A lot of people may be wondering "How do the best players come up with their setups?" The answer is really quite simple. They calculate possible setups using various formulas. I have come up with a fairly easy way to calculate what your augs and skills will do for your damage, shields, energy and many other stats. Rather than giving you one huge equation to try to solve all at once, I have broken the very long process into 4 smaller, more manageable equations that most people will be able to solve to get the final results of their augs and skills.
Before we start, there are a few things you need to know. First, calculating ship stats using these formulas does require some basic knowledge of algebra, or at least some common sense to figure out what the letters and numbers mean. Second, these formulas don't work on RoF and may not work for Stealth, but have been tested and work perfectly for every other stat. If anyone wants to add to this thread and make the appropriate adjustments to my formulas to figure stealth and rate of fire that would probably help make this a more complete explanation, and I will edit this post to include the new formulas with references and credits going to the person that posts them.
I have listed the variable definitions at the end with a short explanation given by an example. Pay attention to the notations marked by * and ^ in the definitions section. One should also note that fixed values given by items (such as hull expanders) should be figured into the starting or original value before you begin solving these equations.
V1=(S*A1*A2*A3....)
V2=((V1-S)*AT*0.04)+((V1-S)*IT*0.02)
V3=V1+V2
F=V3*M1*M2*(Sk1+1)*(Sk2+1)
Variable definitions:
V1-value before aug tweaking and imperial tweaking
V2-value of aug tweaking and imperial tweaking bonuses
V3-value after aug tweaking and imperial tweaking
S-starting or original value
A1, A2, A3- aug values *
AT-your aug tweaking LEVEL
IT-your imperial tweaking LEVEL
Sk1, Sk2-skills ^
M1, M2-item mods *^
F=final value
*any percentage type values (such as augs, skills or mods) should be put into this formula by dividing by 100 and then adding 1, so a 50% aug, skill or mod would be put in as 1.5
^you can multiply as many skills or mods as necessary here. note that the bonus of skills is simply the level of that skill multiplied by the bonus that skill gives then divided by 100. Support 20 on a freighter would be figured as (20*9)/100=1.8.
For my example, I am going to use a wingship with 2 minor speed augs and a slipstream to calculate speed. I will start by listing the stats of the appropriate gear and ignoring all other stats for this example. We will assume the user of this ship has no skills that modify speed, aug tweaking 5, and no imperial tweaking.
Wingship base speed: 80
Minor Speed Aug bonus: 10%
Slipstream speed bonus: 25%
First lets calculate the ships speed with the 2 minor speed augs (no aug tweaking yet). You will notice i skipped a small step that is listed in the notations after the formulas. Refer to the notations to find out how to make your aug values fit into this formula. I did this to keep the main parts of the calculations clean and easy to understand.
V1 = (S*A1*A2*A3....)
V1 = (80*1.1*1.1) = 96.8
V1 = 96.8
Notice there is a decimal here, thats important, do not round it off yet.
Now lets calculate how much aug tweaking will help.
V2 = ((V1-S)*AT*0.04)+((V1-S)*IT*0.02)
V2 = ((96.8-80)*5*0.04)+((96.8-80)*0*0.02) = 16.8*5*0.04 = 3.36
V2 = 3.36
Notice again that we have a decimal, again, do not round it off yet
Then we add V1 and V2 to get the total speed after we figure for augs and aug tweaking.
V3 = V1+V2
V3 = 96.8+3.36 = 100.16
V3 = 100.16
Once again, we have a decimal, leave it there.
Finally, lets figure out how much speed the slipstream will add and how much your skills will effect the speed. Since the person using this ship has no speed changing skills, we can simply ignore that part of the final step.
F = V3*M1*M2*(Sk1+1)*(Sk2+1)
F = 100.16*1.25 = 125.2
F = 125.2
Now we can round the decimal off and we find that this wingship, used by a person with aug tweaking 5, no imperial tweaking, and no speed modifying skills would go 125.
Hopefully I have made everything clear enough so that you can now start calculating your own ship stats with your own unique setups. Enjoy!