Build: 1.7.7 3718 (also manifests on 3720 experimental) Mode: Survival Mode: Single Player Reproducibility: Always Severity: Minor/Major Type: Weapon Damage Summary: When attacking a moving ship, weapon impacts to the rear of the ship appear to do less damage than attacks to the front Description: Noticed during some testing that when chasing down a moving OPV your weapons appear to do very little damage to shield / hull if you are behind it, but if you swing around in front and lead the target your weapons do significantly more damage. Reproduced this with both plasma turrets and rocket launchers. The video shows 5 plasma turrets attempting to shoot at a dreadnought. You can see almost no shield damage being done from the hits to the rear, but significant damage when attacking to the front. Steps to Reproduce: Load the attached savegame. You will start in an admin-core player vessel pointing at a Dreadnought Optional: gm iv to the dread and turn off its turrets Let the dread get up to speed, then match speed directly behind it. Either switch to the rocket launchers and start firing at the back, or enable the "Plasma turrets" signal switch in the control panel. Observe the weak damage effects Flip around to the front of the dread and fly backwards in front of it. Continue firing and observe that you are doing more damage to the shield. Screenshots:
This is easily tested using the Project Eden Debug Rocket Launcher I just added to the scenario Reforged Eden. It deals a ton of damage with a high rate of fire yet if you shoot weak orbital patrol vessels in the rear while they are in motion many shots will fail to deal any damage at all or will deal minimal damage. That debug weapon makes the bug very obvious to see happen.
Same with DI turned on against an unshielded target. Video in EGS 1.10.8 4262: And the log file is attached. After some testing (with multiple weapon types), thinking and conversation among us we wonder if this could be happening because of the desync between the projectile "impact point" where it hits the block and where the game thinks the block is when it calculates damage? We operate under the assumption that once a projectile impacts its impact point has a fixed coordinate in space. However, the block the projectile hits has a moving coordinate. If the ship and the block the projectile impacts is moving away from the player and the impact point of the projectile he shot, and the game misses a beat - it may be calculating the damage to an empty space since the block's moved away from that space and there is nothing to apply the damage to. If the ship and the block the projectile impacts is moving towards the player and the projectile, and the game misses a beat - then either the block would be overlapping the impact point coordinate when the calculation is made, or the next block behind it would be. Either way, there would be something to calculate damage to. Obviously from the video this effect is not consistent as sometimes the projectiles from behind still hit. And this is of course also speculation on the game mechanic we otherwise don't know the workings of - but in case this helps )
Here is another video showing it. The orange shield impact effects make it easy to tell that most shots are not hitting the ship. Unfortunately it has been 2 years and this is still bugged, leading to fights against patrol vessels being much more difficult than intended and making significant balancing issues for any ship versus ship combat.
