Shots miss occasionally, yes. But 80% accuracy is pretty easy on a Heavy Flak within, say, Gatling range. The more important issue is that medium guns take time to fire off a full clip...and a skilled pilot won't just sit and let you empty an entire clip on his ship if he has any recourse. So we can either assume that each gun is functioning under optimal conditions, or that neither is functioning under optimal conditions, in which case you might only get 50-75% of that light gun's clip actually on target (or actually on the portion of the ship you wish to damage).
In my experience though? Good gunners are reliable at putting heavy gun fire on-target. 80% isn't that far off the mark at moderate range.
A heavy flak at gatling range won't always arm. Maybe, if you've got greased or heatsinks. And, most gunners I know have less than 80% accuracy, meaning some lost shots here and there. A Hwacha is especially un-precise, even with the heavy clip and at short range, there always will be some rockets off the map - furthermore when mounted on a Galleon.
Yep. And by firing early, aiming for engines, and reversing, you can keep that distance up for quite some time, even on very tight maps like Paritan Rumble.
Why do always assume a dumb opposition? Let's make the crews equals for comparison's sake. In most normal battles, Galleon or Spires only got a few shots a long range, shots that the other ship has a good chance to dodge or soak by the time you reload. When you finished reloading, most opponent will already have chosen their range.
So while you scalpel away I'll tear into your guns and engines with Heavy Clip on a Hwacha at a range you can't match with damn good accuracy, then disable all your components facing me with Burst at close range.
You do that again. If your gun is castrated by my shatter shots, you can't do what you wrote.
The odds are, the gatling will disable the Hwacha first, except at long range, when it's superfluous, since the gat hasn't the reach, it can't fire anyway. When it can, the fact that it acts as a tracer, has a large clip, reloads in less than 3rd the time the Hwacha does and also has a
superior firing angle, makes that it trumps the Hwachas in a disarm duel.
Also, that Gat tactic is alarmingly ineffective, as even with Charged rounds the Gatling has the second worst DPS against the hull in the game. By a pretty huge margin. Use it to shred armor, reload it, and shred their armor again once it's back up. It's a far more effective use of the Gat then the pitiful 13 DPS that Charged rounds do to the perma-Hull.
Except for the Medium-slot ships and the Squid, all the other ships have at least two overlapping light guns, like I said in my post. I never said that gats alone can do it all - but the fact that they put off the hull make that ship damn fragile to about any other light gun that may overlap it.
The fact that within a 2-3 second window you can strip a ship of most of its guns + engines is well worth the 14 second reload time. Hwachas sow chaos and give you time to get more advantageous positions...and they do it VERY quickly. You then swing guns to bring other weapons into arc while it reloads. You're severely underestimating the power of the weapon as mid-close range disabler: nothing else really compares at that range.
Like I've wrote, the Hwacha's reload time is long enough that I can repair any weapon that it may have damaged during its course, even from scratch. If the engineer's at the hull, and on the balloon, you just won't kill that ship with a single hwacha. It's impossible, unless your target isn't crewed.
Beg pardon?
Hwacha DPS to components: 232 + burst to nearby components.
Gatling DPS to components: 77
The Hwacha is the clear winner here.
Nah, sorry, I contest that. Either your numbers are wrong, or you assume that every missile you fire with the Hwacha will hit the same component at the same time. Won't happen.
I would hazard a guess you are not up against decent pilots/gunners then, and they probably aren't running Heavy Clip. A well run Hwacha ship can disable your engines or guns from almost double the Gatling's maximum range, and easily have Burst rounds loaded by the time you close the distance, which gives you a firing window of a few seconds before you lose half of your ship's components.
The Hwacha's loading time is long enough for all that damage to be gone, even with an average crew, when it's time to fire it again. And if the Hwacha's got better range, the Gat has more firing angle. And all the other advantages, except as what the Hwacha really is; Enforcing an area of denial.
