Pilot Archive

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Julak wrote:
to the guy above me i fly a normal Interceptor and pvp a bit with my friends who use protons and such, now i have no room to spare on my ship for chaff or missles, and to date i have only ever been hit by 1 out of probablt 10-15, skill does allow people to outmanueaver the missile

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Kitten and I ran some extensive missiles tests in Deep Space quite a while back, and we found that its completely impossible to outrun missiles or to evade them only by manuevering. The only way to avoid a missile if you don't have chaff is to either hope for a rare bug, or to put a solid object between you and the missile. We also found that the solid object CAN'T be the ship that fired the missiles at you, unfortunately. The only real advantage that manuevering gives you against a missile is that if you jink sufficiently, you can sometimes get the missile to decelerate in order to take a new tragectory on you, thus buying yourself an extra half-second or so before it reaches you. We found it was completely impossible to maintain that trick for any meaningfull length of time, though, because the missile will still be closing the entire time, and it will always reach you, even if you make it follow a slightly longer path. We also found that once a missile had been fired at you, it was impossible to outrun it. Even if you were at max range boosting away when it was launched, it would always catch you. In fact, boosting away in a straight line usually made the missile get to you faster, since once a missile falls into a straight tragectory towardsits targetit accelerates to a very high speed.

Ive dodged a missle or two before, usually when i make a tight turn then boost off at the same time, the missle seems to hit you but with the turning motion and the speed youre flying away at the blast raduis doesnt hit you as much/at all.