You have nothing.
You would need to know the total amount of players looking while carrying a UA or UP, and the total amount of players looking and not carrying anything...and i don't mean just the forum crowd.
Of each set of those players you would then have to establish the hyperdiction percentage for comparison.
For that you would also need to take the total amount of attempts (jumps) of each player into consideration.
You simply don't have that data, you got absolutely zip, nada.
And even if you had, the result would still only be circumstancial.
Because OF COURSE people with UA/UP had more hyperdictions.
Why ? Simply because so many were carrying them.
If they all had carried fruit and vegetables or domestic appliances, would you then take that as proof that those items increased the hyperdiction probability ?
And if FD came out today and state that UAs/UPs indeed DID increase the chance, you would still not have proven it.
All you would have done is having a lucky guess at a 50/50 bet.
In that case, grats.
We can make some assumptions, which aren't nothing. All investigation begins with no knowledge, but a question that must be tested. Funny how you didn't even propose a solution, though, unlike Alun T, and he's the one that will get my response.
While Keyweg is putting it in a somewhat aggressive way, he does have a point.
The percentages of interdicted Commanders carrying UAs and UPs can only tell you something about their possible effect on interdiction if you know the equivalent percentages for all commanders (interdicted and not interdicted).
To see a way in which this might work, consider a scenario where 1000 commanders fly around trying to get interdicted, 10 (1%) of them have UPs and 990 don't, 990 (99%) of them have UAs and 10 of them don't.
If they fly around for a week and 100 get interdicted, 3 of them carrying UPs and 66 carrying UAs.
In this case, commanders carrying UPs would be 3 times as likely than average to have been interdicted, and those carrying UAs would have been a third less likely to be stopped.
This could actually be done as an experiment, if enough people sign up at the start (and maybe log their initial jump counter and hyperspace distance from the stats panel), and randomly take UAs, UPs, enable/disable shields, etc. then jump around for a set period (or set number of jumps, or set number of lys travelled) and then report how many interdictions they've had.
I'm aware of such sampling bias, but there's a sort of underlying assumption. That poll in particular showed 77.5% of interdicted commanders were carrying UA's. If you assume that most commanders are just trading, smuggling, pirating, bounty hunting, mining, or just passing through, then it's unlikely that 77.5% actually reflects the base population (non-interdicted + interdicted) carrying UA's. With the base assumption that on average, commanders are only carrying around a UA maybe 5% of the time, then 77.5% would seem
almost to be
proof that a UA has a strong influence.
However, since this became a big story, that number is definitely higher - but
how much higher is anyone's guess. Most guesses would probably place it lower than 78%, though, but if we could get some real data instead of guesswork that'd be golden.
It'd be great if a big group of Canonn members got together to study this. Have a control group with no cargo, the test group with UA's, a test group with UP's, and a test group with both, and have them count their jumps and interdictions. That'd be the
real way to do it well.
I'm not pretending that the numbers we already have are anything more than, well, guesswork, working off that weak assumption of a < 78% of players carrying a UA for any given jump.
or it could be nothing
