I keep getting scenarios where me and an enemy player are face to face, 100-300 meters away from each other and I cannot hit them regardless of how many shots I fire. My reticle is dead center on them, no obstruction, and neither of us have any buffs or debuffs that would otherwise alter our evasion or accuracy. I've come across this on all manner of different ships. I know there are optimization and synchronization issues, but I'm wondering if this is to be expected.

Latency in the normal "ground" environment is anywhere between 85-105ms.

Any help in understand this issue is greatly appreciated.

Thanks everyone!

You're definitely not alone. Hitting a target with blasters isn't as intuitive as it should be and is especially noticeable in large Dom (Sat) matches.

Latency can be a factor but its usually not a deciding one unless you or your target is suffering major packetloss or heavy latency (200-250 it becomes a lot more noticeable).

The short answer is that only certain blasters are really actually effective that close, burst laser cannon, rapid fire, and light.

The first aspect to take note of is the firing arc. Your blasters aren't firing at a fixed point and articulate several degrees depending on type. Picture a fixed cone starting from the very front center of your ship. The cone itself is always the same size and shape short of temporary buffs that extend your range. Your accuracy is highest for something direct center but is also immediately penalized by range. The cone flattens out at your max range and you cannot hit beyond that. Note that as the range goes farther out, the cone grows, so essentially something at 500m can be out of your arc but if it were 2000m away in the same spot it might fall into it.

Projectile weapons like protorps function similarly as you need to keep your target in the firing arc until the lock and release is complete. The farther out your target is, the easier it is to follow to maintain the locking.

Just like with projectiles - certain blasters are easier to hit with from farther out as they're accuracy is penalized heavily and its easier to center on a target from farther out. Laser cannon is like the midpoint between the close range blasters and long range but as such does neither particularly well. Quads are the most thematic but are much harder to hit with and lack the benefits of heavies. Heavy blasters upgraded are really great at range where you can center on your target but horrible for up close or fast moving targets. (Unless fast moving target is moving in a straight line away)

For example, say I'm running heavies in a sat match. A target is parked under the sat but as I try to stop my momentum carries me too close. While the target is right in front of me, depending on just how close in that 500m range I am and at what angle, even stopped I'm likely to miss. Think of it as being so close that your blasters fire right past what you want to hit as they're just too close.

But besides the firing arc, range and accuracy penalties there, you also have to deal with evasion. I forget the details with the math, but the short answer is to think of it as a defense chance making something even harder to hit. So, not only do you have to contend with lining up your target properly, you also may need accuracy buffs from copilot or have to wait out defensive cooldowns like distortion field to have a reasonable chance of hitting your target.

Your accuracy is highest for something direct center but is also immediately penalized by range.

Minor error here, range determined base accuracy is a flat rate from 0 to 500 (or whatever upgraded min range is) with respect to range penalties/bonuses. Then there's linear interpolation, rounded to integer values, from the short breakpoint to the mid-range breakpoint, and again from mid to max. Tracking penalties apply uniformly at all ranges.

The cone flattens out at your max range and you cannot hit beyond that. Note that as the range goes farther out, the cone grows,

I get what you're saying I think, but to be clear, the cone is a circular cone that doesn't change shape with range. What tapers, both with distance past min range, and angular displacement from centerline, is the hit probability. A good analogy would be a spray bottle where the droplet dispersion of fluid sprayed is densest near the middle and also the spray is fine enough so that as you get farther from the nozzle less and less of the droplets land on an object in the spray volume.

So since I'm in math nerd-out mode right now, I'll finish up with some of the math reasons that ultra-close range is hard.

Because both whether you're in the firing cone at all and tracking penalties are based on angular displacement, this means that a close target has to move much less in order to change their relative angle to you. It also magnifies the effect of lag with respect to displacement in the firing arc angle. If both of you are flying toward each other, depending on ships and depending on if one or both are boosting, at a lag of 0.1 seconds the "real" positions according to the server could by off by from 100 m to around 480 m compared to what your client is showing. That's more than enough to put a ship from the center of your firing arc to the edge, or even outside of it.

