DPS

Introduction

DPS or Damage Per Second is a popular measure of a weapons worth, and besides Range and Alpha damage (damage per single shot) constitutes the most looked after characteristic of particular weapon in the sense of battle worthiness.
Delivering an actual DPS value for any weapon is easier said than done, because the rate of fire might be affected by various factors and circumstances that are subject to change them self during the time of battle.
This complexity is at moments bordering uncertainty while never really crossing the line. This mechanic alone is what makes Battle Tech games one of the finest entertainment delights for the truly devoted players.

Damage Types

Each weapon hit that lands on an enemy produces damage.
Our game differentiates between few damage types:

• direct damage - dealt by collision or contact
• splash damage - dealt by explosion and
• secondary splash damage - dealt by explosion (or fire?) as well

Total Damage

Total damage of an hit is usually calculated by simply adding all damages up. The actual damage in game can be more than this, due to splash damage being accounted for hitting adjacent components of one or more assets in vicinity of the hit.

Damage Modifiers

Assets in the game have each their own adjusted damage modifiers to compensate for optimal balance, skill and fun across the various types.

Average Total Damage

Once we account for all modifier types, we can derive an average by adding them together and dividing them by their quantity. This is the simple linear average. Then we can apply them to the Total Damage to calculate the Average Total Damage as a single value for a given weapon.

Damage per ton of Ammo

The maximally possible damage dealt for firing one ammo clip (usually a ton). Actual damage will usually only be lass or, at the luckiest, equal to this. This number does not take into account any modifiers.

Jam(Overheat) Time Ratios

There are two things that occur when firing a burst fire weapon.
Each and every shot instantly produces a characteristic amount of overheat (not affecting the asset, but internal to the weapon only), that gets dissipated quite soon.
Once a certain threshold is reached, that overheat causes the weapon to stop firing (it becomes jammed). For the weapon to come back online from the jam, a certain amount of time needs to pass.
The time to recover from a single or more fired shots is not the same as the time to recover from a jam.
On UAC and RAC type of AutoCannons it takes more time to un-jam that to cool down from overheat, as can be observed by the indicators on the weapon HUD section.
On HAG type of weapons, on the other hand, it takes, quite the opposite, less time to un-jam than to cool down from overheat, due to different nature of the weapon system and it's internal mechanic.

The ratio of the times spent in shooting versus in jammed state is the Jam Time Ratio, while the time spent firing as much as possible and waiting to cool down without ever being jammed is the Overheat Time Ratio.

This two ratios play a significant role in numerically evaluating any burst fire weapon, thus it is of importance we shed some light to how those come to be and are calculated.

Sustained DPS's Fire Rate

The fire rate a clip can be fired, on average, taking into account the overheat jams, but not heat dissipation.

Clip Reload Time Ratio

The time to reload a clip versus the time to shoot a clip at Sustained DPS's fire rate without any regards of heat dissipation.

Types of DPS

Note that, while not actually having a real jam mechanic, MW:LL accounts for jam quirks by the introduction of weapon local "overheat mechanic", that unluckily overlaps in name with the weapon-to-asset "heat mechanic". We call it jam onward only for the purpose to un-confuse this a bit, but you can still read it overheat out loud.

In Battletech and Mechwarrior games we understand that there are some so called basic weapons, the loadouts of the lostech era.
Those are the standard Inner Sphere Lasers, Autocannons and SRM MRM and LRM missiles. Those have in common that they don't have jam constrains and usually are delivering more hurt than heat.
Calculating DPS for those weapons usually involves only the fire rate and damage per shot. Not terribly complex. Same applies for LB-X.

Enter Ultra Autocannons:

Everyone who ever fired an Ultra AutoCannon knows the delight of it's almost double both rate of fire and damage output. Alas, the delight that has to end every so often as the darn thing jams up and ceases to deliver the hurt. The number of shots fired, or, rather the time spend in non-stop firing until fully jammed we call the jam time or time to jam. Usually there is 4 to 6 salvos to be fired before this comes in act.
Looking at the image to the right those are the blue tokens - the empty ones are shots left before the jam, the pale ones are shots that still count as fired in close succession. As time lapses, the pale shots might deplete and allow for more shots to be fired yet. This however spoils the DPS - as we are trying to shoot as much as possible and as soon as possible.
But wait there's more! Not only does the jam probability build up during firing in a quick succession, each shot also produces heat. That heat is transferred to the assets internals and has to be dissipated via the heatsinks present on the unit.
This mechanism is represented in orange on the image to the right. We see that each successive shot adds like 5 tokens, but on the next shot only 3 of them remain as pale tokens, while 2 are "gone missing". Those are dissipated via the heatskins by the time the next shot is fired.
Should the asset build up too much heat by carelessly firing too much weapons too many times in succession, adverse effects and conditions might rise to be and reduce the DPS further.
In effect that means that besides the Burst DPS, which lasts only so long, we have some other, Sustained DPS, if we want to account for all the jams and heat buildups.

• TODO RAC, HAG, missiles

Sustained DPS

Sustained DPS value is something we can rely on in most adverse circumstances - somewhat to fairly compare the weapons across various classes and sorts.

Taken into account:

• Jam(overheat) and cool down times
• Spool-up times (RACs)
• Charging times (Air-Gauss)
• Damage modifiers to give average value against Mech, Tank, Hovercraft, ASF and VTOL armor

Not taken into account:

• Clip/new ton of ammo reload (except Bombs)
• Heat transferred to the asset

Burst DPS

Burst DPS is the maximum hurt rate that's possible to get out of the weapon before the weapon limitiations (jam/overheating usually) put an end to the dakka.

For most weapons Burst DPS is the same as the Sustained DPS, as most weapons shoot with constant rate, but for ammunition based rapid fire (Machine Guns, RACs, HAGs) and burst fire weapons (UACs) the Burst DPS is considerably higher.

Damage modifiers are applied same way as for Sustained DPS to give average value against Mech, Tank, Hover, ASF and VTOL armor.