Newcomer / Intro Comparison tools?

[DangerousLarry]

I'm confused about the comparison tool while fitting your ship and would appreciate it if someone could clear this up. It's somewhat frustrating but I feel it's down to poor descriptors.

I presume BLUE colour means it's an improvement where the RED colour indicates a downgrade... This confuses me on certain attributes said item gives and it's probably down to poor wording of specific tags or descriptions. For instance i'm looking to upgrade my ship's Power Distributor. I take it when you compare an item to your existing one it's the left panel that shows your current fitted piece and the right is the piece you're looking at? When going into compare you see the right comparison panel with all attributes in the red. That makes sense to indicate it's not an upgrade but there are a lot of problems here...

An issue i'm struggling with is the wording of the descriptions which say "Weapons/Systems/Engine RECHARGE." I'm of mind to think that the LOWER the recharge figure is the BETTER it is as it requires LESS time to recharge... yet the tooltip tells me this isn't the case? Is this a visual bug or just poor wording on Frontiers part?

Another issue is the class, rating and Integrity values. Obviously Rating D is better than Rating E which the comparison tool gets right but the Class rating seems to be backwards, at least from what i'm used to with practically everything in life. For isntance the tooltip lists a Class 3 better than Class 1. This doesn't exactly make sense given you should be striving to reach a 1st Class and not a lower class(In everyday life this applies to practically everything from college grades, gambling, positioning, etc., etc.). Then there's the integrity value. Both have an integrity of "A" yet one is apparently better than the other? This makes zero sense to me right now. I'm looking at a Rating D, Class 3 versus a Rating E, Class 3 Power Distributor which both have an integrity value of "A" yet the Rating D, Class 3 Distributor is being compared as worse than the Integrity "A" of the Rating E, Class 3 Distributor? It's fairly confusing and i'm unsure if it's just an error in the comparison tools. After all, one would assumed that a higher rating for equipment would be better than a lower rating for a piece of equipment yet the comparison tool says otherwise.

It's very confusing. Can someone tell me what's going on with the comparison tool and how to interpret it?

 

[AH_ImADot]

The Classes/Ratings make sense if you look at it like this:
A/B/C/D is like the grades we get in school (at least in the US) - A is best, B is ok, D is bad, etc.
1/2/3/4 is like the degrees of a burn or category of a hurricane - 1 is minimal energy/severity, 2 is more severe, 4 is very high power.

And that would also explain why you can put a B2 item in a size 3 compartment, but can't put a B3 item in a size 2 compartment. And it kind of then makes sense that a B1 device might be better than a C2 device. Yes, 2 is better power then a 1, but a B item is overall better than a C item.

 

[Wavey]

An issue i'm struggling with is the wording of the descriptions which say "Weapons/Systems/Engine RECHARGE." I'm of mind to think that the LOWER the recharge figure is the BETTER it is as it requires LESS time to recharge... yet the tooltip tells me this isn't the case? Is this a visual bug or just poor wording on Frontiers part?

No the Higher the better as that means its faster to recharge

 

[Singularity]

The thing I cannot fathom is what "intergrity" is supposed to signify ...

 

[Yachats]

And that would also explain why you can put a B2 item in a size 3 compartment, but can't put a B3 item in a size 2 compartment. And it kind of then makes sense that a B1 device might be better than a C2 device. Yes, 2 is better power then a 1, but a B item is overall better than a C item.

thrusters, shields, and frame shift drive are especially sensitive to this. Don't be tempted to put a lower class but higher grade device in. Some ships come stock this way, but if you do it in outfitting it can cause some bad things to happen.

this is because these components depend on the mass of your hull, and lower class components can't cover the larger hull. A good example of this is the Type 6 stock shields. They are paper thin because the stock shields are for the lower class hull.

 

[AH_ImADot]

The thing I cannot fathom is what "intergrity" is supposed to signify ...

My guess is how "new" it is. Maybe someone traded in a busted up component for a shiny new one, and now the outfitter is stuck trying to sell something that is significantly "used".