target painters and tractor beams target priority

Enemy ships which are being targeted by target painters and tractor beams should have priority to be shot at. Especially if both the weapon and the target painter are on the same ship.

You can make an anti fighter frigate with two anti fighter missiles and two tractor beams, but the missiles will often fire at a different target than the tractor beams. I very often see a fighter happily fly away again after being tractor-beamed without having been shot at. Same with target painters, ships which are target painted are very often not being shot at, not even by the ship that’s target painting him.

Thats a neat idea.
Currently you can battle the “fly away” scenario you described by having more short ranged weapons, but I know the counter arguments for doing so.

This is already the case with tractor beams, check viewtopic.php?f=21&t=2506, version 1.11.

it’s also the case with target painters, but missiles make the target decision at the point a which they are fired, so they need to find a painted target then, as opposed to mid flight. In many cases, the painting won’t continue that long, which is why you don’t see it as strong an effect as you might otherwise assume.

So does that mean if you paint a target after missiles are fired, the missiles will still benefit? If so, guess you could just make Cooperative painter fighters, assuming that order works with target painters.

No, quite the opposite: missiles will benefit from painting only if the target was in the act of being painted at time of missile launch.

If missiles launch even just one microsecond after the painter shuts down, then the missiles derive no benefit from the painter.

also you have to remember 2 orders that will contradict target priority vulture and cooperative… most of the time that i see a trackored target buzz off unhurt it has to do with a already wounded target getting a pasting

i think sometimes the logic behind what target gets a tractor or painting is questionable when there is a blatantly wounded target in range and they target something else but i guess you could call that fog of war

I’m running into problems with target painters targeting already-painted ships. One of my earlier builds was a cruiser that included dual target painters, both of which would fire off at the same time and at the same target (thus wasting the second shot.) What I’d like to see is either:

-The second painter module holding fire until the first painter module has finished, ensuring that the targeted ship stays painted at all times OR

-The second painter module picking a second target.

Are you using cooperative order?

Not on the cruiser, but on the missile frigates that will be doing the shooting, yes. The cruiser doesn’t have any real offensive capability other than point defense and short-range anti-fighter beam weapons. But the problem isn’t so much with two ships painting the same target. It’s that a ship with multiple painters will always fire all of them simultaneously at the same target, making more than one painter per ship a waste of resources.

EDIT: Well, almost always. The firing range is determined from the turret location rather than the center of the ship, so there are times when only one painter is in range. But the point still stands.

I couldn’t think of a scenario where I would want multiple targets painted by a single source (concentrate your fire on a single unit until it is completely destroyed and only then move on, etc), but then I had thoughts of a devious nature. Thoughts of a cruiser with nothing but engines and target painters. Thoughts of this ship plowing into the enemy lines ahead of a huge wave of missile spam. Thoughts of christmas, strangely. And devastation, complete devastation.

The original plan was to use dual target painters on a cruiser which, given the firing rate and paint duration, would give you uninterrupted painter coverage for a single target. Or, failing that, do what you envisioned.

That will be great, but those weapons are designed for working alone. Same happens with the frigate support shield beam, for example. U can only use 1 weapon at a time, if u shots 2 at the same time or just one after another already beamed, the only working is the first one.