[TC] Evaluating the PSG

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Gazz
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Evaluating the PSG

Post by Gazz » Tue, 17. Aug 10, 16:05

I need an idea.

That PSG are devastating at close range is a given.
Now I've been trying to get a grip on how much damage the PSG actually does.

Obviously, the first step is to collect data.
PSG_Damage_Log.ods
shows how much hull damage / shot a single PSG bullet does in different situations.

The distance is from the PSG's barrel to the center of the target ship.
Where from you shoot PSG obviously matters because it's damage depends on the shape of the bullet/ship. So that's recorded, too.

I've been trying to come up with a single formula that more or less represents the damage of PSG but with little success.
Especially with huge ships like the Phoenix I find that pretty impossible.
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Post by TBV » Tue, 17. Aug 10, 17:43

Well personally I like the the fact that PSG eludes quantification by the statisticians, but we've had that conversation before.

I'm suprised the large targets like Phoenix are problematic. My plan A would
be to record damage on a target where none of the shockwave misses the
target, and work backwards from there.

I don't know if this is relevant to TC, but in X3R where fighters could mount PSG, I used them a lot. I've never been interested in weapon statistics,
but it "felt" very different hitting a station at optimum range compared with
hitting a capital ship at point-blank range where the shockwave appeared
to be coming out of the opposite side of the target.

But you're a scripter aren't you? can't you just look at the code?

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Post by Smacksim » Tue, 17. Aug 10, 18:44

I don't know how the damage is calculated, but if its a cone with damage occurring every x meters that the cone is in contact with the target, then:

1/3 pi * (r-squared) * height * damage per hit

Using whatever unit is the distance per calculation of damage. IE, if every 10 meters there can be a damage calculation then that'd be the unit to measure r with.

EG, cone radius at peak width is 100m
100m / 10m (distance per damage calc) = 10 damage units wide radius

1/3 pi (10*10) * height * damage per hit

average total maximum damage = 104.7198 * height * (damage per hit).

If the the cone height (length, whatever) is 1000m (100 damage units long), that would be 10471.98 incidences of damage within the cone.

..........

Its probably more like a frustum in shape though: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frustum
Last edited by Smacksim on Tue, 17. Aug 10, 18:52, edited 1 time in total.

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Post by Geek » Tue, 17. Aug 10, 18:51

Your data, as well as game expereience, shows clearly that PSG damage relates to how much the wave hit the ship.

Thus, it is difficult to make a formula, since you would have to take into account the whole shape of the ship, not only its "size" as reported by scripts.
For the same reason, distance to the center is meaningless for large ships. How close/how "thick" is the hull facing the wave is what matters.
Last edited by Geek on Tue, 17. Aug 10, 21:53, edited 1 time in total.
Right on commander !

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Post by pjknibbs » Tue, 17. Aug 10, 19:16

I would perform the calculations against a small target first off--that would give you an idea how the PSG damage varies with range. Then you do a series of tests all at the SAME range, but against different ships (and perhaps from different angles)--that gives you the factor due to the size of the target.

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Post by Nanook » Tue, 17. Aug 10, 20:40

Geek wrote:...
Thus, it is difficult to make a formula, since you would have to take into account the whole shape of the ship, not only its "size" as reported by scripts....
Not only that, but the orientation of the target ship to the PSG wave also seems to have a big effect. So you'd have to test, say, a Phoenix, at varying angles wrt your ship. And then there's all those protuberances that may or may not extend each of the ship models and thus interact with the wave, or not.
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Post by Alan Phipps » Tue, 17. Aug 10, 21:59

.. and there's the small but noticable RNG damage per shot reduction factor that is applied IS to all shots of each separately triggered burst of fire from any laser.

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Post by Gazz » Tue, 17. Aug 10, 22:06

pjknibbs wrote:I would perform the calculations against a small target first off--that would give you an idea how the PSG damage varies with range. Then you do a series of tests all at the SAME range, but against different ships (and perhaps from different angles)--that gives you the factor due to the size of the target.
Isn't that the data in the table?
All ship sizes from Nav Beacon to Phoenix, all possible ranges and the 2 angles that indeed show a lot of difference in damage taken.

As the table shows, a Phoenix can take damage at an official range of 5 km...

Smacksim wrote:If the the cone height (length, whatever) is 1000m (100 damage units long), that would be 10471.98 incidences of damage within the cone.
The main difficulty is to determine how much target volume is inside the cone.
The cone volume itself is static - although the shape is necessarily affected by the firing ship's speed.

