Huh, I am surprised that the needler has twice the uptime of the railgun.That implies that the average engagement time roughly is the cycle time of the needler + 1 extra burst (IE the needler fires, fires again, and then the ships are disengaged). Interesting.
(Perhaps the needler is firing at every passing fighter, giving lots of uptime on paper while missing many of those shots, but then vs actual ships it has a much higher accuracy than the railgun? That's a quite hard thing to test, but I'm just trying to imagine how a manticore is having an average of like 7 second engagements vs remnants.)
Yes it's hard to tell. Every time the Light Needler fires, it commits 15 shots at once, even if the target was only briefly in range, or a hulk gets in the way, or if it's a fighter, or the target dies after the first few, etc. The latter reason leads to more misses for fast fire rate weapons like the HAG -- when the target dies, the shots that are already en route basically automatically count as misses, lowering their hit rate.
Regardless of reason, flux is expended on those shots, so they should properly count in a weapon's combat statistics, so I include all of that.
I've tested no-fighters before, simply by removing the fighter bays from Scintillas (and Brilliants at the time), and yes, the weapon hit rates were much better. But I didn't notice any proportional difference between weapons, so I just test including fighters nowadays.
What is the uptime stat in your table? And how is it calculated? The way I usually think about uptime (time firing/total time) it can't be greater than 1, so there must be some difference in definition.
Oh my mistake, I didn't define what it was. Uptime is simply the number of shots fired divided by how many shots per minute the weapon fires. So it's how often the weapon was firing during the battle, in minutes. In this case, since there were 10 Manticores per fight and I ran it 2 times, it's that number divided by 20. So it's the average amount of time in minutes that the weapon was firing per battle across each ship. In general, even though the battle may last for 4 or more minutes, the uptime is usually only a minute or two. Ships actually spend a lot of the time not firing, but moving into position, venting, etc.
Then flux is simply the number of shots fired multiplied by the amount of flux per shot, so it gives the total flux expenditure caused by the weapon.
So from the number of shots fired, I can take the ratio of hits/fired to get the weapon's average hit rate, and I can also look at the total damage/flux to get the weapon's average damage/flux ratio. In this way weapons are treated sort of as a "black box" where what goes in is the OP that you spent on the weapon (and any other stuff like hullmods, skills, vents, etc.), and its flux cost, and what comes out is the damage that it dealt. Anti-shield weapons tend to have a better damage/flux ratio since their damage is doubled against shields (although the [REDACTED] have good shield efficiencies). So this helps me understand the "real world" effectiveness of weapons more easily.
This tells me that the needler is firing a significantly higher % of its shots into hull, rather than armor. Theory: In the refire delay after a ship lowers its shields (however many bursts that took), other weapons break the armor before the needler fires. 6 seconds under HAG fire with harpoons flying about will do that. The needler then ends up firing less against armor?
I think it has more to do with when the AI chooses to lower its shields. In theory the AI can lower its shields at any time, including right before or during the burst (and thus the Light Needler hits armor). In practice though, the AI only decides on lowering shields etc. once every few combat frames (to mimic human reaction times). So it's more likely that just after a burst -- when it suddenly sees a lot of flux -- is when it decides to lower shields because of high flux, and that's when the other weapons do their damage, during the Light Needler's cooldown. Thus Light Needler ends up doing less damage to armor.
What's also interesting is that the Light Autocannon had the same hit rate as the Railgun (despite being slower and having weapon spread) and thus has the best damage/flux efficiency, and it also did a greater percentage of its damage to hull. I don't really have a good explanation for this but it was consistent across both runs.
By the way, there's a
much easier way to get ammo data now, and thus look at hit rates, etc., yourself. The new mod
System Marker, among other things, shows your (friendly) target's remaining ammo when you target them via the "R" button. So you can go into weapon_data.csv, take all the weapons that don't have ammo and modify their ammo to be a high amount, i.e. 4000 (as far as I know, the AI does not change based on "infinite ammo" versus "a really high amount of ammo remaining" so this shouldn't really affect anything), and then,
just before the last enemy ship dies, target each of your ships and take screenshots of their ammo remaining. Subtract that from 4000 and you'll get the total number of shots fired. From there you can easily do all the other analysis with the
Detailed Combat Results mod. It doesn't work for weapons that regenerate ammo, like Thumper or IR Autolance, but it works for other weapons.
Previously, to get ammo data, I had to console command "traitor" the last enemy ship and "god all" so that projectiles don't do further damage, then transfer shuttle to each ship individually to take screenshots (one screenshot per weapon group), which is not only time-consuming, but still counts toward the battle time so the battle time reported by Detailed Combat Results for that run is essentially inaccurate. Now I can get ammo data much more easily and preserve battle time at the same time. It doesn't work when I modify the ship to stack weapons to do side-by-side weapon comparison testing like I did here (the numbers end up being stacked on top of each other), but it works for general use.
DPS % examples for the 50 hit strength damage values didn't include skills, meant those.
Skills generally favors lower hit strength weapons, point of 50 not being some magical cutoff still stands ofc.
Yeah there's no magical cutoff for weapons, they just gradually slide to irrelevance. It's further complicated by the fact that it depends on the target (such as Target Analysis), the firing ship (such as Wolfpack Tactics or HEF), etc. So I see them more as relevant to get a conceptual understanding of the game mechanics, but I rely more on the actual combat results when comparing weapons.