Welcome to ATS' own wiki.

Read and remember the rules and conventions, they can be found at Help

Space Combat HOWTO

From ATS Wiki

Ok, here's the deal, I want to start a space combat HOWTO. As I've been learning, my knowledge is somewhat out of date, but I'm going to add whatever I can confirm in GZII. I'd like everyone to contribute. Also, my knowledge of wiki syntax is basic, and will probably forever stay basic. If anyone wants to format the page up a bit, please do.

WARNING

Some of the material in this article may be taken and used to "game" the system, or make it behave in unrealistic and unintended ways to your benefit. This guide is meant to help you be the best you can be within the intended confines of ASpace, I will not explain how to cheat the system, and if you do so based on this article, expect severe consequences from the administration.

What This Article Assumes

This article assumes that you are capable of basic flight and maneuvering in ASpace. You should be able to get in a ship, turn it on, leave port, raise shields, go somewhere else, lower shields, enter port, turn the ship off. You should understand the concepts of pitch, yaw and roll if you don't here's a link. You should understand very fundamentally how allocations work in ratios, and be able to properly control how much power you allocate to each system. If you find the article assuming anything else, please mention it either here or on the talk page.

Allocations

The basis of a successful combat mission is having good allocations. It doesn't matter how clever a pilot you are, if your weapons and shields aren't properly powered, you're going to be in a lot of trouble. Many people rely on presets these days, they can certainly be of great utility, but you should still be able to come up with a new set of allocations to suit a certain task.

Allocations Pre-Amble

It seems the best place to start this discussion is with what each setting does.

Under Helm:

Movement - Movement provides power to the ship's engines. More power to movement means your ship can move faster, in an inverse-square relationship, up to the rated capacity of your engines.
Shields - Provides input power for each individual shield. The final output of a shield grows inverse geometrically with input power, meaning you get diminishing returns.
Cloak/Other - This only has a meaning on ships that cloak. A cloaking device requires a set amount of power to function.

Under Tactical:

Beam Weap - This is the power fed to the beam capacitor to keep it charged. You need only enough to fully charge it between shots.
Missile Weap - This is the power fed to the missile capacitor to keep it charged. You need only enough to fully charge it between shots.
EW Systems - This is the power available for electronic warfare. Electronic warfare consists of sensor jamming and sensor augmentation. More is better.

Under Operations:

Transporters - Power needs to go here if you want to transport something, rarely relevant until after combat.
Tractors - Needed to power tractor beams. If opposing tractors are being used in combat, the person with more power here wins out, this includes breaking out of a tractor lock.
Miscellaneous - This recharges the batteries and increases the repair rate of the ship. With the exception of ships with very large batteries that want to drain some for critical systems, or ships with very large reactors that can afford to put extra power here, most ships simply allocate all battery power here to get a free repair boost.

Allocating Procedure

The procedure that I find works best when allocating is as follows:

Note the total power you have to play with (reactors plus batteries)
In most cases, subtract the power from batteries from this total and earmark it for Operation->Miscellaneous
Determine the total needed for systems that require precisely calculable inputs, subtracting this from the total
Determine the total needed for systems that require ballpark calculable inputs, in light of the remaining total
What is left is for systems that benefit from more power to no end

Precisely Calculable Systems

Movement

The amount of power required to move your ship's maximum impulse or warp is easily determined. The only question here is how fast you want to go. Generally you want to be able to go full standard warp, whether or not to allow for emergency warp probably depends on the intention of the allocation and your flying style. In some rare cases you may want to only allow for a portion of your ship's maximum speed to save power.

Calculating this is a two-step procedure. First you need to determine your ship's Movement Constant. The end of this article has a table of constants. If your ship is not present, use the following procedure to calculate the constant, and please update our table:

Allocate an arbitrary small amount of power to Helm->Movement. 1 GW is simplest. Call it M.
Hit warp cru, immediately followed by warp 0.
Note the value that the warp cru command returned as your maximum warp, call it MW.
Apply the following formula: M / MW².

So, in our example with 1 GW, let's take a small fighter, specifically a Cardassian Lekat. Allocating 1 GW of power allows the Lekat to move warp 10, and we would calculate as follows:

1 / 10²

= 1 / 100

= 0.01

The movement constant of this (incredibly lightweight) vessel is 0.01.

