Ships & Modules

Let's strip everything out that enhances a missile and just look at the raw stats.

Focusing on Heavy Missiles, you have Furies, Standard and Precision.
Base stats are
Furies EV 97 ER 215 D 192
Standard EV 81 ER 125 D 150
Precision EV 87 ER 112 D 130

Simply looking at that furies should deal more damage that anything else.

Now lets give ourselves a target:
cruiser with speed 175 and signature radius of 145
battleship with speed 94 and signature radius of 460

The standard rules with missles is:
EV > speed to deal max damage
ER < signature radius to deal max damage

And lets use a really simple boiled down formula:
Damage = D * EV/speed * Sig/ER where EV/speed and Sig/ER cannot be grater than 1

We get the following damage on a cruiser
Furies 72 37%
Standard 67 45%
Precision 65 50%

And on the battleship
Furies 192 100%
Standard 129 86%
Precision 120 93%

The first number is the amount of damage dealt to the target with the effectiveness of the damage. Although heavy missiles are aimed at being anti-cruiser weapons a FURY missile used against a cruiser is much less effective than STANDARD or PRECISION missile used. It should still do the most damage but most of that damage is wasted. Think about having a smaller circle inside a larger circle and how much area is not occupied by the smaller circle.

However the FURY missile used against a battleship is much more effective than STANDARD or PRECISION missile used.

Therefore as a rule of thumb FURY missiles should be used against targets one size larger than yourself.

The aim is to get both EV/speed & Sig/ER as high as possible. This is because if EV/speed or Sig/ER is low your damage is reduced drastically but both EV/Speed or Sig/ER is capped as they cannot be more than 100% effective.

If you're using cruise missiles and don't use Rigor rigs you're doing it wrong. RNI decently fitted is just a rat murderer but fragile against small targets like assault web/scram rats, that's why they have a decent drone bay.

Even in pvp regular Raven in good conditions will murder everything decently tackled and has more than enough tank to let logis do their job. Few fly them because those are stupidly slow and have almost capital sign radius but when it comes to pure dps there's nothing to be ashamed of using cruise ravens.

Actually it might be a matter of perception or dmg formula "buggy" but after testing both applied dps was higher with rigors than "can't name rig for velocity explosion" (meh)
On paper yes, seems interesting for battleship sized ships.

1. You're only using one target painter.
2. You're probably using a ship without target painter bonuses.
3. You don't have guided missile precision at five.
4. You are using +5% implants for missiles, right?

I just use tech 1's it pissed me off that the higher damage missiles did less damage. So I just decided to use the cheapest.

Heavy Precisions are only good against drones, right? I get a better perfonce against sleepers frigs with t1, using painters of course

But the cost difference vs performance really doesn't make them a choice for pve. Pvp, like always, is another story.

This