Feedback on potential Railgun issue - Anyone else?

[Morkonan]

Anyone else having any issues with getting railguns to fire properly or detect their range appropriately?

I'm experiencing some "weirdness" with railguns at 19 Accelerators long. They were fine at 15, but now they're sometimes behaving strangely. (Yes, everything is great with efficiency, Crew, ammo, etc. I've checked and rechecked and checked again... and again... and again. :) They fire just fine on Continuous Fire mode.)

Sometimes, when directed to only fire when they have a Target, they will never, ever, fire when they have a target... Sometimes, they act as if they have half the range of the old 15 Accelerators I had. The ship doesn't appear to want to follow its saved Combat orders in that respect - It will close to range, then just keep closing until it's well within missile range before firing.

Range scales and Targeted fire commands just seem to be "off" for some reason I can't figure out. Hence, it may be a "bug." I'm just looking for some hard confirmation before "officially" reporting it. :)

I can most often get it to behave as it should if I choose "Fire at Will" for the Railguns and select a Target for them as normal, rotating the ship to get some "ralifanning" in and all that, but the "Only Fire At Target" just isn't reliable for some reason.

Has the enemy discovered my ship's prefix codes?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jg1mYsIrFPs

It was fully reliable and I always used it before I upgraded the Railgun to a longer length.

I'm going to rebuild the Rails (4) in Career mode to see if that clears up the issue and will test the current ship in Creative as well.

Potential contributors to the problem or unplanned-for circumstances:

I did as I always do, save my current in-game ship as it is, load that design up in Creative, redesign/upgrade it there, build it, test all its systems, save it as the new blueprint when finished, load that up in Career to replace the one in the blueprint screen and then "Make it so." That's never seemed to cause any issues, but I'm wondering if that has contributed in some way so decided to mention it. (I'm going to save the current build in Career, reload the game to Career, load up that saved design for the same ship and then see if it prompts me with a no-cost "Make it So," "just in case" the game's seeing different things for some reason due to that Career/Creative mixing.)

I added the new railgun segments in Creative mode by copying/pasting a four-accelerator section across all four railgun assemblies at once. I went back and added the then overwritten launchers and tidied up, etc. I wonder if that could have caused an issue due to the railguns unique modular design. (ie: May bug it out in certain unique situations?)

[sir Evans]

This sounds like a bug. Possibly percentage increase turns some ingame counter over, best course of action would be to send bug report to a developer with a savegame.

[saideron]

Interesting. I've only ever used 18 section railguns (202%) and haven't had a problem. Did some cursory testing today and it seemed to work the same, although it could be because I built it all at the same time. Maybe try rebuilding the whole assembly from scratch.

Although, maybe do it on creative so you can send in the save with the bug.

[Morkonan]

I think I might have figured out where the problem is, if there is one:

It might have to do with the sequence I'm giving orders at times. Not each time, but during moments where I'm scrambling to get the situation under control. I haven't nailed it down, yet, but some combination "seems to" que up the Selected Target for the fire mission, but then it's put in que behind the "Go to Standard Combat Default distance/angle" order that's been saved. ie: Somewhere in there, it "seems like" that. Is it? I don't know for sure.

Last night, there were times when everything was clearly good-to-go. Target was in range, guns good, line on target... nada at times last night.

This afternoon, I didn't have any issues except for one time during a screwy encounter with an enemy ship that just happened to join the fray. Nukes were involved, so I was scrambling to issue new orders when against a swarm/pack with little nuke buggers and a random capital ship.

That's when it hit me - The only time this happened last night was generally during "crisis" issues. And, that may involve re-issuing orders, change them, mixing up what ships I gave weapon mount orders to, changing those, re-clicking, etc... eg: Me Confused = Game Confused.

If I can dupe it, I'll send it, no problem. (No need to make-work if there's no reason if I detect "operator error" somewhere. :))

[Morkonan]

Update: OK, I think I figured it out.

Cheesing my way through end-game with my four-barrel railgunner... I end up setting up fun dramatic railgun shots to make the enemy cry.

Railfanning is a thing. So, sometimes I'm fanning, sometimes I'm just targeting a new spot on an enemy or even switching targets. There are times when I may change my "range" from my default combat setting.

And, of course, I'll Rotate to line up the shot...

That's the problem point.

The below is wild-conjecture, since I'm no coder and can't know for sure:

So, apparently issuing a range-change command to set a new range-to-target will que it up as a movement order. The Rotate command is not a "rotate right now as you are this very instant" if the ship is doing what? Moving somewhere... It's a Movement Order, but is a bit different than any others it appears. It's just added to the next waypoint like the player clicked "shift to add" for Rotate. It's done for you automagically when the ship arrives or when it figures out it can start that final rotation.

That combo puts the Rotate Command in this situation in a que'd order state with "movement orders"- The ship will Rotate after it reaches its newly reset Range-to-Target.

(I think velocity matters as well as distance to waypoint in regards to ship behavior going to a point and being ordered to rotate - They can't do both on the way there. There's a Flight Direction for players who want to strafe and have kitted their ship out to do that.)

And then what? It appears as if the combination of moving the ship position marker/cross to reset its current range to the selected target and then issuing the Rotate command will while the ship is targeting an enemy put everything after that in some kind of que..

My railgun shots were not firing because they appear to have been "que'd" up to wait to fire until the ship reached the new range due to me attempting to Rotate the ship after issuing that new range value.

"Fire At Will" worked because all weapons are designed to just fire at any enemy they see with no conditions other than be in sight and in range.

"Fire Only if given a Target" does not orient the ship around that weapon's line of sight to target, but does something a bit different. It may be some meshing of position-related stuff. It's meant to work as the ship's weapons bear on the target as the ship moves around so one can focus fire on one point.

Getting the ship to fire on a target while in Fire at Will mode is not a problem with a railgunner and using rotate. I haven't tested it with anything else.