Escort Ships and Torpedoes

[narhiril]

I was able to replicate this on a clean, vanilla install of beta 0.16.1.  There's some issues here involving ships with torpedo launchers being given the "Escort Me" command, and whether or not the escort ship's torpedo launchers are assigned to a hotkey seems to affect the behavior.

 

Issue #1 - Escort ships that have torpedo launchers and no other weapons will hang back and fire torpedoes occasionally, one at a time, at enemies attacking their charge.  Even if the ship has multiple torpedo launchers, it will only ever fire one torpedo at a time.

 

Issue #2 - Escort ships that have both weapons and hotkey-assigned torpedo launchers will engage in combat with their weapons, but fire their torpedoes at the ship they were assigned to escort.

 

Steps to reproduce:

 

1) Create a ship (ship A) with at least two torpedo launchers.  Give it a crew, a captain, and some torpedoes.

2) Set the torpedo launchers to a hotkey.  This seems to be important in reproducing issue #2.

3) Create a second ship (ship B), control it and order ship A to "Escort Me."

4) Spawn in or find an enemy.  Allow the enemy to attack you in ship B.  Ship A will hang back and fire torpedoes one at a time (Issue #1).

5) Edit ship A - ensure that it still has torpedoes and give it at least one weapon and enough gunners to operate it.  Return to controlling ship B and ensure that ship A is still ordered to "Escort Me."

6) Find another enemy and allow it to attack you in ship B.  Ship A will engage the enemy with its weapons, but will fire all of its hotkey-assigned torpedoes targeting ship B instead (Issue #2).

 

If step 2 is skipped, what will happen instead in step 6 is that ship A will engage the enemy with its weapons and refuse to use its torpedoes at all.

[Kamo]

Another possible targeting bug, but I'm not sure it can be replicated...

I once tried to fire torpedoes at one of my ships (it was an arena fight/test) and some torpedoes had a really bad time locking onto the target ::).

Once a torpedo even locked onto my own ship, circling and successfully hitting her :o, so I wonder how torpedo locks work.

The locking worked better as I ordered my own ship to attack the training dummy ship on the strategic view and resumed manually firing torpedoes ???.

 

That bug may be related to narhiril's one cause it also involved Strategic View Orders. I also confirm that, when I told a 2-shaft prototype to attack her dueling target, it fired one torpedo at a time despite having her shafts loaded (both shafts were on the same hotkey however).

[Wanderer]

Is the interval between torp launches with 2 tubes 2 or 4 seconds? If 2 they might use staggered fire.