Aeson
Posts: 784
Joined: 8/30/2013 Status: offline
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quote:
I see what you're getting at... at the MOMENT of firing the weapon (every 1.6 sec) there is an energy surge of 38... Not 24 as the average value would have you think. So I'm guessing as long as you have enough energy STORAGE to cover the spike (per second) you can recover from the sudden drain... at that point I guess we're back talking about reactor capacities. You can look at it this way, yes. Energy storage limits the number of weapons which can be fired simultaneously, reactor output limits the overall rate of fire (or the maximum number of weapons you can fire at maximum rate, if you prefer to look at it that way). If you have insufficient reactor output to meet the weapon power requirements, the overall rate of fire will be reduced once the stored energy runs out; if you have insufficient energy storage, the weapons you have will fire in staggered sets rather than all at once. To give a quick example, say that I have a ship with 300 excess reactor output and an energy storage capacity of 300. I decide to arm this ship with unupgraded Impact Assault Blasters (38 energy per shot and one shot every 1.7 seconds, so time-average power requirement of 22.4 energy/s). This ship can fire 7 Impact Assault Blasters simultaneously (300/38 = 7.9, rounded down to 7) and 13 Impact Assault Blasters continuously at maximum rate (300*1.7/38 = 13.4, rounded down to 13). If I arm the ship with 13 Impact Assault Blasters, the firing pattern I'll get should be something like 7 blasters firing simultaneously, followed by another blaster shot about 0.013 seconds later (300 - 38*7 = 34, so the ship's reactors need to generate 4 energy), then 3 more blaster shots at intervals of 0.127 seconds, with this pattern repeating every 1.7 seconds. If I arm the ship with only 7 Impact Assault Blasters, then every 1.7 seconds I'll get a burst of 7 blaster shots. If the ship has an available reactor output of 112 instead of 300, then the ship's reactors can only support the continuous firing of 5 Impact Assault Blasters at maximum rate of fire. If I arm the ship with 7 Impact Assault Blasters, the ship can still fire 7 blasters simultaneously if it's had time to store up enough energy, but the volley 1.7 seconds into the engagement will consist of only five shots, with one additional shot being fired at about 2.04 seconds into the engagement and another shot at about 2.38 seconds into the engagement, and the volley at 3.4 seconds into the engagement will consist of only 3 blaster shots (with four more shots following at 0.34 second intervals), and so on until the ship's overall rate of fire is reduced to something that the reactor output can support (in this specific example, that'd mean that the long-term average rate of fire for the ship is going to be similar to that of a ship armed with only five blasters instead of the seven that this vessel was armed with). The reason I brought this up initially, though, was that when you were looking at arming your stations, you dismissed a couple of weapon options because the energy requirement listed in the weapon component detail panel was greater than the difference between excess reactor output and the current weapons energy per second, which is a faulty comparison because the units of the things being compared do not match.
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