We met up earlier tonight and Starmony's heavy prismatic (~3k shield and hull) loadout sparred against the middle weight hybrid setup (800MJ shield, 2k hull) I've been dabbling with, as well as some GU-97s.
Recorded the whole session from my perspective and am uploading it now, uncut. Will take a while (file is over 30GB and I'll need to wait for YouTube to convert it), but I'll post it when it's ready.
I lost each engagement by a wide margin (though that margin narrowed with each fight as I became reacquainted with the FDL and started using the fixed hitscan and gimbaled kinetics I'm more accustomed to). I did mange to evade most ramming attempts, though not quite as many as I'd hoped to, and it doesn't take many collisions to make a difference especially when the ship doing the ramming has a modest mass and huge shield strength advantage. I may have been fairly close with my 1-in-6 estimate, if not a little better, but when each mistake cost two rings of shields or 30% of my hull, 1-in-6 is still too many.
**video placeholder** --
https://youtu.be/2IPg1aIC7Bg -- not live yet, will update post when it is.
Perhaps most interestingly, from my perspective, is that I got to get a good look at the sort of effect latency compensation has on collisions, which should help be more evasive in the future. This became most clear later in the fight, while I was using the GU-97. It turns out that collisions were happening at a range of ~170-180m from my perspective, which is much greater than I was anticipating. This probably shouldn't have surprised me as much as it did, as the game has always favored the attacker's PoV when calculating hit locations and dealing damage (if you get people with high enough ping into a turning contest, they can both appear to be shooting the other in the back).
Here are some screen grabs I pulled from the source video that illustrates this; the first image of each set is the last frame I saw before being destroyed, the second frame the moment I was destroyed (the very next frame, which is only 16.67ms later, as I'm recording at 60fps):
The net result of all this appears to be that, depending on how much latency and thus latency compensation there is, you may have to keep a distance of multiple hundreds of meters to prevent your opponent from seeing and your ship from registering a collision. I think Starmony and I are on the same continent, so
I can imagine how enormous the potential threat bubble will be against overseas opponents. This also makes me think that ship speeds may already be too high for ED's networking model.
I wonder if there are any tweaks that could be done to the balance of the latency compensation to make oddities like this less apparent?
Anyway, the all in on MJ plus five PA build is quite potent, even with out ramming, and Starmony is quite good with it. It's going to be hard to counter, at least 1v1, without cloning and learning to use a setup I don't prefer, or playing to entirely different strengths/tactics that would make fights extremely protracted and frustrating.
