USELESS! - How And Why Ballistics Are Useless | Ballistic Penetration Testing | Star Citizen 4k

I wouldn't say ballistic weapons are "useless","limited" perhaps. We all knew that the introduction of MM all ballistics went through many revisions in balancing them vs ship armour/resistance, and they will be changed again and again, just as fast as a Corsair gets buffed or nerfed pending on the flavour and mood of the month.

If we had a realistic damage model based on armoured panels... but no, they chose the cheesy way and then throw numbers at it, aimlessly.

Shield Ballistic Absortion 30%(when shield is full,down to 0 when the shield totally reduced to o)
Shield Resistance 8%(33.3% x 25%)
Hull Resistance 50%(depand on spcific ship)

Yeah but if you factor in laser as well whilst the shields are up they are not doing anything

It seems to me that ballistics arent quite useless, primarily because... lasers affect shields before doing any damage to the target while ballistics penetrate and cause lasting damage that cant be replenished like a shield. So naturally it should take a fair bit of unloading to fully kill a ship with ballistics, otherwise they would be absurdly overpowered and make shields utterly useless. They definitely need to be balanced a bit more... but I wouldnt go as far as saying they are useless.
You can also use them to shoot behicle doors and cargo ramps open through shields... which has its own use case. 😂

Shields should nt be a % of reduction but more like an ammout of reduction bc how can a size 0 shield reduce by 30% the damges of a s10 idris railgun ? It makes no sense, instead if for example a size 3 shield can reduce balistic damge by 1000 hp and a capital shield can stop 25 000 hp , them it would be 100% more logical. This way a small ship cant resist an enormous gun when a capital ship shield cant be pass trough by a size 1 balistic gun and also, for the armo i would sove something like in world of tanks/warships (taking acounts of angles, armor thickness, ammo penetration values,...) this way a if your balistic weapon is too weak, the bullets will just bounce and dont affect the hp of the element.. (why tf can we open a polaris hanger with a small p4 ar when shields are on/off (with enough ammo)

The ballistics are far from useless.
They do damage through the shield. So in a fight where one opponent can regenerate his shield the ballistic still do damage. Against some ships you can disable them even when they never loose their shields.

Another advantage is that they don't need so much power. So in a ship with energy problems they give you energy for other systems.

Could you do a side by side comparison of similar ballistic and laser weapons? It's hard to really tell that the ballistic weapons are 'bad' when there is nothing else to compare with.

A the ends, those datas show how much cig is bad in "balancing"... how can the military ships (with armor plates "A2", "polaris") have less damage reduction than the "DRAKE" golem??? Wtf

Honnestly I struggle to figure out where is the problem here. Making permanent damages without stripping shields is already a huge advantage over energy weapons. Typically yesterday I had a fight I could never have won if opponents had ballistics. That's also why during bounty you will target ships having ballistics first because they will damage you the most, maybe taking down your turrets, weapons or engines and leaving you in a bad state (or am I the only one ? I don't think). Actually this vid made me think deeper about mixing ballistics with energy weapons on my main ship, just realized as much as an advantage it can be and also how my fight could've been shorten by a lot if I had those

This whole system is so convoluted and you'll never know what works or doesn't work.
In essence, ballistics pass through shields, lose 30% damge (full shield), decreasing with damaged shield (continuous fire increases the hull damage then).
Energy weapons have to combat 50% energy resistance on shields, seemingly also reduced by lowering the overall shield, meaning the damage also goes up, the lower the shields get.
I gotta test this later on with my titan. It has 2500 Nose HP, taking a Deadbolt IV and a M6A to the face. (Also 2x Targa shield = 4480 hp)
I wrote a quick python script, and the theory looks like this:
Deadbolt IV (single shot): 11 shots
Deadbolt IV (continuous fire): 10 shots --> 100 RPM = 6.3s (TTK)
M6A: 15 Shots --> 100 RPM = 9.4s (TTK)
In this specific example, a 33% faster TTK doesn't seem to bad tbh, but I'll edit this later (probably) when I confirm it in the verse.

While I value the many different aspects of space flight in SC, I feel it’s getting so much that it’s not going to be as fun if you’re a solo player.

Ballistics hitting a ship with 100% shields will lose 30% of the damage, once the shields drop to 50% or lower the damage reduction is lowered to 8% until shields are down.

full stop...ballistics should be the meta..... they are limited and need restocking....those negatives are enough that this blanket 50% resist is killing the use of them....Armor needs to be a light 15% medium 30% and heavy 50% to make the armored ships unique ...and not all ships should have armor....period
You can't put something in the game with a load of negatives, no way to reload in the field...and expect gamers to use them....much less think they are worth the rearming cost or prep....

