SE V: Unique Abilities And Ideas

[President_Elect_Shang]

It does? Now that’s not so good, I have one weapon which falls into the negatives at >=220. No wait that is fine, if I follow you correctly this weapon will have a 1% chance to hit which is how it should be if the mounting unit can’t bring the negative to a positive. Good that actually puts one concern to rest. Now what is the difference between leaky PD and the current PD? Both appear the same except you are using volume to stop rounds, which might look cool on screen but as you pointed out all that flak flying may stress the system and have a negative impact. On older systems like mine that may mean the irritation factor would be high enough that I wouldn’t play a mod of this sort; depends on the actual impact.

[Suicide Junkie]

Uhm, I thought I spelled the main benefit out very clearly...
(Lots of people quoted the post in its entirety too)

One missile might (13% chance) get through a storm of 4 PD. One PD gun might clear a pack of three missiles (1.5% chance).

With stock PD, it (almost) always kills the first N missiles in a pack, where N is proportional to the number of PD guns. All the rest get through... no luck or chance involved.

[President_Elect_Shang]

Suicide Junkie said:
...With stock PD, it (almost) always kills the first N missiles in a pack...

Almost is another way of saying sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t.

And what you are proposing is leaky because? It just sounds like over engineering a very simple problem to me. The end effect is still the same and I have already done what you are proposing in my TC but I did it without the added complexity of 50ms fire rates and -999% to-hit ratios. Leaky to me is component A should always stop weapon X but with modding Weapon X may get through component A sometimes. Do I have this wrong? Is leaky in fact component A will stop weapon X sometimes and now with modding component A will stop weapon X sometimes but just not as much?

Now for the third time I am asking what is the difference between your leaky PD and the current PD. And note that I am not asking what is the benefit.

[Spectarofdeath]

In other words think of the HH universe where one side fires a missle broadside, the defending side fires counter missles and decoys and jammers preventing SOME but not all of the offensive missles. Rather then how it is now, where you just build a frigate or destroyer with nothing but PD and it can basically "clear the sky" of all (or at least most, depending on how many ships of the design you have in the battle) of the weapons. As it stands now it's like 1 pd will kill 1 missle, no questions asked. What he's proposing is a Phalanx type system that throws up a wall to stop incoming weapons where the PD may get lucky and stop it, or the missile may get lucky and still hit. And for the record, this is how I belive PD should be handled.

[President_Elect_Shang]

Well crap why didn’t he just so in the first place the first time I asked?_! I agree that is how it should work and by that standard (well it should be the standard in stock but its not) the current system is broke.

[Suicide Junkie]

I said "almost" because there are overkill issues and poor targetting strategies that can affect it.

Did you not read the statistical distributions I posted?
Compared to 99% chance of shooting down the first N missiles and then 0% chance of shooting down any more, that's pretty obvious.

I figured you were getting confused on something more subtle.

[President_Elect_Shang]

No that would be it, nothing exciting or wonderful or colorful. I figured you were fudging the whole 99% hit thing due to frustration with me. If that is stock it needs replaced ASAP. No wonder I don’t play it.

[Suicide Junkie]

The underlying idea is that more shots with less accuracy is what is needed to spread the probability curve.
That combined with the fact that a small accuracy bonus becomes very significant when the total accuracy is low (consider 10% vs 5% accuracy) because of the accursed additive modifiers.

The only safe, low accuracy value is -999% to ensure everybody gets exactly 1%, and not 2% or 5% due to racial bonuses.

If only Aaron had gone with a better accuracy calculation, such as Accuracy = (Offense / (Offense+Defense))

[President_Elect_Shang]

Is Aaron going to fix the problem with the most beneficial bonus not being used for some of the abilities? For example I have the engine in my TC that cuts missile damage down -90%. I also have a component that should reduce missile damage by -95%. The problem isn’t that SE5 is stacking (thank God!) the problem is that it doesn’t see the -95% is better and instead it uses the -90%. I reported it to Aaron but figured maybe something had been mentioned since I don’t see it in the patch log.

[Suicide Junkie]

Heh. I betcha it is just using the biggest value, even though biggest isn't always best.