DPS

DPS is short for damage per second and is a metric used to measure the damage output of ships in stellar impact.

There are two ways in stellar impact to deal damage: turrets and skills. Normally, when talking about dps, only the damage of the guns is taken into account. This, however, make it look like some ships, especially the corvette, dont have a lot damage output, which is simply not the case.

Turrets

There are three different kind of turrets in the game. Those turrets have different cooldown, different range and different firing rate (cadency).

Name	Damage	Cooldown [s]	Locked range	Maximum range
Light	45	3	40	45
Medium	120	6	50	55
Heavy	225	9	60	65

Furthermore, there are three different mounting points of turrets on every ship: front, side and aft. not all of those turrets can fire in all cases.

Only in the side angles you are able to fire a full broadside (you can still fire the turrets mounted on the other side seperately). Otherwise, you can either fire your front or your back guns.

Critical hits

For every shot fired, there is a certain chance c that the shot will be a critical hit and deal three times the damage. c is calculated like this:

c: critchance

c_b: base critical hitchance of the ship

c_u: critical hit upgrade

c_i: critical hit items

c=c_b+c_u+c_i

This gets complicated by the fact that there are seperate upgrades for hull and shield critical hit.

DPS calculation for turrets

The DPS for each turret with critical hits can be calculated with the following formula:

d: base-damage of the turret

f: firing frequency = cooldown^-1

c: chance for critical hits

u: damage upgrade multiplier. So 50% u = 1.5

v: firing rate upgrade multiplier. So 50% v = 1.5

w: combined critical hit upgrades in %

dps=dufv+2dufv(c+w)

This shows, directly, that firing rate and damage upgrades have exactly the same effect, because they both have the same progression.

The DPS of a full broadside is:

$\sum _{n=1}^{k}d_{n}uf_{n}v+2d_{n}uf_{n}v(c+w)$

whereas:

n: ID of turret so n=1 turret number 1 n=2 turret number 2

k: total number of turrets in broadside

This gives us the following numbers for various upgrade-paths:

DPS calculation for skills

The DPS calculation for skills is very easy: its damage over cooldown. So a fully upgraded rocket battery has a dps of 34 (1026 /30 s). Thats an damageupgrade of about 10 % for a destroyer in midgame. However, it gets more complicated if you take into account that various skills buff each other. With the damage bonus of scanner you would get about 44 dps out of your rocket battery.

A typical corvette build these days uses shockwave and torpedos. Thats 22 dps ignoring armor for torpedos plus 12 dps from shockwave. So you would deal 22+12=34 effective damage per second.

DPS calculator

There is a DPS calculator here

The Fallacy of DPS

DPS, is at best, an estimate over a large period of time. The value assumes that shots are always delivered as soon as the cooldown has elapsed, and it ignores the initial firing which can be fired without any delay.

While situations do exist where DPS can be an acceptable measurement of firepower, it cannot be regarded as an ultimate value of strength. A higher damage per shot doesn't matter when the enemy has little health left, and a higher rate of fire means nothing when you only have time to fire a single volley every 10 seconds.