Rember previous mining event? I was so done with it, after it ended. Also I was super hyped to buy my dreamed ship - crusader inferno. I bought it and was very disappointed with his gun struggling against pvp small fighters. And now I know whay.
Again thanx foxy for amazing video ❤

Honestly realistically if space is full of micro meteors and space shit traveling far faster then any gun can produce so far, then a weapon flinging projectile at such a ship meant to absorb these micro meteors and space shit harmlessly a projectile would be no different and be pretty useless against such a ship. Shit even most lasers would be harmless to considering some of the stars we discovered in the past year.

Preach brother. Ballistics could be so cool! But CIG needs to take a good look at them to balance things. I also hope, sooner rather than later, we will be able to restock ammo on ships. Like a reverse reclaimer.

The real problem is shields should be the one stopping ballistics and armor should be reflective or ablative to reduce energy damage. Shields would make more sense to protect against micrometeorites or other nav hazards, along with ballistic damage.

Are you sure that the default 33% is resistance and not a third of power from the old triangle? It appears, given the warning, the 33% power to shields results in 8% resistance and changes to the new power grid do not change that.

Interestingly enough, when you expand the testing to energy and distortion weapons, you will see that some ships have a damage reduction (All Vanguards, Starfarer Gemini, Valkyrie, Mantis, etc.) while some ships will take extra damage (All Mustangs, Sabre Peregrin, Fury LX, All Guardians, etc.). So, using energy weapons against a Guardian for example, you will need fewer shots to kill one.

Sad, my guess is they are waiting for engineering to release before balancing balaistics

I think the shield resistance value are for the shield health. So ballistics will do (alpha damage)-8% to shield health

Use energy weapon to reduce shields. It's going to be like halo gunplay with an emphasis on MMO tropes (heavy hitter, healer, long range, etc). Some combination of weapons will not be effective depending on the target. The issue will come with what players decide to outfit their ships with, it will require a varied group of ships to take care of the variations.

So (using an F7A Mk II as an example) Erkul has an Armor section that shows the -55% physical damage modifier for ballistics. It also says "1000 HP" for the Armor section overall for a ship that has over 13,000 HP total. Does that mean the ballistics resistance is only good for the first 1000 HP, and then the ballistics do full damage? This would kind of line up with the logic of the armor getting shot up and made more useless as a battle progressed.

Please show a comparison video vs laser cannon/repeaters

What you are stating here is merely the situation right now, but not the target CIG aims for.
Ballistic weapons are supposed to penetrate hulls and damage components. They are the type of weapon that'll be hell to any crew on a ship because the bullets can kill them inside as well as force them into the whole engineering and component repair gameplay loop.

iirc you even said in one of your recent videos how useless the Cambio SRT is, and I strongly disagree there. Once engineering is in, ship crews that expect combat will run the Cambio SRT a lot, because that is the equivalent to shield regeneration, but for its physicalized components.

The question is only when that will come in, with engineering or with maelstrom.

I disagree that they are useless.... maybe in the context of small ship dog fighting, but in capital ship stripping of PDC and turrets they will be very useful. Take the Polaris, 1 million shields... but the ballistic will penetrate to some degree those shields. THey may not be a treat to the hull of the polaris, but stripping out the PDC and damaging turrets they will be very effective and then bigger ships can come in with torps to do the real damage. THey have a purpose, just not what you are testing them for.

It makes the game much more strategic and requiring multiple types of ships to win big battles... and a lot less point and shoot race with DPS being king.

Ok so, What I see here is that the way of calculating the damage is slightly "wrong" (let me explain).

The first gate should be the 8% of the percentage of the power given to shield given that is a bubble shield, if the shield is divided in 4 parts then you should divide the amount of power of the shield by 4 in case you have each part of the shield at 100%

The second gate then is the amount that your hull can absorb, wich shouldn't be just a percentage, your hull is a pre-defined thing It makes no sense at all. That means that your hull's damage absortion capacity depends on the gun firing at you. So, totally theoric values with no shield, Let's say, your hull has a 50% damage reduction, and a 1000 dmg gun shots at you, your hull absorbed 500 points, ok, but if you get shot by 10000 dmg gun, the hull can absorb 5000 points? makes no sense. Your phisical hull should have some HP, not a percentage. When a your hull HP drops to Zero, you should not be able to absorb more damage and all the damage left would go to the HP pool

So Then, the calculation would be like this for bubble shield where X is the raw gun damage and Y the resultant damage: Y = HP_Pool - ((X * (8% * 33%)) - Hull_HP_Left)

If the result is 0 or negative, then you are dead, if it's positive, you're still alive.

OR they could make the damage model like War Thunder and add the shield mechanic

I've seen lots of comments noting different corrections to the calculation and thing you forgot. I'll just throw them together here:
1.) the 33% on spviewer is the triangle default, not the physical resitance, that value is 8.3%
2.) You ignored the Damage Absorption effect from Shields, which is between 0% and 30% depending on Shield HP and gets reduced when the Shield HP goes down. It's not tied to the shield triangle / PowerPips, which is why it's not tied to the Bug in 1.)
Nonetheless, by ignoring the Absorption your calculations were roughly correct again,which is why the real test confirmed the theoretical result.

