Intresting CFA finding (somthing i've discovered while modding)

[Carl99]

Whilst messing with FBL's and CFA while modding i've discovered a few things i thought i'd share with everyone.

1. If a fragmenting round hits a target it will not release it's fragments.

2. The fragments for CFA have a very low damage, (it looks like a copy paste of the FBL entry, where the total fragment damae is about 40% of the main projectiles damage, which is still less than the Aoe damage of FAA, SSC, CIG's, and IPG's however, which do 100% as AoE).

3. CFA and FBL do not have the flak tag turned on, AFAIK this is the Tag that causes a projectile to do AoE damage upon detonation.


What this means quite simply is this:

1. FBL's and Especially CFA are drasticlly infiriour against targets they do not hit than CIG's, IPG's, SSC's, and FAA. As they have no AoE on their main damage projectile.

2. Due to the horrificlly low Fragment damage, even a full 8 round volly ogf CFA fire will only do a maximum of 7MJ of none direct hit damage. This compares with 104MJ for FAA.


Bassiclly we now have an explanation beyond the whole, "Cluster weapons don't proximity detonate" for why CFA seem so lackluster somtimes. Unlike FAA they're only effective on direct hits. Which in combination with their lower base DPS, lower base Accurracy, and other factors leaves them raher lagging.

[Seleucius]

I knew it! Thank you! I remember back when everyone was complaining about these weapons being useless -up until- that patch last year which "fixed" them, at which point I posted something along the lines of 'lol wtf cfa/fbl blo stil,' to which a whole bunch of people replied something like 'omfg nub tey fxd it cfas teh ownz nw flk sux.' I thought maybe I was just missing the magic, or had found some weird no-patch-for-you bug, because my CFA sucked as much as ever when I tried it, though it did look prettier and blow out my speakers less.

FBL was such a good -idea-... A HEPT-class mini-flak weapon for fighters and small turrets? Awesome, right? Le sigh...

[Smacksim]

Maybe when their 'flak flag' was turned on they were too powerful and the easiest thing was to turn that off? In any case though, its good to have more data. Really wish these weapons were more balanced in vanilla...

[Bobucles]

I have never seen flak do more than its listed damage.

Do the flak fragments even work?

[e1team]

Strange. Because they said that already after 2.5 patch the CFA and FBL are working as intended.

[Carl99]

Maybe when their 'flak flag' was turned on they were too powerful and the easiest thing was to turn that off? In any case though, its good to have more data. Really wish these weapons were more balanced in vanilla...

If that where true they'd have turned it off on FAA at the same time as it does beter Base DPS and damage pr shot anyway.

And yes fragment do work but i think the blast radius is based on damage. So wit such a small damage A) Even if they do hit a target your not going to notice it unless several do at once. B) their blast radius would be so small it would be very easy for fighters to slip between. Only when fired in large numbers would B) be avoidable.