(Damaged part DON’T work a 100%)
I should perhaps have made this more clear. The above sentence was meant to indicate that I don’t believe that what I had put into my previous response was the way in which target boosters affected the targeting calculations.
As far as I know, hits on a power generator have no effect on the performance of any aspect of any vessel in the game. I’ve had cruisers whose only live module is a weapon that were still blazing away to the best of their ability when they blew up, and I’ve seen cruisers with only engines remaining attempt to crawl back towards the ‘safe’ side of the battlefield. Hits on weapons, engines, and shield generators will hurt your ships, but hits on power generators don’t seem to. Notably, destroying all shield generators before the shields fall does not appear to destroy the shields, but rather removes all shield resistance, which is why when I’m watching for cruisers dying to laser fighters I watch for evidence of fighter weapons dealing damage to the shields.
@GATC and Aeson
The manual says that SOME modules don’t work 100% if damaged, but doesn’t say which ones. I’d expect the most likely candidates are things like repair modules, so their rate of repair is reduced. It also says SOME weapons have a lower recharge rate if damaged, again not saying which ones. The implication is that some, perhaps most, are unaffected by partial damage.
As concerns loss of power plants, this actually signficantly reduces the recharge rate of weapons. I noticed this while watching modules to see if weapons hung up without firing. While doing so, I noticed a number of times that when the fighter lost its generator but nothing else, its recharge rate went way down. I assume that the weapon was recharging off the baseline power generated by the hull itself. I would further assume that this hull power had to be shared with the engines, so I expect the fighter slowed way down as well. But I couldn’t see the fighters in the swirl, I was just watching the module display. I can say, however, that loss of the generator very quickly resulted in the loss of the fighter, which was probably a result of being slower than before.
Fighter lasers seem to be some of the weapons whose recharge rate is unaffected by damage to themselves. At least I couldn’t tell any difference when they were partially red. The only time I noticed them slow down was when they’d lost their generator.
I’ve done a little testing on Nomad Awazem fighters to try and see if trading a small amount of speed for additional health is worthwhile, and I’ve found that for similar fighter speeds, it’s pretty much a toss-up between speed and health.
Test Fighters:
Awazem Fast: Speed 2.49, Health 18.0, Cost 88, Laser Cannon, Engine 2, Power 1.
Awazem Slow: Speed 2.43, Health 23.0, Cost 103, Laser Cannon, Engine 2, Engine 1, Power 2.
Out of ten tests, each of the above fighter designs won five times. The average percentage remaining of the fleet over the ten tests was 25.7% for the Awazem Fast and 21.8% for the Awazem Slow, indicating a slight advantage for the Awazem Fast, although the difference is probably well within the chance-based score deviations, and is also affected by rounding in the score percentages, as I only recorded the percentages listed in the upper part of the screen rather than the actual end-of-battle health values.
The conclusion that I draw from this is that the small amount of extra health is not worth the small speed penalty, as the slower fighters are more expensive and I can probably put the extra credits to better use somewhere else.
Test set-up was 960 fighters arranged into 60 squadrons in each fleet, using Attack Fighters at minimum range, Stick Together, Last Stand, and Rescuer as fleet orders.
As a side note, 1920 fighters closing with one another makes quite the fireworks display for the first half or so of the battle.