My understanding of Eve mechanics is sometimes spotty. I know there are knowledgeable people on these forums, though.
I have tried using fury light missiles on the SOE epic arc and they seemed to apply less damage than the regular light missiles, even to cruiser sizes opponents. Today, I tried fury cruise missiles against the final boss in the Amarr Epic Arc - Harkans Behemoth. The fury cruise missiles applied noticeably less damage than the regular cruise missiles. These Tech II missiles have a shorter range and more of a dependence on signature radius than the Tech I missiles - is the signature radius penalty so significant that it cannot apply full damage even to battleships?
I suppose I could check this in Pyfa, but I wouldn’t know where to get the stats for the NPC.
From how I understand it, if your target has a sig radius of say 150, and your missiles have an explision radius of 300 then they will only do 50% of the damage, so essentialy you need an explosion radius the same or less than the target for it to apply properly.
Yes. Basically, to targets of the same size, the effective damage of the missile (before resistances) is ± ED = damage × missile_signature / target_signature.
If you look at the fury damage/missile_sig you’ll notice this ratio is LOWER than the one for eg CN cruise missiles.
Actually some BS NPC are actually not even 100% applied with fury rapid heavy missiles and need one or two guidance computers.
So a good thing is to fit target painters, and/or guidance computer, and/or rigor/flare rigs.
Remember that some named rats are immune to painter ; but otherwise most BS should go down quicker, once painted and with a correct ship, with fury than with CN.
also remember that a few BS have bonus to missile precision : eg raven navy or typhoon. The explosion speed bonus are actually very relevant when shooting BS, but a bit less when shooting cr and smaller because then the signature is more damaging than the speed (yes speed also impacts the formula, but a bit less)
Furies need some help with application. Try some rigs, Rigors/flares, or modules missile guidance computers/enhancers to increase your missiles application, and a target painter to increase the target’s sig. A web or grappler can help but in general you won’t be that close to most targets with a battleship.
if you are going to be shooting a lot of smaller things then faction or precision ammo can help a lot.
I dunno the best way do to stack the buffs these days but a few buffs on each should give pretty good application.
So do a lot of people bother with the T2 cruise missiles? Seems like it would be a lot more straightforward to stick with T1s - especially since both of the T2 variants have reduced ranges.