This probably won’t get any traction.. but after reading Kirith’s article on Ninveah, I got to wonder about the issues associated with Target Painters. The reason for this was that Kirith proposed making the Typhoon something akin to the Scorpion.. essentially an E-War Battleship. The downside to that is that Target Painting at the battleship level is.. well.. pointless.
Here is what Target Painting does, according to CCP:
A targeting subsystem that projects an electronic “Tag” on the target thus making it easier to target and Hit.
How it does this is by increasing the signature radius of a target. So, say you are a frigate, and your signature is about 15m in size. A target painter increases that signature radius by making you “brighter” to everyone’s radar. The consequence of this is that it is easier for people to lock you, for weapons to hit, and potentially to score better hits in the case of Turrets or do more damage in the case of missile weapon systems.
The problem comes in that, after a certain size, a weapon simply cannot do any more damage. You can essentially “max out” a signature radius to the point where it isn’t a factor. Because of this, Target Painting has less and less effect against bigger ships. Battleships and above are practically immune to target painting because their size and slower speeds already make them easy to hit. And unlike the other types of E-war, it doesn’t have any effect on your enemy’s ability to fight back. So there isn’t much value in putting a target painter on a battleship class ship like the Typhoon currently. Most target painting then is attached to fast targeting ships like frigates or to bonused ones like Huginns or Vigils.
However, what if we made a change to the Target Painter similar to that of Burst ECM. What if a target painter not only increased the signature of the ship that was targeted, but all the ships around it as well. Say to about 50km? And suppose.. and this is really just a little extra, what if the Target Painter’s “bloom” also could decloak ships? Meaning you could target your buddy’s frigate and he can fly around with a 50km “net” and maybe decloak any stealth bombers sneaking around?
Just a thought.. probably has no traction..
You might want to look at the turret hit formula again. Signature radius (and thus Target Painters) always make a difference, especially as gun size increases.
Actually, I have. There is *some* benefit.. I was able to prove that you get a slightly better hit quality at that level on armor ships.. but on Shield tanked ships, the signature radius is already so off the chart because of LSEs and Shield rigs that it doesn’t make much of a difference.
Actually that’s probably more due to stacking penalties. Adding a +30% sig radius penalty just nerfs all the other penalties.
Well, if you have some numbers I’d be glad to see them. I would hate to have been wrong about Target Painting benefits.