After some keen observations and boredom, a player and I noticed that while firing weapons with AA off and a target, the stream of neutrons would drift ever so slightly off the center of the cross-hair. I don't know if this is a known issue or reported in the past but I felt like this was an odd 'glitch' in the game.

It's very minuet but noticeable at long range without AA and probably with AA on and no target.

Also while AA is on, the stream of neutrons will go toward the target, but depending on the firing ships position, the stream will either go straight toward the target, cross each other, or twist.

This occurs due to VO's network optimization. See these threads/posts for reference:

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"The problem you guys are talking about is related to a network optimization. The orientation of your ship (and the direction of a weapon fired) are quantized, so that their network packets are smaller, so we have to send less data back and forth. We have it tuned so that the quantization isn't noticeable normally, but it does become apparent when you're zoomed in." - Waylon/Vlad

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"When you're far away, the floating point number used to represent your position becomes less precise. When you shoot a laser, your firing direction is quantized. Both of these precision limits are imposed to improve network performance, and in 99% of what you do in Vendetta, the precision is quite adequate.

[...]

The 'twist' you see is just an artifact of the way laser shots are rendered. They're supposed to look like really thin cylinders, but they're rendered as quads oriented in a direction that's supposed to face the camera. If you're almost parallel to them, and you are when you're shooting lasers, they're nearly degenerate, and the direction it chooses to draw in changes rapidly. Hence the 'spin'.

So any shot rendered this way will flip over once due to the quantized laser shot direction being pretty close to, but exactly the same as, the camera direction. If you're firing with autoaim, however, it fires in different direction from the camera anyway, so you might not see the 'spin' there." - a1k0n

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"All mynt is trying to say is that matching your crosshairs to the target leadoff is not as effective with sunflares as it is with other weapons. It's true, rockets aren't affected by autoaim anymore. They used to be. In alpha I used to deselect targets in order to fire rockets more effectively. Anyway, we fixed that a long time ago, but rockets remain one of the more obvious examples where a pilot can be far better than any idealized autoaim computation, and where it's better to go with your gut than to use the leadoff. The differences are more subtle with energy weapons, but I guess rockets were just a more confusing example.

I have no idea why autoaim doesn't work properly with railguns beyond a certain distance (although I think Andy did look into it at one point). I would guess it has something to do with quantization, although not necessarily the quantization of your ship angle. We quantize to reduce the amount of data we have to send over the network. It makes things a bit less accurate, but it reduces overhead as well. 99 times out of 100, you never notice." - Incarnate

Hokay.

This is the thing that makes shooting out the small turrets on tridents with energy very difficult as you need to be within ~50m to land a hit.

And hitting something sat still with rails, at 1500m away. The rails can travel much further, but good luck hitting anything at a distance greater than ~1300m with them. If you use Auto-aim, good luck hitting anything past 700m with em :P

Same bug, different year...

...and regardless of you posting very old dev threads, IMHO, this is a bug, that was just explanied away, ships do not move fast enough in combat to have such a system as it was explained.

Yes, it's an everlasting issue. The direction of the laser shots are represented by quaternions. The quaternions are quantized when sent over the network. That means there are only a finite number of directions a laser shot can be shot in and it will click into one of these quantized directions.

The only solution is to increase the amount of information sent over the internet. Normally this is not a problem because you're shooting at larger items, but when shooting small things it is a problem.

Like mines or rockets...

It's actually a vector, not a quaternion, since lasers have no roll angle. Anyway we could extend the protocol a little bit to adapt to the precision required (e.g. if you're not moving, or you're firing a railgun, or you have something stationary targetted). The precision is a bit lower than it should be in general.... it was tuned a long, long time ago, before we had railguns and ships all moved a little slower.

yea this makes perfect railgun shots miss and its quite annoying.

I just found my next band name: Quaternion

And yeah, this is kind of annoying with rails, but Meh, I use rails so rarely...

You use rails about as rarely as you hit anything with any other weapon.