4Game

Flying my T10 for ages, Thargon Missiles always seemed to do unfair amounts of damage. In my testing with my t10 with 5600 absolute hull, I was taking 2% hull damage per missile, which translates to something like 112 damage per missile! Even with the inaccuracy of using % values with such a large ship, the minimum damage would be 84, at EXACTLY 1.5% of my hull which would then be rounded up.

This seems pretty ridiculous, obviously; even a single cyclops swarm has 32 missiles, which should do 3/4ths of my hull in damage!

Out of curiosity, I decided to re-test this damage with my little yellow Adder, the Rubber Duck. She has 280 hull and is basically a piece of tissue paper. According to my above calculations, you'd expect her to die in no more than 4 missiles, right? And each individual missile should be doing between 30% and 40% my hull in damage.

But that didn't happen. Each missile did 10% damage. Exactly, and consistently. One hit took me from 90% to 80%, from 80% to 70%, from 70% to 60%.

This is dramatically different! That translates to 28 damage, and no more than 30 and no less than 26!

So…what gives?

One possible answer is that Thargon Missiles have long been theorized to deal COLLISION damage. They don't cancel repair limpets when they hit you, which is the same as if you ram into a rock with a repair limpet active, is one argument to support this.

But an interesting side effect of this is that collision damage is based on hull mass, on BOTH sides of the equation. An example of this is if you ram two cutters into each other at max boost; each cutter will take multiple thousands of points of hull damage. But if a cutter rams into a sidewinder at max boost(assuming the sidey has lots of hull reinforcements and can survive), the sidey may take 50-90% damage, but the total amount of raw damage will actually be a lot less. While a cutter in the same scenario would have taken thousands, the sidewinder will take hundreds. Larger percentage, smaller raw numbers. JUST like the adder vs t10, above!

What does this mean?

Well, it means smaller ships are going to take dramatically less damage compared to larger ships in the same exact scenario. It also explains in some part why the T10 seems so inadequate at AX combat; it actually is taking quite a bit more damage than smaller ships.

It also means that larger ships really need to prioritize taking out the swarm immediately.

One potential other side effect of this depends on whether or not the damage dealt impacts MODULE damage taken. The modules on larger ships, especially the external modules like weapons, will typically have about the same amount of integrity of smaller ships, but larger ships are taking four times more damage. This means their external modules will die about four times faster, and no matter how much hull you have, if all your weapons fail, you're out of the fight.

TLDR: Thargon Missiles do much more damage the larger the ship hull they're hitting.