Weapon output calculator
This little utility is designed to help balancing mods by calculating the weapon output from the damage, reload and chance to hit values. The concept itself is great and could be a great help in balancing mods in the future.
The utility presents it's weapon outputs at one, ten and thirty seconds.
Unfortunately, the weapon outputs appear to be calculated for the thirty second output and then ten and one second results are the figure for thirty seconds divided by three and thirty respectively. That sort of calculation is adequate for a rapidly firing phaser as it's reasonably accurate, but there is a margin of error that increases when you start using powerful but slow firing weapons.
For instance, my hypothetical weapon does one point of damage with a certain chance to hit and a three second reload time.
Therefore, at one second my hypothetical weapon should have done one point of damage, three points of damage at ten seconds and ten points at thirty seconds. The utility correctly calculates the thirty second value, but then returns incorrect values for the ten and one second values ("3.33333349227905" points of damage at ten seconds and 0.333333343267 at one second respectively)
As it is, this utility does have a useful role to play in balancing by providing the average figures which can be considered "near enough" and i'll happily concede that while doing balancing in certain situations it may be more useful to have the average figures. For that alone, this is worth grabbing if your balancing a mod.
However, personally i'd like to see the absolute correct figures calculated. Hopefully we'll see another version of this with that little correction in as that would take this from being "useful" while doing balancing to "essential".
- Freyr
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Weapon Output Calculator v1.0: MANUAL
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OK, you've downloaded the calculator. That's the first step. Put it into a folder of your choice (see installation instructions) and start it.
Wow, this looks complicated.
You see the 24 fields on the left side? That's where you put the values of your unit(s).
You don't have to use all of the rows, just leave the 0s where they are if you don't need a row.
When all the information is entered, press the Button "Calculate".
The three fields on the right side should now be filled with information.
That's it! You just did your first calculation.
If you calculate the output of another unit's weapons you can compare their destructive power.
About the output information:
There are three numbers. The first one is labeled "in 1 second:". This would be the damage dealt in one second. This number is unrealistic, of course, because the weapons don't deal damage all the time. But it is very useful if you are comparing different units because it's so small.
The second one is labeled "in 10 seconds:". This number is more realistic. The third one is labeled "in 30 seconds:". This can be especially useful if you want to know how many units your unit can destroy within a certain period of time.
Things to note:
- You might have to use commas instead of dots when entering decimals. That's the German system, I don't know how your computer behaves. If one of the methods doesn't work, try the other.
- Please don't leave fields empty. It causes an error.
- A reload rate of 0 is unrealistic and not supported by this tool. If you use a reload rate of 0, the whole row will be counted as 0.
| Version | Author | Terra_Inc | Website | ||
| Downloads | 565 | Size | 194.28 KB | Created | 2009-09-29 |
Comments
Can you make a calculator that has less than 0.5% margin of error?
either way... get yourself a