Let's say a target spaceship has 100 hit points before their weapons are down/engines out/whatever. After modifiers for ECM, Evasive Maneuvers, etc, our ship has a 50% chance to hit. Which comes to about 250~300 shots to take down the target. Let's go with 300 shots, just to be sure. At this point, would you like to deliver all 300 shots immediately?

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Original post by AngleWyrm Let's say a target spaceship has 100 hit points before their weapons are down/engines out/whatever. After modifiers for ECM, Evasive Maneuvers, etc, our ship has a 50% chance to hit. Which comes to about 250~300 shots to take down the target. Let's go with 300 shots, just to be sure. At this point, would you like to deliver all 300 shots immediately?

erm.... yes?

I'm not entirely sure what you're asking here.

Nope. 299, 3 second pause, final 1.

A little context please?

Disable and capture the ship?

If you're asking whether or not I'd want to sit through one hundred and fifty misses and one hundred and fifty hits to destroy an already disabled ship, the answer would be no way!

Otherwise, I'm going to have to also vote for context.

Context? Oh yeah, that. I was originally going to name this "Carrying Capacity", and then notice that M-16s have a 3-round burst mode, and that fighter pilots usually launch their missiles in salvos of two instead of one at a time, and bombers that sometimes unload the whole shebang.

But I got lost on the way from 'copy' to 'paste'. I blame it on

">Music Videos.

">Definitely evil.

Anyway, ammunition storage: If I had a weapon capable of delivering all my ammo at once, I'de want to look at the target and estimate how much I should use. Which seems like more fun than dragging it out and getting killed.

[Edited by - AngleWyrm on May 19, 2008 6:47:37 PM]

That is a rather cold and tactical way of playing, similar to asking how big a bomb do you need to blow the ship up. The main draw to actually shooting though is that all those evasive maneuvers and chance to misses and actually taking shots is fun. so no, i would shoot each shot and enjoy it.

Hey whatever works for ya.
For me, it's figuring out how to win.

Quote:

Original post by AngleWyrm Context? Oh yeah, that. I was originally going to name this "Carrying Capacity", and then notice that M-16s have a 3-round burst mode, and that fighter pilots usually launch their missiles in salvos of two instead of one at a time, and bombers that sometimes unload the whole shebang.

In the M-16 and fighter cases, it's because they need to conserve ammo, and they don't have nice convenient 'hit percentages' to work out the average number of shots needed to kill a target. Also the situations in which these weapons are used typically means that the number of potential targets they are likely to have is unknown at the start of the mission. So they fire in bursts designed to give them a reasonable chance of a kill without leaving them defenseless later on.

Bombers on the other hand, will be told "bomb this accordion factory and this mime school and return to base". They have a fixed number of targets, and they're not going to bomb anything else, and nor are they going to want to return to base with half a load of bombs still in the bay. So they'll dump the whole lot in one dollop.