Issues, Workarounds & Localization

Hey folks, ever tried to jam a drone and it didn't work?

After a suspicios ship loss, I had some discussions and did some testing and here are my results:

T2 light Drones have a sensor strength of 7.5 across the board.
Therefore, it shouldn't matter which color of jam you are using when trying to jam a drone within optimal range.


So if you're jamming at 9.0 blue, a 7.5 drone should be jammed reliably, right?
As it turns out, no.

Instead, a yellow jam, as long as it's > 7.5, will always jam a light drone, regardless of its flavor, while all other colors roughly reflect the chances for off-race jamming, i.e. 3/7.5 in case of 9.0 on- race.

Here is my theory on why that is:
Ships and drones all have 4 different sensor values.
In a ship, 3 of them are zero.
When you jam a target, the algorithm finds the highest ship value by comparison and uses that as upper limit for the random number generator and compares the result to the matching racial jam value of the jam you've used.
E.g. you use a blue module on a blue ship, it will use your blue module's on-race value, if you use a blue module on a red ship, if will use your blue module's off-race value for red.

Now what happens when you jam a drone that has 4 equal values?
I think the system starts with radar, since the radar value has the lowest ID.
But since all the numbers are equal, none of the following color values will be higher than radar, making radar effectively the flavor of all things that have four equal sensor strength values. This is essentially a bug.

Please try to confirm this for yourself and let me know, it's true for T2 light drones and probably for all others as well.

o/ Njord

TL,DR: DRONES HAVE AMARR SENSORS, USE AMARR JAMS ON DRONES FOR BEST RESULTS.

P.S.: You can test this by undocking a griffin with 4 different jams (> 7.5) and an Acolyte/Hobgoblin/Hornet/Warrior on it.
Launch it, lock it and run all jams on it for 20+ cycles. My experience: The yellow jam will be the only one that never fails, while the others will, regardless of which drone you're jamming.