Well, if you have two chaff launchers and some materials to make some more then you pretty much can stay chaffed? the whole fight.
No, this is why Frontier introduced the interruption mechanic. Unlike basic gun ammo, which takes only 2 seconds to synth, chaff or sinks take much longer.
Any hit to shields or hull during the process interrupts it - no loss of mats but full reset - effectively ruling it out in a 1v1.
Ahhh, so that's why we have those timers I have been hearing about in the forums. Still, I'm not sure for how long it can take for two chaff launchers to run out but for what I've seen they can last for quite a while.
The pure uptime of 2 x unmodded chaff launchers is 220 seconds. With ammo modding, that rises to 300 seconds (so, 5 minutes).
With skill and care that 5 minutes can be stretched out to about 10 minutes.
Unfortunately because an apex PvP build has, in fully aggressive mode, at least 20 minutes of health, but if being cautious, at least 30 to 40 minutes of health, basically a man with a gimballed plan can just mess about for the 10 minutes that it takes his fixed opponent to run out of chaff ... then wreck him.
The fundamental point is that when, in 2.1-2.2, Frontier increased TTK in apex duels by, literally, a factor of approaching 10, they did not adjust other aspects of the game to match.
Also, for what I saw in ED shipyard, chaff has 20 sec of jam. A well modded chaff launcher has 15 ammo so the pair has in total 30 ammo. 30*20=600, or 10 minutes of pure non-stop jam. If I follow your estimations, if you are careful you could stretch it to 20 minutes.
Maybe then it's a case by case scenario. For what you've said it seems chaff is useless with big ship duels but in smaller ship duels it might make sense since those take less time on average.
It's actually half that. Chaff lasts 10 seconds, and what you're seeing is the reload time. 2 unmodded chaff gives you 200 seconds of uninterrupted uptime, and modded chaff would give you 300 seconds. 1v1s routinely last 30+ minutes.
Hmm, then why Ed shipyard also states that the reload time is 10 secs? Is it that it lists the jam as the actual usage of chaff plus relod?
Chaff follows a simple 10 seconds uptime / 10 seconds downtime cycle. Idk what the ED Shipyard 20 seconds means, unless it's the full cycle.
About the Big Ships / TTK thing in your first post, actually it's more the other way around.
As Pharmacist was confirming on here the other day, a big ship duel will rarely go over 20 mins.
However, skilled small ship duels can easily double that.
The reason is that hit points and effective hit points are not the same thing. Evasion, active regen and broken regen all add vast invisible reserves of health to small ships and manoeuvrable mediums such as FdL.
In contrast a big ship takes every shot aimed at it and regenerates nothing. Its on paper and effective hp are identical.
ED shipyard is showing the reload timer for modded chaff, which would be 20 seconds. It shows 10 second reload for stock.
All I know about Pharmacist is that harry and him were in a fight for an hour and a half with no end in sight, and I ended up dropping in and torping harry so the fight would be over. They both thanked me.
Ha ha ha ha ha - there's an exception to every rule, then ... Pharmacist I hear has 5,000+ rolls on his Corvette and as for Harry's Cutter ...
Harry actually sold his cutter, so he had to engineer one the day before. Literally the most boring fight I ever watched.
I find fixed is less rock/paper/scissorable. Only advantage I find to gimb'd is so you can z4 it under wing focus and still maintain ToT. People don't respect that too much though.
If one is truly lame, they'll run full gimb'd and heat hounds to burn out your chaff. Don't even need to name and shame for much of this audience!
To the OP I definitely suggest chomping that one off and moving to full fixed, for respect if nothing else. That and you could run 4 enforcers on your viper I'm assuming... which is dank for the sfx alone, and you can ping fdl's slightly off target with the impact effect. You'll probably find hitscan easier to dial in on fixed than anything leading the target. That gets into personal comfort/ experience though.
If one is truly lame, they'll run full gimb'd and heat hounds to burn out your chaff. Don't even need to name and shame for much of this audience!
To the OP I definitely suggest chomping that one off and moving to full fixed, for respect if nothing else. That and you could run 4 enforcers on your viper I'm assuming... which is dank for the sfx alone, and you can ping fdl's slightly off target with the impact effect. You'll probably find hitscan easier to dial in on fixed than anything leading the target. That gets into personal comfort/ experience though.
Actually yeah come to think of it, there's a really important point here, about learning curves (with or without respect, lol).
Basically you have to throw the crutch away for a time, even if you later pick it back up.
In 1.3 I favoured a PvP Anaconda with fixed on the bottom four points and gimballed on the top. A sweet combo but it held me back, even though I was quite good with the fixed.
One day I just decided to go through the pain barrier and use eight fixed. It was the best thing I ever did.
Even though nowadays I often use mixed loadouts, it was that 8 x fixed Annie period that really taught me. Necessity is the best teacher.
Later when the 1.5 meta put me into a 5 x Hammer FdL in the League, after the Annie it just felt like, "np, this ain't no thang."
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LOL gimabals with hounds, I wonder who that is....
All fixed or full gimbal combined with full FAoff.