TBV wrote:I've never been interested in weapon statistics,
but it "felt" very different hitting a station at optimum range compared with
hitting a capital ship at point-blank range where the shockwave appeared
to be coming out of the opposite side of the target.
That the damage depends on how much "target" is inside the cone was not the question. That's the basic principle of the PSG.
The problem is to quantify it.

Alan Phipps wrote:.. and there's the small but noticable RNG damage per shot reduction factor that is applied IS to all shots of each separately triggered burst of fire from any laser.
The values are very close to one another (within about 3 %) and every point of data in the table is the average of 6 shots.
For "proper" statistics that is too few but with my completely static "lab environment", there were no outside influences. =)


I don't think that an accurate formula is doable but even a rough guesstimate would be a major improvement.
PSG damage varies by a factor of 166.
I've been toying with linear approaches, area, volume... nothing really useful, yet.
Ships are mostly hollow so area/surface is probably closer than volume.
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would velocity matter

Post by madned » Wed, 18. Aug 10, 00:17

would velocity matter? a ship running away from you might stay in the wavefront longer than a ship coming towards you. against M1 or M2 it's probably not going to make that much difference. but against faster smaller targets it might matter. m6, m7 or TL for instance.

can you outrun a psg wave? in which case at the right speed you might end up running with such a wave, say a mamba.

side question. how thick is the wavefront?

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Post by Aro » Wed, 18. Aug 10, 01:32

What about the fps factor?

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Post by imperium3 » Wed, 18. Aug 10, 11:04

What I would recommend to test is to create a few basic ship-models which are just featureless discs of different radii and thickness. Then you have a completely even surface to test the PSG on, and can see what factors affect damage.

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Post by Chris0132 » Wed, 18. Aug 10, 11:08

Generally I go with 'shoot it at big things at close range and it kills them'.

From basic observations during use, the bigger the surface it hits, the more damage it does, the PSG is basically a giant space shotgun crossed with a giant space flamethrower, the bigger the target you're aiming at the more hits will land on it, the more damage you will do, and the more you will lag.

Shoot big things with it and they die fast, shoot lots of small things with it and they die fast, basic rule is that it's only worth having if you have LOTS of stuff to shoot at once, be that a lot of capital ship hull or a lot of small fighters.

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Post by Smacksim » Wed, 18. Aug 10, 14:43

Oops, I was thinking of the PBG, but I suppose the principle is similar.

I remember killing K's with the supertuned M4 Pirate Bayamon in X2. The waves of PSG would do sooooo much damage if you applied them through the length of the ship. Do they operate similarly in TC? IIRC, they were toned down somehow.

The real world military has surely done the math on this question in microwave / sound / heat weaponry. And calculating against complex profiles I'd think would be a mathematical question encountered time and again in all sorts of applications.

Surface area: Stealth tech, surveillance / motion analysis, astronomy

Volume: MRI's, microwaves....

................

Another question: Ship models are mostly hollow, and even if they were solid, surely the damage calculations would be vastly simpler to have programmed if the wave interaction was done only against ship exterior surfaces, IE the same surfaces used in collision detection. If so, the math should be much simpler than tracking a wave through a complex 3-D object's volume I would imagine....

You could average the available surface area in slices of the ship with the three 'normal' profiles that would encounter the wave: Head-On, Side-On, and 'other side'-on, then weight these to solve for any occurring angle-of-incidence, right?

Since the wave is not continuous, but digital, there can only ever be average solutions for general application. Were the wave a true physical-world energy wave, perfect solutions (given available data) should be possible.

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Post by Gazz » Wed, 18. Aug 10, 14:51

Any solution that requires analysing the 3D model or 3D math to determine the ship's exact orientation in relation to the PSG bullet is nice for purely scienetific purpuses but alas, it would be completely useless in game.

I used a very crude formula in Reunion but I'm not very happy with it.
The large amount of data, that I had collected now, proved that it was too far off for comfort.

I haven't plotted the curves, yet. Maybe there's a common shape that I can somehow normalise into something useful...
If it were simple, I wouldn't have asked. =P

Smacksim wrote:I remember killing K's with the supertuned M4 Pirate Bayamon in X2. The waves of PSG would do sooooo much damage if you applied them through the length of the ship. Do they operate similarly in TC? IIRC, they were toned down somehow.
Look at the table?

Applying the same factor to shield damage, one PSG does up to 9 times PPC damage.
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