[rubixcube]

This is a bit of a late question I know. But I always wondered by weapons in bp have longer lifetime's than the actual range of the weapons.
I'm sure there's a reason for this, but I'm curious as to what it is.
So why is this done?

[General Battuta]

There is a good reason! It is to help with issues the AI has firing at capships - sometimes you would see a ship enthusiastically blazing away with all flak guns, only for the projectiles never to reach the target (the AI believed it was in range because it only checked distance to the target's centerpoint, when in fact it was shooting at a farther point of the ship, or something like that). I believe later additions we did to the AI table helped alleviate this issue. Fury could probably tell you more.

[Jellyfish]

To whoever's confused about the 'lifetime' thing, I think he means projectiles dissappearing within the range of weapons.
Am I right?

[Qent]

Projectiles in BP disappear outside the range of the weapons, which is what he said.

[Fury]

Battuta's explanation is somewhat correct, but it has less to do with AI than what he says.

It is true that AI sometimes has problems with determining actual distance to target which may lead to projectiles never reaching their intended target. But this is more of a retail issue and most of these issues have been mitigated by AI profiles flags. The main reason why it was done was purely visual. With all the improvements that AI received in BP2, their use of primaries was substantially better than in retail. It became jarring to see projectiles suddenly disappearing right on your face and just before they were supposed to impact (or miss) their intended target. Hence why their time of life is 10% longer than their targeting distance. For big weapons the increase in lifetime is 20%.