Now that we have our movement constant, let's call that MC. Next, pick the maximum speed you require, let's call it W. The number of GW that you will allocate to Helm->Movement is determined as follows:

W² * MC

Example: Andy the Andorian has just hijacked a Hideki from the Spoonheadia IV patrol. The po-po is chasing after him, and he needs to be sure his allocation will allow him maximum warp. He can quickly look at this page and find that its MC is 0.13, and a look at status from engineering mode tells him that the rated warp speeds are 15/16/17, meaning 15 normally, 16 emergency warp, 17 maximum emergency warp. He needs all 17 warp factors, and determines his Helm->Movement allocation as follows:

17² * 0.13

= 289 * 0.13

= 37.57

He allocates 37.57 GW to Helm->Movement and makes off like the bandit he is.

As a final note, you may be asking why warp? The power requirement for impulse grows faster than the one for warp, after all. While that may be true, in the speed ranges used on ATS warp is generally the more expensive of the two, impulse 95 requires the same allocation as warp 13.4, impulse 70 as warp 5.5. If you need to allocate based on impulse speeds, formulae are available at the end of the article.

Weapons

Weapons are very straight forward to calculate, very little in the way of corners can be cut here. From tactical mode, check beam stat and miss stat to determine the input and output values of your weapons, your weapons must be offline in order to get these values. Each weapon's power consumption is reported in the format W_i GW/W_o GW, where W_i is the input power required to fire the weapon, and W_o is the damage output of the weapon.

The input power from each weapon is drawn, upon firing, from its respective weapon capacitor, beam capacitor for beams and missile capacitor for missiles. These capacitors only charge once weapons are brought online, and at these times their current level of charge can be seen from the tactical status display. The level of charge increases once every second, and the increase is equal to the total amount of power allocated to the capacitor's weapon type. So if 1 GW is allocated to beams, every second the beam capacitor will gain 1 GW of charge.

Another important piece of information in the beam stat and miss stat command output is the recharge or recycle time of the weapon, this also only shows up when weapons are offline. It is a value in the format Rs and comes immediately before the power consumption information. This represents the maximum frequency with which the given weapon can fire.

The idea behind allocating for weapons is to have the weapon capacitors full by the time the weapon is next able to fire. More specifically, to have replenished the portion of the capacitor that the given weapon or volley used by the time it is ready to fire again, since weapons are not always fired together. Allocating more power than this does not help make your weapons stronger in any way, a common newbie mistake. Extra power simply dissipates once the capacitor is full.

Once we have the weapon's input power requirement and the recycle time, the formula for allocating weapon power is as follows:

ΣW_i / R

The Σ represents summation, in this case adding up all W_i values of the weapons that recycle every R seconds. This formula must be applied separately to beams and missiles, since power is allocated separately to them. It must also be applied separately for each recycle time within the weapon subtype. For example: the Defiant has beams on both 6s and 15s recycle times, they must be calculated separately and summed at the end for a total beam value.

Example: Andy the Andorian is back, after several years at a Cardassian hard labour resort. He's decided that stealing is bad, so he's signed up with Starfleet and, given his criminal background, been put in a comfy security position. One day, following the mysterious disappearance of fifteen different superiors, Andy finds himself manning tactical. After wiping off fingerprints, he begins to allocate his weapons power, starting with Tactical->Missile Weap. A look at miss stat shows 6 60s quantum torpedoes that each draw 1 GW of power. He allocates as follows:

Σ1 / 60

= 6 / 60

= 0.1

Next he moves on to Tactical->Beam Weap. A look at beam stat shows 4 6s pulse phasers that each draw 30 GW and 2 15s phaser arrays that each draw 60 GW. He allocates as follows:

Pulse phasers:

Σ30 / 6

= 120 / 6

= 20

Phaser arrays:

Σ60 / 15

= 120 / 15

= 8

Then he sums the two working values to get 28.

So Andy allocates 0.1 GW or 100 MW to Tactical->Missile Weap and 28 GW to Tactical->Beam Weap.

Ballpark Calculable Systems

Shields

Shields require a bit of art when allocating to them. Precise formulae for their performance are available, and they do not benefit indefinitely from more power, but the loss of benefit is gradual, and exactly where on this gradient to select can be tricky. To the right is a very nice graphic, contributed by Takor (the author of MapView) that paints this picture in slightly clearer terms.

Typing status from helm mode provides the power ratio for the shields, often called the shield ratio. Just as the the weapon power information is only available when weapons are offline, this is only available when the shields are offline. It is presented in the format SR_i GW:SR_o GW, the most common value is 5 GW:20 GW. This means that at SR_i GW of input, the shield output is SR_o GW, for this reason SR_i is known as the input of the shield ratio, SR_o is the output.

