Point Defense Turret Problems

[TheBlueBomber343]

After using point defense turrets, I've noticed two major problems.

1. They seem to have problems locking on to certain objects. I'm thinking maybe they non-instant acceleration and deceleration, causing them to constantly overshoot some targets when locking on. I've noticed that it seems like it mostly happens when it's trying to lock on to objects a bit further away.

2. I think the aiming is a bit messed up even apart from the overshooting, as turrets seem to aim just a bit to the right of the object centerpoints. With larger objects this really isn't a huge issue at all, and it's honestly barely noticeable. However, when it comes to shooting smaller rocks, it constantly seems to lock on to a point just a bit beside the rock, causing it to miss those smaller rocks a lot of the time.

[Merik Fyndhorn]

I'm using 2 NPDT turrets on my K225. There are a couple of things which impact accuracy.

1. Distance from ship. The further away a target is and the faster it is moving the more likely you are to miss.

2. Recoil from firing, messes with alignment on the next shot. There is a recoil from a shot. It is worse the further off the center line your target is. If your ship already has a tendency to bounce back and forth a significant amount when trying to respect the aim at the autopilots mark on the hud the recoil will be a much worse problem for you.

3. There is a degree of inaccuracy built into the firing solution. If you use the NDCI autopilot you can actually see the minor 1-2 degrees of confidence I'm speaking of.

In short though. If you stabilize your ship I expect you will find you get better results. My hit rate has to be in the mid 90's which is more than adequate in my mind.

[TheBlueBomber343]

Originally posted by Merik Fyndhorn:

I'm using 2 NPDT turrets on my K225. There are a couple of things which impact accuracy.

1. Distance from ship. The further away a target is and the faster it is moving the more likely you are to miss.

2. Recoil from firing, messes with alignment on the next shot. There is a recoil from a shot. It is worse the further off the center line your target is. If your ship already has a tendency to bounce back and forth a significant amount when trying to respect the aim at the autopilots mark on the hud the recoil will be a much worse problem for you.

3. There is a degree of inaccuracy built into the firing solution. If you use the NDCI autopilot you can actually see the minor 1-2 degrees of confidence I'm speaking of.

In short though. If you stabilize your ship I expect you will find you get better results. My hit rate has to be in the mid 90's which is more than adequate in my mind.

Yeah I use the autopilot that allows me to see the degrees off, which is one of the reasons I've been able to spot the weird targeting. It's not even like normal inaccuracy though. It's more like the designated center-point of rocks is actually placed incorrectly. This wouldn't really matter in most cases as you don't need that much accuracy, but it causes problems for these turrets.

Sure, sometimes the rock is rotated correctly and there's no issue. But if it's rotated in such a way that that center point is a bit too far away from it you'll basically miss every shot until you or the rock moves enough. (This is just my theory of what's going on. I really don't know what's causing it.)

But yeah, I def think it's a code issue and not intended. And if it is intended I think there are better ways to go about making it inaccurate.

[Koder]

Originally posted by TheBlueBomber343:

Yeah I use the autopilot that allows me to see the degrees off, which is one of the reasons I've been able to spot the weird targeting. It's not even like normal inaccuracy though. It's more like the designated center-point of rocks is actually placed incorrectly.

Could you get me a screenshot of that?

[obliviondoll]

Originally posted by Koder:

Originally posted by TheBlueBomber343:

Yeah I use the autopilot that allows me to see the degrees off, which is one of the reasons I've been able to spot the weird targeting. It's not even like normal inaccuracy though. It's more like the designated center-point of rocks is actually placed incorrectly.

Could you get me a screenshot of that?

I know I'm late to this particular party, but I've been using the PD turrets lately and this problem is still occuring, so...

https://i.imgur.com/jk0apAI.png
https://i.imgur.com/cZ5N6BD.png
https://i.imgur.com/fmMjUNV.png
https://i.imgur.com/gcZjCet.png

This is only really obvious when you're close to the maximum auto-targeting range, but it's definitely visible in the pics I posted. It's also recognisably a problem when you're moving at about 10m/s or higher and firing at small rocks which are off-centre from your direction of movement, and the bullets keep missing to the right of the target, which can happen much closer than where the aim point is visibly off-centre. The problem of actually missing your targets tends to go away when you reduce the target's angular velocity (coming to a stop relative to the rings means you'll hit 99% of shots even with the aim point being off-centre enough to show a possibility of missing).

[Koder]

We see nothing of the sort happening with pristine hardware. Please make sure that your point defense turret is not misaligned by impact damage - aiming problems caused by reckless flying are not covered by the Nakamura Dynamics Limited Warranty.

[obliviondoll]

Originally posted by Koder:

We see nothing of the sort happening with pristine hardware. Please make sure that your point defense turret is not misaligned by impact damage - aiming problems caused by reckless flying are not covered by the Nakamura Dynamics Limited Warranty.

Is it worth pointing out that I can only see the result of the misalignment while in flight as a result of an autpilot system which is also made by Nakamura? It seems odd that they can't make this system interface even with their own weapon systems to help with aim adjustements to mitigate the impact of these problems.

[Koder]

To reiterate, with a pristine system in this configuration no such misalignment was observed. Are you sure your point defenses are not damaged?

[obliviondoll]

Originally posted by Koder:

To reiterate, with a pristine system in this configuration no such misalignment was observed. Are you sure your point defenses are not damaged?

Sorry, to clarify:

I'm not 100% certain but I suspect there was misalignment. I've done some further testing where I made sure I had a freshly installed turret on a new ship, and couldn't reproduce the results.

My previous comment was an in-character commentary about the fact that Nakamura's NDCI autopilot can accurately track misalignment on a weapon which was also made by Nakamura, but isn't capable of correcting its aim. Because that's the kind of thing that annoys people irl when companies make software that sometimes has issues even when it's running on their own hardware.