[#1294][6.0 HF 5] Barracudas Only Using 2/3 weapon hardpoints?

[geldonyetich]

I was fighting a Xenon Defense Station last night, and needed some extra firepower, so I brought in some customized Barracudas.

They were armed with two launchers (one on each wing) and an ion gatling on the front. I watched as they were fighting the station and they would only fire one of the wing launchers and back away before going into ion gatling range.

Well, the ion gatling thing is fine, people probably prefer they keep their distance until they were out of missiles anyway. Some of my Barracudas that had already used up their missiles were doing just that: strafing runs with the ion gatling.

But why were the ones that still had missiles only firing one wing launcher? It effectively halved their DPS when I needed it most.

So I retrofit the Barracudas to have three phase guns instead. Once they started attacking the station, I again switched my camera over to them and monitored what they were doing.

Oddly, they were only attacking with two of their three phase guns: the nose and one on a wing.

I checked the loadout, all three guns were selected and active. (Pardon the emphasis, I just know somebody's going to point that out.) The same applies to the launcher loadout. Unless I was looking right at it and not seeing it, the loadout was fully enabled. In fact, knowing I'm perfectly capable of that kind of boneheadedness, here is a screenshot so we can be sure.

In retrospect, I noticed something that might be related: the launcher that was not firing the missiles and the gun that was not firing were on the same hardpoint. This leads me to conclude that the Barracuda pilots may not be using that hardpoint.

Unfortunately, I don't have a saved game of the station being under attack anymore, or even the configuration I used while attacking the station. I should have saved one at the time, sorry about that.

For the time being, I've switched to Threshers because the Barracudas can't survive the shockwave of exploding station modules anyway.

(Honestly, the Barracudas took so long coming around for another strafing run that I suspect my defense drones' mk1 pulse lasers were doing more damage to the station than the two phase guns.)

[Alan Phipps]

This should be easy enough for any vanilla player with a Barracuda to check and confirm/deny.

[geldonyetich]

For the record, I'm running vanilla, completely unmodded. Although I started this particular run back in 6.0 beta, if that's an influence. Of course, given the complicated nature of a game this advanced, it could be some kind of odd circumstance, like turret logic from my capital ship was somehow jamming the fighters or something. If I get in a circumstance where I notice it's happening again, I'll need to submit a saved game. Kicking myself I didn't do that earlier.

But personally, I didn't notice until I targeted a Barracuda and swapped the camera to them with F3 to carefully spectate them. Battles are hectic and we're often too busy to pay attention to what our NPC pilots are doing. They're firing missiles and shooting, clearly they're working correctly, right? Only by really getting in there and going out of our way to pay them extra attention do we notice something is amiss. So something this obvious could actually slip unnoticed for quite some time.