The 200mm is the best of all trades. It’s boring. Or rather, there is potential for interesting variation being wasted.
200mm has highest dps, highest range, and figuring that out is basically all there is to them.
200mm dmg mod/rate of fire = 0.77
150mm dmg mod/rate of fire = 0.73
125mm dmg mod/rate of fire = 0.68
There are only two significant differences: one is the powergrid, but that’s never a constraining issue, all ships can fit maximum number of turrets with plenty of powergrid to spare.
A slasher will spend 10% of it’s powergrid on 200mms, a thrasher will spend 33%. Unless you want to do something absolutely nuts and ineffective like oversized tanking your destroyer, this is meaningless.
The other one is tracking. And you might think this turns out to be a significant difference. Not so.
Range difference is 100m for the optimal ranges. With frigate targets you presumably want to hit, you would have to have a reaction time of 0.03 seconds to effectively exploit this. Even if you’re a pvp god and we account for “not burning straigt at you” and we multiply it by 10, this will still only amount to 0.3 seconds, still well in the range of latency and other shenanigans.
My main point is that if “tracking” is supposed to be the differentiating feature with these, these curves are too close.
This is chance to hit over distance to target, for a 25m sig at 3000m/s assuming a perfect orbit. (stiletto has a base sig of 31m)
Same sig, at 1000m/s
They are basically the same. Hitting, or not hitting, is not significantly influenced by the choice of turret.
It’s never 100% anyway and the biggest difference works out to about 10%. That’s not a strength or weakness anyone can exploit, not when fitting them and not when trying to outplay them.
Tracking and powergrid requirements are constant across meta variations as well:
tl;dr: small autocannons are basically the same.
Here is what I would like to see done about this:
First of all, keep the 200mm where it’s at. Current meta is a good baseline.
What I would like to see for the 125mm and 150mm is significant variation of optimal and falloff ranges and/or tracking.
Mostly because I discovered that varying ammo on the 200mms has basically no effect except for damage type, because the base range values are so low.
The 125mm could be significantly better at tracking, like a base value of 1000 or 1500.
The 150mm could have significantly better optimal range, to give meaningful choice for using different ammo types affecting range. Right now the effective difference is like 500m.
In short: keep 200mm as highest dps, 125mm good for tracking, 150mm good for variety.
E.g. the graph below.
It shows 3000m/s 25m sig as a before
1000 tracking for 125mm (600 optimal 4300 falloff, as before)
4000m optimal for the 150mm (320 tracking, 5000 fallofff)
200mm unchanged, but would have 10-15% more dps than the others.
The current variation for “base” vs. “Fusion S” with the 200mm is a 1200m optimal, 7200 falloff or 600m optimal 6600m falloff.
The new variation for the 150mm would be 4000m/5000m unbonused, 2000m/3000m with fusion reducing range by 50% and 6400m/7400m with carb lead, giving the 60% bonus range.
For comparison, here is another picture comparing these from above to lasers and blasters.
I can share the code if needed.
Anything grossly wrong about my math/assumptions, please point it out.
Thanks for reading.
