Warfare & Tactics

So, after much searching, I find lots of conflicting or unclear data on POS combat/defense, maybe some of you all can clear up some questions for me:
- When attacking an online tower array (say, ECM or Neut), the range is based on a) the range from the attacking ship to the tower or b) the range from the attacking ship to the array.
- similarly, when an array is engaging a ship, is the range a) from the tower to the ship or b) from the array to the ship.

- Do native shield resists (+hardeners) only apply to the tower shield (and not the array shields)? Kind of immaterial, I guess, since array shields are tiny with almost no regen.

- To incapacitate a defense array, you need to do at least one point of hull damage? To get it working, do you just need to get the hull back to 100%?

- I know that the defense arrays, if uncontrolled, will lock on to a random target and 'engage'. Aftter a period of time, they unlock and engage another random target. How long do they engage one target before disengaging?

- It appears that crystal type or projectile type only affect types of damage, not range or tracking? Is this correct?

- Three types of projectile (large) ammo do a total of 48 points of damage (EMP, Fusion, and Plasma). The rest either do 32 (Depleted Uranium and Titanium Sabot) or 20 (lead, nuclear, proton). Do these damage amounts still apply to the guns from a tower? If so, the 48 point damage types also have the max damage in EM, Therm, and Explosive, so the only other ammo that might be of use is Tit Sabot, which has the max kinetic damage overall (although it is hard to figure out how the huge non-kinetic damage from the other ammo would not make up any difference).

All I can think of at the moment, thanks for any help.

Batelle knows nothing and I am happy to correct him.

There are no shield resists on POS guns.

The range is calculated from the attacker to the target - regardless of what it is. It is not calculated from the tower itself, to the ship attacking the POS guns.

If numbskull, above, was correct, the farthest guns could shoot you as easily as the nearest guns. In fact, you could shoot the POS guns with impunity, because you could, eg, get a rail Naga with 228km range and sit 228km away from the POS gun and be 270-310km away from the tower and hence be unlockable. This is bullshnitzel.

Eg; you will see people set up many POS's with what I call the bonboniere arrangement - a cluster of guns at the top and a cluster at the bottom (you pull it apart to get the toys and jokes inside, like a christmas cracker, trolololol). People who assault the bonboniere arrangement do so by setting a safespot, eg, 150km above the top gun cluster. On a large tower this means you are in excess of 250km from the bottom cluster.

This, proven millions of times, allows you to halve the theoretical DPS of the tower by being inside the range of the top gun cluster, and outside the range of the bottom gun cluster (assuming you can, yourself, hit out to 150km).

Secondly, does ammo affect POS gun optimals, etc? Answer: yes. This is most clearly shown by fitting different ammo types into cruise batteries and watching the rainbow. You will find that small beams with radio will hit to 120km, and with multis you will hit to 60 or so. But don't take my word for it, test it yourself.

To answer your question about the projectile ammo, yes, they still apply for the tower guns. Because they apply to the cruise missiles, see? You can watch the damage notification name the missiles as they tear your ship a new one.

Again, numbnuts is wrong that "theoretically" a gun with short range ammo could not hit a ship 1km from it, because the gun itself does the locking, not the tower. Again, go visit a POS with small guns and they will lock you first; the large guns and EW mos will lock you last. Anyone who is a POS gunner knows this is true, too, because its much faster to lay guns on an enemy than it is to lay a scram or EWAR battery on them. If the tower did the locking, it would, a) have a scan res attribute, and b) take an equal amount of time for all guns to lock. And same for range.

To incap, it's about 1% of hull damage. It's more than one point, which batelle would know if he ever sieged anything, because you get structure bleed before armour is 100% gone, and the batteries aren't incapped at that stage. Yes, you have to repair the hull to reactivate the gun.

As to the random locking, it is about 30s. However, if you are the only target, odds are this is an academic argument. If you saturate the POS with targets, you can get lucky and have a scram cycle off you so you can escape. This allows an attacking force to pack less logi to achieve the same result, as the POS's DPS gets diluted and spread around the attackers. Generally, budget 5 guns per ship; if you have less than 4 guns per ship, you might be able to get away with less logi. If there is a POS gunner, all bets are off, and you better pack logi.

The horse I rode in on is called 40-odd POS bashes, unlike the knackered nag you trot around on.