# The TTK is damm high? Why? I keep seeing the same two takes in every combat thread. Either "TTK is all over the place" or "ballistics are just objectively better than lasers." After spending a while poking at how weapons actually perform in 4.9, I don't really buy either of those as the full story. I think two separate mechanical issues are stacking on energy weapons specifically, and once you account for them, a lot of the "TTK is broken" talk turns into "lasers are quietly running at about half strength." Let me walk through the reasoning, and then throw out a balance idea that I think would give ballistics an actual role instead of just being the strictly better pick. ## Issue 1: server ticks are eating your fire rate The server runs its simulation on ticks, roughly 30 a second. Weapons that fire in sequence can only actually pull the trigger on a tick. They can't fire in the gaps between them. So your real rate of fire gets rounded down to whatever cleanly fits into that tick budget. The rough model people keep landing on is basically: your real RPM is 1800 divided by (1800 divided by your listed RPM, rounded up). It sounds fiddly but the takeaway is simple. Anything listed between about 600 and 900 RPM gets dragged down to an effective 600. And here's the annoying part, look at where the guns actually sit. Most energy repeaters live around 750 to 800 RPM, which is dead centre of that dead zone, so they're firing at 600. That's a 20 to 25 percent fire rate loss you never see on the card. Ballistic cannons, on the other hand, sit at low clean numbers like 24, 50, or 100 RPM, which divide evenly into the tick budget, so they lose basically nothing. So before any damage even gets calculated, energy is already down roughly a fifth of its DPS versus what the stat card promises, and ballistics aren't. That alone skews every side by side comparison people are posting. Quick caveat: the exact tick model is community reverse engineering, not something CIG has confirmed. But it lines up cleanly with the "601 to 899 all become 600" behaviour, so I'd treat it as a strong working theory rather than fact. source: https://www.spviewer.eu/ https://issue-council.robertsspaceindustries.com/projects/STAR-CITIZEN/issues/STARC-106502. ## Issue 2: the armor damage multiplier inherits hull modifier This one already has an Issue Council report on it (STARC-198632 if you want to go confirm it or add your own repro). Short version: ships carry a separate modifier for how energy versus ballistic damage interacts with armor, and right now the wrong value seems to be getting applied. Energy is landing on armor at something closer to a penalty when it's supposed to get a slight bonus, while ballistic is only off by a hair. What that means in a fight: once shields are down, lasers are doing roughly half their intended damage to the armor https://issue-council.robertsspaceindustries.com/projects/STAR-CITIZEN/issues/STARC-198632 ## So why does the whole TTK conversation feel so messy? Because people are comparing a working weapon to a broken one and blaming the weapon type. Ballistics right now are running near their intended fire rate and near their intended armor damage. Energy is losing about 20 percent off the top from ticks, and then roughly half of its post shield damage from the armor bug. Stack those two and an energy loadout can take way longer to kill the same target than an equivalent ballistic one, and the gap is entirely mechanical, not design intent. That's the "ballistics are just better" meta in a nutshell. It was never a fair test. Fixing these two things has to come first, because you genuinely can't balance weapon types around numbers that are currently broken. ## The idea: make ballistic resistance scale down with shield size Okay, assuming those get sorted, here's what I'd actually love to see. I don't think the goal should be "lasers and ballistics do the same thing." They should feel different, and right now the difference is muddy. My pitch is to bake ballistic resistance into shields and scale it inversely with shield size. Small shields (S1 to S2, light fighters) get high ballistic resistance. Little ships shouldn't just get shredded straight through their bubble. This protects the nimble stuff and keeps energy as the natural answer for fighting small, evasive targets. Larger shields (bigger ships, capitals) get progressively less ballistic resistance but more shield HP. As you go up in size, ballistics start to bite. They become the penetration tool, the thing you bring when you need to crack something big and heavily shielded. Ballistic starts to genuinely matter the larger the target gets. And this is the important bit: when shields do drop, ballistics should hit noticeably harder than energy, and you should actually feel it in the moment. Not a quiet 10 percent edge on a spreadsheet. A real, decisive spike where dropping someone's shield and switching to armor cracking is a payoff. Right now the shields down phase is where energy dies for the wrong reasons. I'd rather it be the phase where ballistics get their moment for the right reasons. Why I think this is good for the game: It gives the two weapon types actual identities. Energy is sustained, shield stripping, great against small agile targets, and no ammo worries. Ballistics are burst, penetration, the anti big ship and shields down finisher, paid for with limited ammo. It rewards target selection, because the right gun depends on what you're shooting instead of one answer for everything. It makes the shields down moment feel earned, which is exactly the kind of readable, dramatic beat that makes dogfights fun to fly and to watch. And the finite ammo on ballistics is the natural counterweight to that power spike, so it doesn't just become the new strictly better option. TL;DR: a big chunk of the current TTK and "ballistics win" discourse is really energy weapons running at 600 RPM instead of their listed rate, and doing about half damage to armor. Not ballistics being overtuned. Fix those two first (STARC-198632 covers the armor one). Then, to keep the two weapon families genuinely distinct, scale ballistic resistance down as shield size goes up, so ballistics become the penetration and anti big ship pick. Curious what other combat focused pvp folks think? Questions for DEV? Are these bugs being looked at? Are they bugs? Any confirms on this would be great Thank you for reading.