Ships & Modules

First things first, this is a long wall of text with math examples which I round to more "round" numbers so you can follow.
There is no to long to read I can give you, sorry.

About turrets and small to heavy and sentry drones:

I'll start with the basics, optimal and falloff range.

Optimal range is the range your turret can do 100% damage. Falloff range gets added ontop of the optimal range and where your turrets lose up to 50% damage.
At exactly optimal range + 2x falloff range your turret damages reduces to 0% damage.

Now a super secret tricky part, all turrets, small to heavy and sentry drones can do "smashing", "wrecking" and other "named" shot which all accure in falloff range and can do up to 150-300% damage.

But sometimes turrets "miss" and do 0 damage at all.

I am using an artillery fit tornado for this example and I'll round the numbers a bit, so it's not too weird to follow.

This tornado with 1400mm artilleries may show you they do 10000 hp damage at a short-ish optimal range but getting into falloff range, they could do up to 30000hp damage if all turrets are doing a "wrecking" shot.

Assuming the turrets are in one group and as such all fired at once.


A little bit about missiles, the stepchildren of weapon systems in EVE

If we can look beyond the naming, missiles in EVE are nothing more than one time use drones, which have a hard, short life and mistakenly often get names(tm).

The maximum damage a subcapital ship can do with missiles is ~8800 hp damage, assuming a Golem with a group of 4x torpedo launchers and they all get there in the first place and the target has 0% resistance (a polarized gun boat maybe, that doesn't move and has a signature radius of > 50000 lightyears).

The difference being that no missile in EVE can or will ever do 100% damage. More about sad things later.


About dps or why do I even talk about this, dps is everything right?

I'm afraid it's not that simple.

I see people too often raging about fitting like 4 or 5 magstabs or ballistic controls on one ship and then wonder why their (insert a value of phantasy number here) dps doesn't do more then expected.

More is better(er), right?

The fitting screen you see when you fit a ship shows you a lot of numbers. Most people only look at a (not the!) dps value and even tornado pilots wonder why the dps value does not "fit" their expectations.

Since I don't fly minmatar, I will assume that an artillery fit tornado "only" gets ~500 or 550 dps.

That will sound really low-ish for aspiring tornado pilots, whom only want to kill stuff with their turrets.

Remember the example from earlier?

That tornado with the rounded number can do up to 30000hp damage with one shot.

And here's the thing that is bothering all the tornado pilots alike, artillery guns have the longest cycle time of all subcaptial turrets.
In that example the cycle time of artilleries is 200 seconds.

Back to the fitting screen all the fitting screen does is this calculation: 10000(hp) : 200(seconds cycle time) = 500(dps).

So what has that ludacris example to do with my dps?

dps or damage per seconds is a value that your fitting screen shows, nothing more, nothing less. And while it is safe to assume that higher is better, EVE doesn't follow.


Of timer ticks and damage per hit


Let's look at frigates for a while, since even the youngest pilot in New Eden can fly one. For the next example I'll choose an Incursus and for this to work I say it does 200dps.

Just to have an easy view of how this dps value is created, I declare that that Incursus does 100 kinetic and 100 thermal damage per second.
So don't hang the messenger just yet, I do know the real values for an Incursus, it is just an example.

This Incursus will now shoot a battleship* - to be continued.

Finally I get to fit one of my favorite battleships - the Apocalypse. Without getting too much into details, since I wrote an essay on how to fit a ship already, I choose mega beam lasers to take the range bonus for full effect and the yellow standard crystals.

For everyone who doesn't fit 8 heatsinks on an Apocalypse and 2 shield extenders for whatever reasons(tm), the expactations on battleship damage are high, the result rather "low".

In this example Apocalype is fitted with 8x mega beam lasers but the fitting screen only shows 450dps.

Wait what?

Didn't that Incursus from earlier do 200dps already? And shouldn't that battleship do at least a bajillon dps??

Dreams and speculations aside, that 450dps is created the following, 1350hp EM damage and 1350hp thermal damage, every 6 seconds.
Or in better words, if grouped together, those 8x mega beam lasers with yellow crystals can do up to 2700hp damage in optimal range or up to 8100hp damage in falloff - ouch.

This looks a bit more battleship like.

Just to soften the suspence, that Incursus didn't win the fight in my example because it was hit in falloff by a wrecking shot at ~88km range and didn't have enough ehp to survive that shot.


Again, why is this important and why do you spoil my dps?!!

The server EVE is running on operates in timer ticks and to give with Australia a fighting chance to compete, it is set to one second or 1000 milliseconds.

If we compare medium pulse lasers with the same crystals (the yellow ones for arguments sake), pulse lasers always do much more damage than medium beam lasers - so to hell with those, right?

Hold on, here's another thing, medium pulse lasers do exactly 50% damage per hit that medium beam lasers would, just in half the time, resulting in a higher dps value but not more damage.

-page one-

You say that wrecking and smashing hits and whatnot only happen in falloff? I'm 99% certain I've had them happen within optimal...

Your arguments seem to boil down to, more range means I can hit them sooner. If the Orthrus had been in closer from the start, you likely would have lost. I'd imagine it's the same with the Phantasm.