Adding or removing power changes the output according to a geometric series with ratio 1/2. What this means for non-math people is that putting 5 GW into 5:20 shields provides 20 GW of protection, putting another 5 GW in provides an additional 10 GW, for a total of 30 GW. Another 5 GW provides 5 GW more protection, for a total of 35 GW, the next 5 GW provide 2.5 GW, for a total of 37.5 GW, and so forth. For those having trouble picturing this, the graph illustration should help.

It can be shown mathematically that this means shields can never exceed 2 * shield output (SR_o) GW of output, so 5:20 shields with infinite power project 40 GW of protection. Because of this, and the way shield requirements grow so fast, shields with a larger shield output values are better in almost all cases, even if the input is higher and they are more expensive to operate at low power.

Choosing shield power levels depends on how much power is left. Larger ships which produce extremely high levels of power may have the luxury of increasing all shields to a very high level, smaller ships may have to select compromise levels, and may have to favour some shields over others. This is ok, because small ships have the luxury of turning and accelerating much faster than large ships, which allows them to more easily select which shield an opponent is hitting.

A few general rules apply:

Fore and aft shields are usually prioritized above other shields. Most weapons fire fore or aft, and most opponents are either being closed on or chasing, so it makes sense that these will see the brunt of the assault. Once these have worn thin, a skilled pilot will force an opponent to hit another set of shields, and possibly re-allocate power accordingly.

The input value of the shield ratio is a good bare minimum to use when powering shields. On some very small ships even this can be unrealistic for all shields.

Depending on whether you will use yaw or pitch to change angles when fighting, you will want to prioritize one pairing of dorsal/ventral and port/starboard shields over the other. Port/starboard for yaw, dorsal/ventral for pitch.

The power you are leaving behind goes to electronic warfare systems, and potentially repair, so moderate consumption as much as it is reasonable to do so.

Loosely speaking, power to shields doesn't make your shields last longer! The output power of your shields is used when determining internal damage to the ship. At the point where you are taking no internal damage of significance, you've powered shields enough. As the shield integrity drops so does the output power, so you may want a buffer, but keep it within reason. See the Understanding Damage section.

In order to aid these choices there are two powerful tools. One is the graph image mentioned numerously above, the other is a pair of formulae:

If we are considering a given input value S for a shield with ratio SR_o GW:SR_i GW, we can predict the output as follows:

2 * SR_o * (1 - 1/2^{S / SR_i})

If we have firmly decided that we want to produce a given output level with a shield, call it SO, we can determine a requisite input value as follows:

SR_i * [ln(1 - SO / (2 * SR_o)) / ln(1/2)]

Example: Brent the Breen has learned of a Starfleet vessel with an old criminal acquaintance running tactical. After paying him to take a dive in their upcoming firefight, and promising to keep his escape pod undestroyed, Brent sets out to prepare his ship for combat. Brent is flying a R'derex that fell off a truck in his backyard, and is attempting to choose good shield allocations, knowing he has slightly over 85 GW left after movement and weapons, and that his shields are 4.4:22. He decides he will mainly pitch, and prioritizes his shields fore/aft, dorsal/ventral, port/starboard.

For fore and aft he wants to produce 40 GW of protection, matching any normal 5:20 shield's maximum. He determines his needed input as follows:

4.4 * [ln(1 - 40 / (2 * 22)) / ln(1/2)]

= 4.4 * [ln(1 - 40 / 44) / ln(1/2)]

= 4.4 * [ln(4 / 44) / ln(1/2)]

= 4.4 * 3.459434

= 15.222

This leaves about 55 GW for four shields and sensors. He determines a 3:2 ratio between his main and secondary shields seems appropriate, and puts a flat 10 GW in dorsal and ventral, then finally, needing to save power, uses a 3:1 ratio for his tertiary shields, giving starboard and port 5 GW each. His expected protection from dorsal and ventral shields is:

2 * 22 * (1 - 1/2^{10 / 4.4})

= 2 * 22 * (1 - 1/2^2.272727)

= 2 * 22 * (1 - 0.206938)

= 2 * 22 * 0.793062

= 44 * .793062

= 34.895

For a respectable 34.895 GW of protection on his secondary shields.

It should be noted that the formulae used above represent 100% undamaged shields. For shields that have taken damage, the more complete formula is provided below in the formula section.

What's Left

Electronic Warfare

Repair and Batteries

Any power diverted to Miscellaneous under Operations has the double effect of increasing repair recharge rate, and recharging the batteries (or keeping them from dying to begin with).

