Fighter size

I’m trying to understand if fighter size has an actual impact on the fighter’s chance to get hit. Does anyone know about this ?

The gunnery calculations include parameters for the size of the target. This happens across the full range of units in this game from fighters all the way up to the most immense modded ships. AFAIK, it’s a truism that the smaller (and faster! - separate subject) the target, the harder it is to get a clean lock-on. The relative range of effect is one thing…I have no numbers with which to suggest the absolute degree of compensation being made here. Is the latter what you’re after? Or merely a confirmation of the overall principle?

The difference between a 9-meter fighter and a 18-meter fighter might be too small to offer much more defense for the 9-meter one, even though the second fighter is double the size in relative terms. If things are calculated based on the actual size of the targeted ship, then the difference between the Rebel Fenrir cruiser (140 m) and the Imperial Praetorian cruiser (250 m) offers a lot more room for an “electronic warfare” modifier. The observed performance of ole Johnny Reb in combat makes me lean towards believing that the “actual size” method is the one being used.

Again: just my admittedly imperfect observations; YMMV; void in Guam and the US Virgin islands; some settling of the product may occur during shipping, etc.

I actually just did a few tests - everything else being equal, size 9 vs size 11 fighter wins most of the time. Size 3 vs Size 11 wins all the time (20 to 30% vs 10%). So it makes a small - but consistent - difference.
However, a small difference in speed (2.00 vs 2.20) is more than enough to nullify this advantage. So it’s not really significant…

I was more after the general principles however - testing doesn’t really help with that - which your post helped clarify. Thanks.

Note : The actual to hit formula is Hit Rate = (1-(ship speed / tracking speed))*(0.5 + (ship size / 256)*0.5) [more details here]

Which means that your intuition that it is the ‘actual size’ that influences the hit rates was indeed correct.