optimal is 21 and fall off 29 (thrasher with long range ammo). I have quite good tracking as I use two tracking rigs and long range ammo, but I was boosted by 3 faction tracking speed remote boosters as well.
But even more stupid was getting very low damage Grazes hit on a stationary shuttle (landed on a instadock bm and afked) while being stationary myself at 15km with same ship.
No. You would see the target in lock losing no HP, but still getting a hit-message (you can check these in your log).
However, as you said yourself: Misses can always happen randomly even if a drone is already in orbit of a Battleship sized target. If the target moves “south” and the orbit of the drone is at one moment in the direction “north”, the transversal can still be pretty high, resulting in a lower hit chance in the tracking formula. Also it can be that the drone gets out of it’s optimal range for a few seconds at the peak of it’s orbit that is at the exact opposite direction where the target is moving to. And since drones have a very low falloff-range, you might see 1-2 misses before they catch up again to their target.
I especially notice this in the Abyss, where some advanced battleships can go 300, 400, or 500m/s - or even a lot faster when entering a tachycon cloud.
So, while pretty rare, yes, even medium drones can occasionally miss a battleship. Note: they can also occasionally do “penetratiing”, “smashing” and “wrecking” hits, which offsets their rare misses on average quite well.
Thanks for the replies!
I guess I haven’t payed attention to this before because I have maxed out skills for drones. But now I’m playing Alpha. And suddenly I see everything is slooow and I can see a lot of details
This can happen when you have very poor drone skills and the battleship target is flying too fast. When a drone is orbiting in the opposite direction at maximum transversal velocity, it will not only push its tracking speed limits but can also end up out of optimal range at the moment it starts flying in the same direction as its target.
I’ve noticed this behavior with fast-flying Drifter battleships and cruisers.