In most cases the batteries are simply used to recharge themselves, gaining a free repair boost, and no further thought is given to them. This is usually good enough, and in fact the way I recommend in my general procedure above, but a ship's batteries can contribute in other ways, and repairs can have more than just the ship's batteries allocated to them. The goal of this section is to give anyone interested in finding power for other systems in the batteries, or dumping excess power into repair, an idea of how effective their choices are likely to be.

First, for the person who wants to remove all power from Operations->Miscellaneous, I have a simple demonstration. It can be seen to some degree in the repair chart to the right, but I'll use the repair regeneration formula to show why this is a terrible idea. Take a ship with total repair capacity RC, and assume that Operations->Miscellaneous has RP power diverted to it. The number of repair points regenerated every second is given by:

(1 + √RP) * RC / 1000

So, in general, let's see the difference between 0 GW RP and 1 GW RP in a ship with any repair capacity RC:

(1 + √0) * RC / 1000	(1 + √1) * RC / 1000
= 1 * RC / 1000	= (1 + 1) * RC / 1000
= RC / 1000	= 2 * RC / 1000

That's right, by spending just 1 GW of power you would have doubled your repair capacity. This trend continues along the perfect squares, so 4 GW will triple your capacity, 9 GW will quadruple, all the way up to a ten-fold increase at 81 GW, a twenty-fold increase at 361 GW and beyond. Now, it seems fair to say - unless your ship produces exceptional power levels - that the difference between repairing ten times faster and eleven times faster is not worth going from 81 GW to 100 GW of power spent, those 19 GW should probably be going to shields or EW. It's probably also fair to say, conversely, that doubling your repair capacity is one of the best expenditures of 1 GW available on your ship, second probably only to the small amount of power running your missile capacitors.

The second consideration is battery charge. The battery's level of charge, available from status in engineering or operations mode, is provided in GW*H. A battery with, for example, 10 GW*H of charge will discharge after providing a number of GW for a number of hours that, when multiplied together, give 10; This could be 10 GW for 1 hour, 1 GW for 10 hours, 5 GW for 2 hours, or any other combination. The only restriction is that a battery has a maximum discharge rate, which is the amount of power it gives when set to 100%, and can be seen from status in engineering mode. The total charge in GW*H and the maximum discharge rate in GW are equal, meaning that an ATS ship battery can run with no recharge at full power for exactly one hour.

A Complete Example

Understanding Space

Space is Discrete

Though it rarely seems that way to new pilots, and it does a good job of simulating a continuous time line, space is not continuous. Everything in space happens on ticks, which occur once every second, and update the objects in space to reflect everything that has happened to them in the last second. This includes obvious things like movement, and less obvious things like changes in reactor levels and power allocations. This has a number of consequences, some make life easier, some make it more difficult.

Understanding Damage

Damage can basically be broken into two categories: shield decay and internals. Every time a shield is hit, that shield takes damage, reducing its effectiveness at preventing internal damage. Every time a vessel is hit, a number of internal systems take damage, this number depends on the total damage of the volley.

Internal Damage

Shield Decay

Shields decay every time a weapon volley hits them. Individual weapons comprising the volley don't matter for this purpose, only the total damage that the volley produced. So if I'm in a Lekat, with four 80 GW particle cannons (missiles), fire all missiles and three of them hit, the damage to the opponent's shields is based on the 240 GW total.

Shields fall when the shield's output would be less than 1 GW, which, depending on how much power is put into the shield, generally falls somewhere in the 1-4% range.

Early in testing I noticed that shield damage seemed to behave strangely as the shield output changed, just when I thought I was going crazy darky informed me that he'd observed the same thing. This is a very important and counter-intuitive concept: shield damage is not dependent on the current output of the shield. No matter how much power you pump into your shields, they will fall after roughly the same amount of damage. Pumping a shield up to try to keep it alive may keep it above the 1 GW threshold for one extra volley, with some luck, but that's the extent of the good you can do. This is critical to understand when making intelligent choices about power level adjustments.

After a volley of D GW, the number of percentage points of integrity that the shield will lose is given by:

D / (10 + SS/10)

Where SS is the ship's total number of superstructure points. It's important to note that, even though damage is not done directly to the superstructure anymore, the total size of a ship's hull is critical in its ability to soak damage with its shields. As a matter of fact, it's the only factor that determines this.

