Weapon and part marginal values — 2026-09-09

The current catalog needs contextual budgets, not a single damage-per-weight formula. Accuracy, armor penetration, projectiles, Heat, melee resources and movement create different thresholds. These checks make those thresholds measurable; they do not adopt another balance change or establish prices for future content.

This appendix uses the adopted ranged Accuracy +2 catalog and paid elevation rules. It complements the post-adoption protocol and its separate competitive games and movement geometry. No games or movement policies run here.

What was measured

The retained manifest, full results and derived summary contain:

• 1,440 exact ranged rows: eight standard profiles × five stock targets × clear/soft/hard cover × standing/moved × base, +1 Accuracy, +1 Penetration, +1 printed damage per projectile, +1 projectile per Fire, −1 Heat per Fire.
• 120 exact melee-budget rows: dual Blade/Spike × Ruko/Marrow/Vex × five stock targets × base, +1 pool die on each weapon, +1 right-arm Handling, +1 Piloting.
• 9,216 persistent exposure sequences: Rifle/Cannon/Pulse × Courier/Foreman/Bastion × clear/hard cover × base/−1 Heat × no Vent/spare-Quick Vent × 128 shared seeds. Each sequence schedules at most eight shooter activations against one passive target. The observed run took 3.516 seconds.
• Same-context body-stat comparisons, conservative held-weapon comparisons, explicitly legal/illegal Reaver body swaps, conditional Lock On hit probabilities and range cutoffs.

The ranged platform is a Medium Foreman body with Standard head/legs, Loader right arm, Utility left arm, Ilse, no ammunition, and an explicitly empty left hand. Its back is Bare except when testing the Missile rack, which leaves both hands empty. All eight frames are legal at Weight 35–40 under Cap 50; exact builds, arm capacities, equipment and stats are pinned. These are one-axis cloned counterfactuals at unchanged weight, not purchasable upgrades or recommended stats. The normal target bodies/pilots are held fixed. No active allied ability, bond, Lock On, Enraged or command reserve modifies the principal attack matrices.

Accuracy and penetration depend on the opponent

The exact helper enumerates printed damage before critical-table extras, on-hit Heat, finite part durability, overflow and early volley termination. Its expected damage is not actual Hull lost or kill probability. Natural 1/20 and shared modifier dice are included; this is fresh ordinary Fire at range 4 without Evasive, Brace, height or stationary-target bonuses.

More Accuracy is valuable when it converts failures, then saturates at the natural-1 ceiling. This does not make an accuracy upgrade worthless everywhere: cover and other penalties can move the same weapon away from saturation. Cannon's +1 Pen has no printed-damage benefit against this clear Courier because ordinary damage already penetrates; it can still affect critical frequency, which this helper does not price.

The following increments average equally over five targets × three covers × two movement states for each weapon. Each column buys a different amount of functionality; it is not an equal-price ranking.

Values are additional expected printed damage per Fire. Another projectile benefits from the existing action and Heat payment, and brings another penetration/critical opportunity in real combat. A damage bonus applies to every projectile; glancing damage uses integer rounding, so it is not simply “one more damage.” Both upgrades need whole-volley and persistent checks before assigning weight. Pulse's on-hit Heat is absent from this table, so a low printed-damage number cannot establish that it is weak.

All 240 paired −1 Heat exact rows matched base exactly, as they should: immediate printed damage omits that resource. Across the 30 contexts per weapon, +1 Accuracy's mean hit improvement ranged from 4.52 to 4.83 percentage points, but one or two contexts per weapon had zero improvement. The machine-readable rows preserve this spread rather than just its average.

Heat buys safety and usable actions

The persistent check uses real activation bookkeeping, criticals, part loss, target/self Heat and reactor stress. Targets take passive activations to clear temporary states but never fire, cool, repair or move. One ordinary Fire is scheduled per shooter activation when its weapon/action remains usable. The cooling policy spends a remaining Quick on Vent whenever the shooter is hot. It does not optimize actions or spend saved Quicks on additional offense. Sampling continues through the fixed horizon for censoring; no further attack occurs after target or shooter death.

Every row below has 768 exposures per version, consisting of six target/cover cells sharing 128 seeds, not 768 independent seed blocks. Kill percentages mean target killed within eight scheduled activations, not winning a duel. Each interval is an exploratory paired 95% interval from 1,000 whole-seed bootstrap draws, preserving all six exposures per sampled seed. These are unadjusted intervals for this fixed mixture.

These samples do not establish a kill-rate change from −1 Heat. They do show safety and action-budget differences. Going from 1 to 0 removes the need to Vent for this weapon; going from 3 to 2 leaves it hot. The fixed cooling policy can even record more Vents for the cooler Cannon because it has fewer stress resets/lost actions and continues firing. That is a limitation of treating Vent count as a universal efficiency score, not evidence that lower Heat is harmful. Counts include a permitted spare-Quick Vent after a lethal Fire in the fixture; they do not guarantee an equivalent number of useful actions in a competitive game.

The sampled negative kill deltas have intervals spanning zero. Changed stress/Vent branches consume different random draws, so a shared seed is a matched experiment, not a guarantee that every later hit roll stays identical. Pulse applied roughly 19 target Heat per sequence in this fixture, illustrating power omitted by the printed-damage table. This is gross inflicted Heat, not Hull damage or guaranteed useful pressure.

Censoring remains explicit. For the no-Vent Rifle, base had 364 kills, 399 living-shooter horizon-censored exposures and 5 shooter-dead/no-kill exposures; lower Heat had 376, 392 and 0. For no-Vent Cannon these were 653/103/12 and 654/106/8. For no-Vent Pulse they were 114/651/3 and 109/659/0. Each triple totals 768. The summary retains the corresponding cooling-policy counts and per-seed timing; dead or still-alive no-kill trials are never discarded from the kill denominator.