I'm also not entirely sure that server ticks play a huge role in this, simply because most things in even cycle on whole second increments. So as long as they're cycling on full second increments, their numbers don't get shifted at all.

Yes, high alpha has application (ganking and to get around logi being the most obvious), but in most fights (all else being equal) higher dps is more important than higher alpha.

I find this statement rather erroneous. It is easier to make a comp that applies 100% damage with missiles then it is with guns.

Examples below, for the sake of simplicity assume all level 5 skills.

Navy Raven fit with 2x T2 Rigor,1x T2 Flare and Using Fury cruise missiles.
That missile has a 210 explosion radius and 104.4 explosion velocity.

Anything with a sig radius bigger then 210 and slower then 104 m/s will take 100% damage.

So let's take your Orthrus example. 120 sig radius and 306 m/s base speed.
Add 1 T2 target painter. First one is +37.5% to sig radius. Now the Orthrus has 165 Sig radius
Add 2nd T2 TP. The 2nd module is only 86.9% effective so that's +32.5875% to sig radius. It now has a 218.77375 sig radius.

Now this poor Orthrus with only a MWD has wandered in front of a Vindicator with 90% webs and a scram. It's been reduced to 30.6 m/s speed.

Guess what. This Orthrus will now take 100% damage from Fury Cruise missiles.

Edit:

While roaming Vindicators and Navy Ravens are...well usually not commonly seen. This example is just to show that you can apply 100% missile damage.

I'm too lazy to do the math again but just assume a roaming gang of HAM Sacrileges, Armor Hyuginns and some armor logi. Conceivable, Achievable and yes will apply 100% missile damage to almost anything it catches.

A picture says more than a 1000 words.

Since I had to try this out before I write it, this is what happened that night: picture

Most of those are the failed Orthrus with rapid light launcher attempts whom even had links, I did not. You may ask Goons for confirmation because their 16 carriers didn't quite manage either and they gave up after 2 hours of trying.

Just saying.

It's been widely accepted for years that wrecking shots always have a chance of occurring and are in fact the last to be eliminated in falloff.

Normal damage distribution on guns is between 51% and 150% of listed damage with a 1% chance of wrecking for 300%. The highest quality hits are the first to be lost to falloff/transversal, but wrecking hits are paradoxically the lowest quality hit.

How does this work?

Chance to hit, as I hope we all know at this point, is determined as:

\textup{Chance to hit} = .5^{\left (\frac{\omega \cdot 40000}{accuracy \cdot signature} \right ) ^2+ \left (\frac{distance - optimal}{falloff} \right )^2}

This will return a number between 0 and 1. As the exponent approaches 0 the entire function approaches 1. As the exponent approaches infinity, the entire function approaches 1.

So now we have a number between 0 and 1. We roll a die, which returns an integer between 0 and 100, which we promptly divide by 100. If the result is below our chance to hit, the shot hits. The die is also linked to hit quality, where the values .01 to 1.00 correspond to 51% to 150% hits respectively, and 0 represents a wrecking hit.

I built you a spreadsheet to play with. The two worksheets should be self-explanatory.

Edit: I don't suppose for times like these we could have something nice like latex support on the forums? No? Ok, then everyone gets to read code instead.

Edit 2: If you want a single formula for expected damage, I think this should work: \textup{Expected Damage} = \textup{Optimal Damage} \cdot \left ( 3 \cdot 0.01 + \left ( 0.5 + \textup{Chance to hit} \right)/2 \right )

about wrecking shots:

i know it is theoreticaly possible to get wrecking shots as long as you are in optimal + 2x falloff. i play eve for a long time now but i only saw wrecking hits on drone or ungrouped guns. I never saw a wrecking shot when i had guns grouped. did someone of you actualy land a wrecking shot with grouped guns?

Would be time to play the lottery.

edit: i remember one time i landed a smashing hit onto some frigate with my 280mm arty svipul at 35km which is way out in second falloff.

No silly, I was looking for the marks after 3 hours killing Orthruses, Cynabels and whatever else they could think of to nuke me of the field.
I made this picture when I got cap boosters since my few ran out.



This is what I am saying and you already know all this, but not everyone else. Believe me I have the greatest respect for the Tuskers, each and every single one of you, kudos to you.

I wrote this because I thought there is some confusion going on amongst newer pilots, after seeing some really weird fits out there after "analyzing them" thoroughly.

Was an afterthought of my fitting post. Sorry for making those.

No it doesn't. The page you link makes no such claim, and a page it links to directly -- this one -- contradicts this statement.

See above; wrecking -- or "critical" if you insist -- hits are the last to do, not the first.

"Note that, broadly speaking, as your chance to hit decreases your chance of doing high-damage, good hits ('wrecking' shots, and so on) also decreases."
I'd say it makes such a claim, and the page YOU linked just says that you'll see more wrecking shots as your chance to hit decrease, but it doesn't actually increase the number of wrecking shots. It increases the conditional probability, not the probability.

I have a practical question then: How does one reduce the amount of poorer quality hits (ie: grazing) - or is there even a way to accomplish this? Are we relegated to random chance for the regular occurrence of 50-150% shots? I'm not even taking about the 300% wrecking shots here...