Problem: When firing a rail gun at a distant target (well within the max distance of the gun), you can't fine tune the aimpoint enough to put the pellet on target. No matter what you do, the pellet will only get so close to the target.

Switching auto-aim on/off can help a little, but even small movements of the ship aren't enough to get the pellet on target.

I'm assuming this must be some limitation of the game with regard to resolution, pixels, and distance, etc.

But I feel like the pellet should be going where I aim the gun assuming the gun and the target are at the same velocity (i.e. stopped relative to each other). Or, if it doesn't, I should be able to apply some "Kentucky windage" to the problem to overcome the inaccuracy. But aiming to the left or right of the target results in the pellet going to the same place regardless.

+1

Such problems only arise with static targets and can be addressed by moving your ship the appropriate amount to compensate.

Disable autoaim when firing rails over distance, but even then there is a quantization of direction that happens over distance inside VO's engine, and nothing you do will over come it, except maybe moving yourself? You really only would notice this "opposite coriolis effect" when both target and shooter are stationary at over 1000m away from each other, so it usually isn't something that comes into play when actually outside of a practice session (or pig shoot or whatever).

Can you give an example of a time where you have experienced this when the victim is "live"?

We already doubled the resolution of the quantization of orientation, a couple of years ago, so this would be more fine-grained for people.

It is important for us to have quantized orientations in general, though, as they have substantial impact on aggregate bandwidth usage.

I would say, just shift your ship slightly, as greenwall says.

I've encountered this issue a few times. Mostly I see it with cap gauss and cap rails. I've seen plenty of times, cap gauss consistently unable to hit a stationary target, that is well within their firing arc, specifically when it's coming from a stationary platform (parked npc, defense turret)

Could the resolution be increased further without major bandwidth issues?

Or could the resolution be variable, dependent on equipped weapons. Cap rails have a long enough range for this to actually become an issue at times. If all you have is a couple of neutron blasters, it's not really much of an issue, but if you are packing rails, cap gauss, or actually repair guns (they seem to have an insane range) it can conceivably become an issue.

Could the resolution be increased further without major bandwidth issues? Or could the resolution be variable, dependent on equipped weapons.

No. It's a fundamental aspect of protocol functionality. Don't expect us to change this anytime soon.

Certain types of weapons that have a larger collision surface, like the giant "golden ball" Teradon weapons and such (I believe the station defense gauss as well?) should have an easier time dealing with this, since the collision is over a larger area.

But, there will always be a decrease in precision with distance. Homing weapons also avoid this issue.

I have actually seen it happen with the border turrets, I'm guessing they are the same as the station defense turrets. Specifically when shooting at mines. I found a few spots I could drop a mine where ALL the turrets that would fire at it, having a clear line of sight would miss by a couple meters. The homing missile turrets were not a factor as they were obscured by asteroids (they did not waste ammo trying).

I wonder if it would be possible to make ALL weapons with enough range for this issue to matter into homing weapons? I mean ONLY enough homing to circumvent the issue. I don't know if that would be difficult to do, or if it would actually work. I also don't know what effect it would have on velocity inheritance.

I wonder if it would be possible to make ALL weapons with enough range for this issue to matter into homing weapons?

Yeah, I've thought about that as well, but it hasn't been a priority.