Melee pool and pilot breakpoints

Keep the stock Braced right arm and Duelist left arm for the following legal Reaver builds. Dual Blade weighs 46; dual Spike weighs 44. Their principal differences are:

Handling and class/Piloting bonuses are added afterward. With Ruko, the complete fresh pools are six Blade dice or eight Spike dice. More dice support both attacks or defense and are not interchangeable with more damage per accepted strike. Blade has a genuine penetration/damage tradeoff; Spike's extra resources and lower weight are substantial advantages. Neither is a strict stat-dominance result, and these initial budgets do not establish the winning loadout under player decisions. The earlier isolated loadout study remains separate evidence for complete exchanges under its declared automatic choices.

Piloting affects hit success, floor(Piloting/2) bonus dice and deterministic first actor. It also raises the mech's own Evasion, a defensive benefit deliberately not valued in this attacking-pool comparison because the opponent is fixed. Against Bastion, Marrow's successful Blade resources stay at 6.65 when Piloting rises 2→3: the hit chance is already 95% and no new pool die is earned. Own Evasion and contests can still improve. This is why a universal “one pilot point” price is particularly misleading.

The distributions also retain all-defense standard/heavy parry capacities. These are alternatives to spending those successes on attacks; adding them to offensive output would double-count the same pool. +1 die on each held weapon adds two to a dual loadout, whereas +1 Handling on one arm adds one. Future modifiers must name their unit of application.

Mounting, movement and utility are part of the price

The conservative current body audit found zero confirmed numeric Pareto dominances when Size, class and categorical abilities match. Different Size reallocates hit-location exposure, so smaller is not automatically better. This does not certify the entire catalog: zero detected dominance is weaker than demonstrated strategic balance, and nonlinear critical/limb-disable effects still matter.

Whole-build substitutions can invalidate apparently good component bargains. Keeping Reaver's Autocannon and Blade explicit, a Precision right arm cannot carry the Autocannon (capacity 4 versus weapon Weight 6). Adding the Missile rack makes the build Weight 51 against Cap 50. Both cases are retained as illegal; neither is silently optimized away. Heavy legs, in contrast, can raise the cap: that Reaver swap weighs 51 but has Cap 60 and remains legal.

The parent's separate geometry audit measures Jump access and travel thresholds on actual maps. This table only establishes legal body tradeoffs; whole-build Hull does not substitute for armor or loss of a particular limb.

Range is similarly discrete: the current long-range limit is floor(1.5 × printed Range), with no current long-range accuracy penalty. Range 5→6 increases the reachable firing-distance cutoff 7→9; Range 6→7 increases it 9→10; Range 8→9 increases it 12→13; Range 10→11 increases it 15→16. A point's value depends on map sight lines and whether movement can obtain a legal shot, not on its contribution to damage at range 4.

Free Lock On saves a Quick and can affect multiple subsequent attacks, but a lock still needs acquisition and a usable sensor path/range. On the common Rifle platform against a standing clear Courier, a successful Lock changes per-shot hit chance 60%→77.5%; against a clear Bastion it remains 95%. Against hard-cover Courier it changes 37.6%→42.5%, with leg absorption still separate. Ilse's own acquisition chance in these fixed examples is 60% for Courier and 75% for Bastion. These are conditional probabilities, not guaranteed bonuses or a complete valuation of the Sensor mast. Smoke, repair, allied abilities/bonds, disruption, ammunition, Overdrive, two-hand occupancy, disabled-arm penalties and team support remain additional dimensions.

Reusable pricing method

For each future item, retain a vector of reliability, damage/crit/disable, Heat and action use, survival, mobility/access, utility and legal weight/capacity headroom. Compare legal whole-build substitutions against several target/terrain roles; preserve poor contexts as well as best cases. Mark breakpoints explicitly: accuracy saturation, armor/crit thresholds, per-projectile bonuses, reactor overflow, zero-Heat transition, Piloting bonus steps, lost-limb effects and range/access cutoffs.

Use conservative Pareto checks to catch an item with the same functional role and no compensating disadvantage. Then use exact models for their supported mechanics, persistent full-engine exposure for durability/Heat/crit consequences, complete melee exchanges for shared-pool decisions, and separately reviewed competitive policy samples for action opportunity and objectives. A drawback only pays for an advantage if it changes a meaningful legal choice or outcome in relevant contexts. No universal scalar price is fitted or recommended by this audit.

Reproduction and verification

pnpm exec vitest run cli/part-marginals.test.ts --maxWorkers=2 --testTimeout=15000
pnpm exec tsx cli/part-marginals.ts --prepare --out NEW-manifest.json
pnpm exec tsx cli/part-marginals.ts --run --manifest NEW-manifest.json --out NEW-results.json
python3 cli/part-marginals-summary.py NEW-results.json NEW-summary.json

Actual retained commands and hashes are in provenance. manifest-v2.json is the executed manifest; the earlier manifest.json is an unused pre-typecheck capture retained for transparency. Execution checks all 39 engine/data/helper fingerprints before and after, pins full current rules/catalog/builds, and refuses overwrite. The analysis validates all factorial keys, every shared seed, probability mass, actual damage plus remaining Hull conservation, explicit kill/censor denominators and Heat negative controls. Focused tests include a real shooter meltdown and surviving horizon-censored exposure. Independent review approved the design and implementation before execution. The retained-number review reproduced 40 aggregates, 54 Heat metrics, 108 confidence-interval endpoints and 39 hashes. The consolidated review approves the scoped conclusions.