Make effect of chaff on your targeting negatively proportional to your sensor grade

Brrokk · Dec 11, 2019

As title. When the target launches chaff, your gimbals or turrets should waver about most with E or D sensors, but much less if you have A sensors.

This would seem realistic and give more trade-offs in ship build. For example, it would allow the damage reduction of turretted weapons to be partially offset with better accuracy against chaff-spamming NPCs, by choosing to carry extra weight of sensors.

<EDIT> Could make it dependent on target range too.

Rubbernuke · Dec 11, 2019

This idea is a good one. A lot of people including myself keep on asking for this (https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/link-sensor-grade-to-gimbal-efficency.519434/#post-7944788) hopefully FD will act on it.

Raino · Dec 11, 2019

just deselect your target and go straight shooting, no waving anymore and it is a good practice for fixed weapons

Friedenreich Xante · Dec 11, 2019

Raino said:
just deselect your target and go straight shooting, no waving anymore and it is a good practice for fixed weapons

Indeed, but it's a good suggestion anyway. People tend to go for the class D sensor regardless if the ship's primary role is offensive, just for weight saving (although I know a few CMDRs who use A rated ones). This would be an incentive to use higher grade sensors.

[PS4] Filthymick420 · Dec 11, 2019

Brrokk said:
As title. When the target launches chaff, your gimbals or turrets should waver about most with E or D sensors, but much less if you have A sensors.

This would seem realistic and give more trade-offs in ship build. For example, it would allow the damage reduction of turretted weapons to be partially offset with better accuracy against chaff-spamming NPCs, by choosing to carry extra weight of sensors.

<EDIT> Could make it dependent on target range too.

In this situation I simply untarget and free aim. but I agree this would give people a reason to use more than d-rated sensors for the benefit of them being lighter than e, c, b and a.

KillaALF · Dec 11, 2019

Didn't the try this already in one of the 2.x betas? It was never implemented, though.

CMDR X · Dec 13, 2019

Brrokk said:
As title. When the target launches chaff, your gimbals or turrets should waver about most with E or D sensors, but much less if you have A sensors.

Yes, this! Chaff totally breaks the immersion for hotas+gimball users like me. It's not the fact that it makes things harder, it doesn't. It's just more boring.
Waiting for that irritating crap to dissipate. A grade sensors should see through the stuff better and faster. I could use K+M+Fixed but I don't out of principle
because I would never fly a real ship with a K+M.

Or, even better, give us a button to toggle gimball weapons to fixed mode w/ leading reticle. I would appreciate this even more than a sensor buff.
X.

metatheurgist · Dec 13, 2019

CMDR X said:
Or, even better, give us a button to toggle gimball weapons to fixed mode w/ leading reticle. I would appreciate this even more than a sensor buff.
X.

Should just happen auto when chaff is detected.

Morbad · Dec 13, 2019

KillaALF said:
Didn't the try this already in one of the 2.x betas? It was never implemented, though.

They tested tying gimbal tracking to sensor quality in one of the 2.3 betas, but I do not believe this had anything to do with mitigating the effects of chaff.

metatheurgist said:
Should just happen auto when chaff is detected.

If the targeting system could distinguish between chaff and valid targets, chaff wouldn't work very well.

That said, a big reason for auto tracking weapons is to be able to fire at a deflection from the ship's facing. I would vastly prefer to retain entirely manual control over whether my weapons continue to try to track my target or not. Many weapons do not need to be particularly accurate to serve their purpose. An "unselect" or "clear target selection" function could be useful though.

Imo · Dec 13, 2019

Even better: Remove Chaff.

[PS4] Filthymick420 · Dec 13, 2019

Imo said:
Even better: Remove Chaff.

Jokes. the purpose of chaff is to keep you from hitting your target. you're basically saying this is functioning properly, remove it from the game. It's like super easy to unselect your target and use your gimballed weapons like they're fixed, barely an inconvenience lol

Sylow · Dec 13, 2019

KillaALF said:
Didn't the try this already in one of the 2.x betas? It was never implemented, though.

What they actually tried was to make the tracking arc of weapons to depend on the quality of your sensors. So in effect E grade felt very limited, D grade was a very small nerf to what we have, while the others were modest upgrades. Even A grade just gave a little more wiggling room. (The weapon could still not move more than the mount itself allowed, no matter how good the sensors were. )

And just like in many other betas, those who actually tried it considered it to be fine. But many who never tried it felt like their candies were about to be taken away and thus also gave "qualified feedback". And as FD can't handle the tears of clueless forum dwellers they did what they always do: cave in and undo the changes.

Totally unrelated to that * cough * , one might wonder why the game is progressing so slowly...

KillaALF · Dec 13, 2019

Morbad said:
They tested tying gimbal tracking to sensor quality in one of the 2.3 betas, but I do not believe this had anything to do with mitigating the effects of chaff.

Sylow said:
What they actually tried was to make the tracking arc of weapons to depend on the quality of your sensors. So in effect E grade felt very limited, D grade was a very small nerf to what we have, while the others were modest upgrades. Even A grade just gave a little more wiggling room. (The weapon could still not move more than the mount itself allowed, no matter how good the sensors were. )

Thanks for the correction, guys.

Brrokk · Dec 13, 2019

Imo said:
Even better: Remove Chaff.

That would be the bold choice. I guess when chaff is used we're all supposed to think about how it acts in atmosphere. In space a chaff "cloud" wouldn't spread and would remain as just a blob of metal bits traveling with the velocity the ship had when it was released. It should have no effect on targeting really.

ICBMs can't use chaff outside atmosphere, that's why they release decoys instead.

CMDR Jayce MacLeod · Dec 13, 2019

Years ago FDev was going to implement something like this if I remember. I think it was even beta'ed (they also were going to nerf gimbals a bit while buffing fixed for lower quality sensors) but it never came to be. I'm all for better tracking with better sensors when chaff is out.

Morbad · Dec 13, 2019

Brrokk said:
That would be the bold choice. I guess when chaff is used we're all supposed to think about how it acts in atmosphere. In space a chaff "cloud" wouldn't spread and would remain as just a blob of metal bits traveling with the velocity the ship had when it was released. It should have no effect on targeting really.

Our sensors are infrared and so is chaff, evidently. Probably why they changed the color quite a while back. Those little flakes cool off pretty fast and stop confusing tracking.

Still some inexplicable behavior, like fire-at-will turrets being able to ignore heatsignature and engage targets that cannot be resolved, but chaff in ED is clearly not what the real-world countermeasure is. Chaff is far closer to a cluster of flares.