Yeah, do a side by side ballistic vs laser canon test on a reclaimer and then tell me ballistics are useless. I’ll hang up and listen. Love all your stuff Foxy, but I think you are leaving out many factors on this one. 😊

Very nice video thank you for testing it, I was wondering can you do an energy weapon comparison vs the same ballistics?

I sorta disagree that they're useless: energy weapons would have to first drop shields (and they suffer a damage reduction too) before they even start doing damage to the hull (and some hulls also have damage reductions for energy, albeit lower). They work differently, and ballistics have ammo limitations. But if targeting components, specially on something heavily shielded then I think they have their place. Not everything is about PvP time to kill.

meh they not useless they allow you to penetrate shields to take out weapons on large ships very fast. just giving ballistics a bit more spread damage would make them a bit more useful

Yeah if CIG wanted to do this right they would need to solit it into physical dmg by caliber... not gona happens, this is a bandaid and will stay till 's00n tm' comes

the problem w ballsitcs isnt the damage. its the damn speed. they are all so slow.

CIG fucked up again

While CIG may find some value in your analysis, it’s essentially irrelevant until the armor system is introduced. They likely aim for the armor to reduce ballistic damage by about the same amount, but at this stage, they can't differentiate between ships with and without armor.

One thing about ballistics is that while very little passes through, they do destroy parts and maves. On certain ships, losing mavs can be very crippling to ship flight.

I use a hornet with 4 panthers and two revs. I use only the panthers to get shields down and add the revs once the shields are down and this leads to extremely fast kills. Maybe it's all in my head but I seem to kill quicker this way than I do running panthers and rhinos.

o7

Well that explains why the Pisces is made out of paper 😂

They obviously don't suck : you destroyed 3 ships while their shields were still up (except for the last ammo on the F8).

Btw @Alexpetrov8871 listed several positive points in favour of ballistics.

*Cries in Inferno*

The video doesn't show that ballistic weapons are useless because you didn't have a comparable laser. Weapon, right, it would show how many shots from a laser cannon versus how many shots from a ballistic cannon?

I had a LOT of fun with the 4 X AD5B ballistics with the old Corsair and the old power model... could rip a hammerhead in seconds. And I could put the shield power to 100% fully since they didnt influence the ballistics DPS... so great for bounties this was. But yh a lot of things have changed.

The drawbacks of ammo isn't worth in the current state of the game IMO. Anything that has shields strong enough to resist incoming DPS from smaller ships also has so much hull HP and physical resistance that you'll run out of ammo, and if you bring more people you can just chew through the shields anyway.

Also the current meta is smaller ships, ballistics are made to punch up against slower targets, energy weapons are better at punching down.

They might be better on larger ships when/if we ever get a complete rework on how ammo/charge capacity works or by allowing ammo refills as a part of engineering.

So my understanding in this. For ballistics, when shields are on, somewhere between 60-80% of the damage passes through the shields and is applied to the hull depending on shield health. This is why your numbers for the F8C were slightly off, it was doing a bit more damage than the 66% passthrough you used, but it wasn't noticeable on the other ships because there was excess damage due to the low overall hull HP. This damage is reduced by the "armor" (hull physical resistance), which is generally -50%. The 20-40% of damage that was absorbed by the shields is applied to the shield health, but first it is reduced by the shield physical damage modifier, which is -8.25% on all ships.

To summarize:
- 30-40% of the raw damage is dealt to the hull
- 18.35-36.7% of the raw damage is applied to the shields

Energy weapons dump all their damage into the shields and then all into the hull. With lower mitigation on the hull (0-5%) they do more damage overall. Generally they do about,

- 83.5% damage to shields (on all ships), until broken
- ~95-100% damage to the hull

My assumption for the current state of ballistics is that once physicalized armor is added there will be both the opportunity to target unarmored areas (like thrusters), and armor degradation. With a health value for armor we'll see players rewarded for continuing to target the same areas on a ship and eventually punch through the armor there, this would be especially noticeable against big ships. We'll probably also see armor penetration values unique to different weapon classes, with things like railguns and mass drivers having more than gatlings. Maybe just a higher velocity = higher penetration.

All speculation in that last part, but for the moment ballistics kinda suck.

So how does this compare to the laser cannon shots? how many m series shots does it take to kill each ship?

its bullshyt, didnt you saw the shield resistance for Energy i TWICE the value of the balistics? so what?

I mean, just last night I was doing vhrt in the inferno. Melted a carrack and a starfarer that were defending eachother. Of course popped em both with missiles at far range then cleaned em up quick with ballistics. Didn't get a scratch. Ballistics still feel good to use.