Let’s say I’m trying to not waste missiles so for distant targets I’m manually stopping the launchers before the target goes boom. However I’m way too lazy to do this all the time, so I’m calculating the distance a missile can travel before the launcher cycles. No need to manually stop if the target goes boom before the cycle ends.
Current numbers: 14603 m/s missile speed, 4.05 s launcher cycle time. 4*14.6 is 58.4, so I don’t need to stop the launcher manually if the target is 58 km away or closer. This is visible in practice.
Now as far as I know, everything in Eve happens on 1 second ticks. My question is then: what happens if i bring the cycle time under 4 seconds (can still upgrade an implant)? Do I need to multiply the missile speed by just 3 seconds then?
Anything from 3.01 to 4.00 seconds is still 4 seconds as far as the server is concerned. Only 2.99 seconds and bellow count as 3 seconds. The difference between 3.01 and 4 seconds is only the relative frequency between 3 second and 4 second cycles because some cycles times are rounded down while others are rounded up if the cycle times are not full seconds.
In some cases it does, in many cases it doesn’t. The time after the full second determines which percentage of cycles gets rounded up or down. That’s at least how it works with ship hulls.
So your launcher DOES cycle with 4.05 s. The initial launch is created the tick after the server received the initial activation(on your position with maximum speed towards the target) , and the next cycles will happen 4.05s after this, and create a new launch on the tick after that .
After a while, because your cycle is not 4.0, your cycle will restart just after a tick, and so the delay difference between launch will be not 4 but 5 ticks. That will happen statistically one in 20 launches.
so in order to be sure your missiles hit before the next launch, your target must be closer than 4.0×14603 = 58 km. One on 20 will also hit before the next out of average 20 launches.
If you go to 3.75, then 0.75 = 3/4 launches will be 3.0 tick delay, and 0.25 = 1/4 launches will be 4.0 delay.
Thanks everyone. I upgraded the implant and my cycle time went to 3.97 seconds and indeed the only thing that happened is that my “fire and forget” distance went from ~58 to ~56 km.
