How many times have you blasted another pilot in the face with a shaker only to see him fly away unharmed?  It happens quite often when the game is not set up right.  Most of the time you can check the game status  (hit the pause button) and the game is set on 10 packets/second and No Short packets.  Or some real idiot set it to 20 packets!  Packet loss on the Internet is bad enough without the added insult of incorrect Descent settings.  Incorrect network settings only make matters worse.  Much worse.  The pilot you shot in the face never even saw the shaker.  As far as he is concerned you never fired it.  The packet describing your shaker shot was lost.  Completely!   The best settings for any Descent game, is 5 to 8 "SHORT" packets (Check the box).  You will not experience nearly as much loss, and when you make that beautiful shot you will get your kill.

I'm not going to rave on about packet loss, but if you want a good clean game set the damn thing right for Descent.  Short packets 5, or 6, or 7 or 8, but never any higher or lower.

Ping, is another cause for a NO KILL shot.  Ping is the time it takes a very small packet to travel from your computer to the other pilot's computer and back to yours.  The ping numbers you see are always in milliseconds, ms. A really good Internet ping is usually no better than 250ms... or one quarter of a second.   Typical pings from 350ms to 600ms are acceptable.  If your's or another pilot's ping is over 800ms then either you or they need to leave the game and reconnect.  Reconnecting to your local ISP will usually correct the problem.  But, unfortunately not always. I pinged a pilot once at over 10,000ms... that's 10 seconds!   What I saw and what was real were two different things.  He was already in the next room while I was firing at where he was a ten seconds before. Not fun for him or me and a waste of good Shakers. :)   Ask that pilot to leave and reconnect to his ISP nicely, in most cases he will.  If he will not leave and I'm the Game Master then I will kick him.  Nothing personal.

A really good WEB site which discusses various aspects of playing Descent on the Internet can be found at http://www.myrkul.org/descent.html  Check it out for even more useful information about packets, pings, and why that certain kill was a bust.