Understanding Hit Probabilities

At Warp

At any warp speed, within weapons range, it is next to impossible to miss an opponent. Any discussion of warp hit probabilities is pretty worthless under the current system. Just know that whatever you fire at warp, you hit with. The only exception to this are fighters, which can sometimes be difficult to hit at medium and long ranges at warp.

Manoeuvres

Triangulation

The granddaddy of manoeuvres on ATS is triangulation. It's one that all the older players know, and it used to be the basis of getting from point A to point B in ASpace. These days autopilot and long acceleration times have made it largely obsolete, but it's an extremely useful combat manoeuvre to know.

The basic procedure for triangulation is as follows:

Get close to the target at warp, within a few thousand su.
Stop
Intercept the target
Pitch by an amount designed to put you exactly one second at warp 1 away
Go to warp 1 for one second, when you stop you're at the position exactly one second at warp 1 away from your old position and the target
Intercept the target
Go to warp 1 for one second

This puts you exactly on top of the target, in theory. The name and the math come from basic trigonometry, the idea being that your position, the target position, and some third position make up a triangle where the distance between the third position and the target as well as the third position and yourself is exactly one second at warp 1. The math to determine this isn't too difficult, though with different ships accelerating at different rates, accounting for this becomes more complex.

Approximate Triangulation

Since acceleration plays such a large factor in current ATS, extremely precise triangulation is quite complicated. In combat or another situation that requires thinking on your feet, stopping for minutes at a time to consult your calculator for precise results just isn't an option. In that spirit, let's forget about precision and do it approximately, but make the math simple enough that anyone can do it mentally with almost no effort.

The approximate formula for the pitch, with X being the distance in su, is:

90 - X / 1000 + X / 10000 * 2

In other words, pitch 90 is the basis. For every 1,000 su of distance the pitch goes down by 1, for every full 10,000 su of distance it goes up by 2. Why is this easy? Well, it's just a matter of place shifting, let's look at an example:

Brent the Breen is 22,904 su away from a juicy target after some warp combat got taken to impulse. Coming in on autopilot requires warping well away, stopping, turning around, and coming back in, not very fast or smooth. A plain warp 1 hop is useless, because after one tick he'll have passed the target's position by around 15,000 su, putting him basically where he started. To quickly "divide" by 1,000, he simply doesn't look at the last three digits of the five digit number and is left with 22. This means his pitch is approximately:

90 - 22 = 68

Which he can easily determine in his head. He now drops the second digit of the 22 and sees that there are about 2 units of 10,000 su between him and the target, so he adds 2 for each of them, for a total of 4. Note that this second step is OPTIONAL and many pilots get great results without bothering with it. His pitch becomes:

90 - 22 + 4 = 72

He intercepts the target then immediately hits pitch 72, when that turn is complete he goes to warp 1, hits imp 0 as soon as his ship has accelerated to warp 1. He now intercepts the target and goes to warp 1 again, again hitting imp 0 as soon as he gets up to speed. He comes out within a few dozen su of his target, guns ablaze. They never had a chance to respond to the autopilot approach they were looking for.

Formulae at a Glance

Note: Many of these formulae are solutions of one another.

Maximum Impulse

100 - 90 * MC / M

M - Power allocated to Helm->Movement
MC - Movement Constant, as per formula or table below

Maximum Warp

√(10 * M / MC)

M - Power allocated to Helm->Movement
MC - Movement Constant, as per formula or table below

Movement Constant

10 * M / MW²

M - Arbitrary amount of power, with known maximum warp MW when allocated to Helm->Movement
MW - Maximum warp achieved at M gigawatts

Power Required for a Given Impulse

90 * MC / (100 - I)

MC - Movement Constant
I - The desired impulse speed

Power Required for a Given Warp

W² * (MC / 10)

MC - Movement Constant
W - The desired warp speed

Power Required for a Set of Weapons

ΣW_i / R

R - The recycle time of the set of weapons
W_i - The input power of a weapon
Note: Weapons with different recycle times should be done separately, the results added.

Power Required for a Tractor Lock

(X + 1) * TTP

TTP - The power, in GW, allocated by the target to tractor beams.
X - The distance to the target, in su.
Note: TTP is assumed to be minimum 1.

Repair Capacity Replenishment

RC / 1000 * (1 + √RP)

RC - The ship's repair capacity, as listed under damage status
RP - The power allocated to Operations->Miscellaneous

Repair Points to Restore 1% of Integrity to Shield

SS / 20 + 0.5

SS - The total superstructure points of the ship
Note: Armour tech may modify the SS value, but this has not been demonstrated so far.

Shield Damage from a Volley