So here I am, kicking but in my Corvette, but it's a little slow... Small ships seem to be quite bulky against it, but then I jump in my Clipper, with half the firepower, and it's killing things twice as fast as the Corvette... Strange. Does this have something to do with the small ship damage cap? I heard someone mention this the other day, that large ship damage is capped against small ships...
So someone explain to me the the small ship damage cap, and how it works exactly...
- Thread starter CMDR Nef
- Start date
Weapons lose damage with range. Clipper can easily keep enemies at close range. Corvette cannot because Corvette is slow. My Corvette does just fine vaporizing small ships that get into close combat ranges (Under1.5km) in a matter of seconds. beyond that range however it seems to take a while.
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This is what I've noticed myself.
The sound of the weapon strikes, particularly pulse lasers, changes with range. Is sounds louder and harsher when you are doing real damage.
I have an all gimballed pulse laser outfit on my Anaconda at the moment. At maximum range a full capacitor charge worth of firing will barely take one ring off an NPC Cobra shields. At close range it will strip the shields and destroy the ship with some spare. Hence my usual tactic with fast NPCs like Cobra is to zap them once to draw attention to myself (eliciting the usual "You made your last jump", etc, response), wait until they close to under a km, then let them have it.
I huge all of the ships I fight at all times when firing, so it's not a range issue. (less than 500m) I was just asking because someone said that large ships can only do so much damage to small ships. There's some kind of damage cap in place, so I was wondering why with half the firepower, my smaller ship was doing twice the damage, and if it was because of this cap.
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Not an effect I have ever noticed.
I have noted that large gimbaled weapons have poorer tracking than medium or small. First noticed this in the Vulture where it did, indeed seem to be less effective against smaller ships, but, again, the effect is proportional to range.
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I don't believe there's a "damage cap" for larger ships against smaller ships.
What I think is being referenced here is the mechanics behind weapon sizing. As you've likely seen around, smaller hardpoints do less damage against bigger ships by way of a modifier. But that isn't about nerfing small ships, or making it harder to fight big ships. By doing so they can set the damage values of large weapons only a small bit higher than the small weapons. Small weapons then do less damage to big ships because of the modifier, but when a large hardpoint is turned on an iCourier, the iCourier shouldn't get mashed in seconds by a single pulse laser because it's taking full damage from a large weapon that's only doing a bit more damage than a small/med pulse.
Otherwise to make large hardpoints have any meaning they'd have to do much, much more damage compared to a small hardpoint, with the consequence that to keep up damage against another large ship it would pulverise anything without a huge shield/hull HP.
Your clipper may be the faster killer simply because of range, as already pointed out. When you can stick on an enemy a few KM away and keep them under fire, they're normally toast in seconds.
Edit: Gimbals are indeed different across hardpoint sizes. Larger weapons track slower with gimbals. You may also have noticed that cannon projectiles travel slower the larger the hardpoint, which currently damns the C4 cannon to some extent. This was acknowledged and I believe is due a bit of a buff.
What I think is being referenced here is the mechanics behind weapon sizing. As you've likely seen around, smaller hardpoints do less damage against bigger ships by way of a modifier. But that isn't about nerfing small ships, or making it harder to fight big ships. By doing so they can set the damage values of large weapons only a small bit higher than the small weapons. Small weapons then do less damage to big ships because of the modifier, but when a large hardpoint is turned on an iCourier, the iCourier shouldn't get mashed in seconds by a single pulse laser because it's taking full damage from a large weapon that's only doing a bit more damage than a small/med pulse.
Otherwise to make large hardpoints have any meaning they'd have to do much, much more damage compared to a small hardpoint, with the consequence that to keep up damage against another large ship it would pulverise anything without a huge shield/hull HP.
Your clipper may be the faster killer simply because of range, as already pointed out. When you can stick on an enemy a few KM away and keep them under fire, they're normally toast in seconds.
Edit: Gimbals are indeed different across hardpoint sizes. Larger weapons track slower with gimbals. You may also have noticed that cannon projectiles travel slower the larger the hardpoint, which currently damns the C4 cannon to some extent. This was acknowledged and I believe is due a bit of a buff.
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