(Radiation weapons are order-specific weapons from the new Expansion / DLC)
Radiation weapons have two damage values, the initial blast damage, and the ongoing damage. The ongoign damage takes time, and once it starts it cannot be stopped, even if the shields go back up.
The weapons each have a radiation damage and a decay. From that, I also show you the total damage this amounts to, and the duration voer which it happens.
The decay is the rate at which radiation damage survives to the next ‘pulse’, where a pulse is 200 ms (although the game scales that down so it’s actually 500 ms, or half a second).
so say the blast damage is 20 radiation damage is set to 10 and the decay to 0.98
initially damage done is 20
after 500ms the ship takes 9.8 more damage
after another 500ms the ship takes (9.8*0.98) 9.6 mroe damage
etc…
until the damage each pulse is below 1.0, at which point it’s ignored.
Radiation damage cannot be ‘delivered’ as a payload unless a shot penetrates both armor and shields. Even if it does 0.01 internal damage, it will deliver the full radioactive payload. Those of you who know the GSB weapons inside out will already be re-evaluating the shield disruptor missiles on frigates as a way to punch a hole in enemy shields to throw a few nukes at them
My take on it is that the ‘bug’ of radiation triggering when your shield is still up is expected behavior. Plenty of weapons, especially plasma, can go through your shields to damage your hull directly when the shields are still up. Cliffski said that the radiation triggers whenever it damages the hull directly, so penetration crits would still count. If there is a protective layer of armor, the shot would need to penetration crit through that as well to damage the hull and trigger the radiation, which would rarely happen
This is true. The weapon basically checks if it did internals, then applies the payload. If those internals were a critical hit, it still gets delivered.
We’re not talking about plasma damaging a cruiser that has a one or more collapsed shields out of its full set.
Weapons that already penetrate have no need to crit, because they are already doing damage to the layered defense. The rad gun has 48 shield penetration and 36 armor penetration - no shield is bouncing that - crits shouldn’t even be relevant by normal rules.
If this was any other weapon, there would be zero internal damage to an unarmored craft and zero armor damage on an armored one until at least one shield collapsed. The same is true for armor - no internal damage occurs until at least one plate goes down. This is pretty trivial to test. The only thing that’s going to bypass that is the nearby explosions of other ships and weapons fire from inside the bubble.
I’m watching target ships sprout explosions along the hull after the first volley of rad rounds connect, and I don’t think the paltry 9 damage these things do is causing a shield collapse that fast. It never happens to armor, only to shields, which throws the crit theory out the window.
The weird thing is the inconsistency of it. It’s not every shot, but something closer to 1 in 4, which is still much higher than the crit rate. I wouldn’t call it a gamebreaker just yet due to that, although the internal damage is easily enough to gut half the weapons off of a frigate.
I’m not positive, as I’m new to the game (so if I’m wrong, please correct me), but I suspect that a critical hit is sorta like one in a RPG: It occurs every so often, and in this game, it totally bypasses defenses to deliver direct hull damage.
If I put that right, this is basically what you’re hoping happens when you have laser equipped fighters attacking cruisers en masse. It’s either that, or death of a thousand cuts.
As far as I understand it, it’s a chance to bypass immunity mechanics.
It’s the same effect as if the hit penetrated - but note that this does not mean guaranteed hull damage. Usually it just damages the shield or armor directly.
It is most relevant to armor discussions, as the sliding scale of ‘average armor’ means that repeated crits can eventually reduce the penetration threshold of armor, the mechanic that allows fighters to always eventually destroy an armored craft despite the shield.
There’s a similar mechanic in play for faster-than-tracking targets.
There are no criticals against shields.
Otherwise, 30 beam cruisers should be able at least to lower the shield strength of a single reflective at least once. But that doesn’t happen.
While we’re in here talking about game mechanics, I’d like to ask about two more things:
Shield resistance and armor resistance. The manual seems to make the claim that shield/armor resistance is a binary effect, and has no effect besides determining whether or not a given weapon hits. For shields, particularly, this seems to imply that a weapon with shield penetration of 28 is exactly the same as one with a shield penetration of 100. Is this true?
When determining average armor strength, is the per-module ‘armor strength’ the manual references the maxdamageabsorbable property?
Yes, either the weapon can deal damage to the shield, either it can’t. If we’re talking about a 27 resistance shield, the 100 shield penertation weapon has no advantage over the 28 one.
Average armor strength is the sum of the total damage absorbable value of all your armor modules divided by total amount of modules+1 (armor and non-armor ones), modified by the various modifiers (hull bonuses, diminishing returns…). Please note that this is different from what the manual states (the +1 part I discovered recently and wans’t intended). A weapon needs an armor penetration value higher or equal to that, but just like shields, having more than needed means no special advantage. Please note there’s a chance, as stated in the manual, that a shot deals damage even though it shouldn’t. That’s called critical hits, and occurs only 1-2% of the time.
while this should go in suggestions, based off your explanation jukelo (thank you for that btw), that info for your ship design should be stated on the info screen, which i don’t think it is, or what’s there isn’t the resistance levels (correct me if i’m wrong. i’m not near my computer that i can check this)