At a range of say 1 km, with a short range cannon like BLC, RFL, or LLC, that's not that much of a big deal most of the time, but at sub 500 m ranges it's very significant.

The other issue, is that the camera, the ship model, the ship collision box, the UI overlay, and the origin point for shots may all be separate objects internally to the game. This can cause something called parallax error. If there's a slight difference between location of these elements, that means that what is "seen" from one point might have line of sight or a particular angle, but it could be different from the other point(s). The closer you get to an object the more parallax error gets magnified. This may be worsened because I believe that there's actually a bit of slight of hand with respect to ranges in GSF. The engine isn't built for environments with distances in hundreds of kilometers, so often the workaround is you just mess with UI scaling. So that gunship 15 km away, the engine may be treating it as 1.5 km or even 150 m and then just adding a zero or two before presenting it to you. For most cases that's no big deal, but when calculating close range parallax effect, a 10 or 100 fold difference in range is potentially a big deal (note this may or may not be happening in GSF, in scaling tricks when you apply the scaling in calculations has a big impact, choose right and this actually wouldn't be an issue).

You can hit at point blank range. I've blown up turrets from inside the turret. It's just that hitting is more a matter of learned "feel" and a bit of luck, because the UI is not entirely reliable as an aiming guide sub 500 m.

If you're both slow moving or stationary, just search around a bit with your firing and you should be able to find the correct offset for parallax. Also make sure you're not super close to an obstacle (like 10 to 20 meters apparent distance) to make sure you're not running into LOS issues (though in theory, there should be an animation of your shots hitting terrain if that is happening).

A useful application of parallax in GSF is firing from behind cover in a gunship. The railgun is "above" the hitbox for the ship, so if very careful by strafing up you can poke your railgun out from behind terrain and shoot people while your ship is still protected from them by the terrain. Especially good technique when dueling another gunship.

I think you're over-complicating something most pilots (even many vets) don't grasp so I was trying to simplify without going into things like the min/mid/max. But if you think about it --- since it scales starting from below 500 and you're basically not gonna hit if you're too close, what I said wasn't technically wrong just vague.

(edit -- or lacking detail) If you're too close and at the wrong angle you even at dead center you're essentially being penalized on accuracy even if its not literal in the numbers.

Dead center is ideal, but in reality I'm generally off by at least a few degrees and unless both the target and I are stopped there might be one hit in the 100-500m range before target is out of the cone (picture ff/sting shooting target and passing)

But yeah "grows" may be a bit confusing --- but I did mean it gets bigger the farther out it goes (and I think I did mention its static and only changes size when range is buffed temporarily.)

I do appreciate the extra detail as far as the actual programming though. And I'm sure you're right about the scaling for distance given that its standardized by 100m increments and mid blaster range is more like the 30-35m range in the general game world.

Side note - did one match on SF this morning, and someone said we were f'n cheating. All I did was out fly them utilizing my knowledge about the limitations of firing arcs to manually break locks or let them chase me for an extended period so that they were vulnerable to any teammates paying attention.

Part of me is hoping people will see this and use it to become better teammates and/or competition.

This may be worsened because I believe that there's actually a bit of slight of hand with respect to ranges in GSF. The engine isn't built for environments with distances in hundreds of kilometers, so often the workaround is you just mess with UI scaling. So that gunship 15 km away, the engine may be treating it as 1.5 km or even 150 m and then just adding a zero or two before presenting it to you. For most cases that's no big deal, but when calculating close range parallax effect, a 10 or 100 fold difference in range is potentially a big deal (note this may or may not be happening in GSF, in scaling tricks when you apply the scaling in calculations has a big impact, choose right and this actually wouldn't be an issue).

I can verify that they're scaling by 100. You can verify this pretty easily by using /say in a match. The range at which you can see it matches the range you can see it in the rest of the game, multiplied by 100. Say is visible under 42m or under 4200m in GSF. I don't know how exactly they're doing the scaling, but that's the end result.