Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[SirAaronIII]

The particle beam could be a pike. Similar to a spear but with a longer range (I think that's how they work? I never bother with much besides lasers anyway). Maybe microwaves are wrestling? It's hard to absolutely kill someone but it is easy to disable them with it. I was thinking missiles could be like throwing, they can be extremely OP if you make them that way. Railguns are like swords, I guess? Gauss cannons can be... uh... I don't know.

[Bremen]

I didn't realize that different beams had different damage profiles. Is the information available somewhere?

[Girlinhat]

Gauss cannons have shorter max range than equally teched lasers, but have constant damage over range.  While a laser might do 20 damage at point blank and 5 damage at 50k km, or whatever, the particle beam will do 7 damage at all ranges.  It has a shorter max range but a longer effective range.

Check the wiki on "beam overview"

Lasers - Penetration
Carronades - Spread
Meson - 1 point of damage at all tech, ignores shields and armor, hits internally.
Microwave - 1 point of damage at all tech, only hits sensors, fire control, and similar sensor-type equipment.  Ignores armor, does 3 damage to shield (but cannot destroy shield components).
Missiles - Pyramid shaped craters.
Gauss - One point of damage, but very high ROF, impacts 1 armor section per hit.
Railguns - Dunno.

[Flying Dice]

Railguns shoot volleys of slow projectiles, so I imagine they would be similar to gauss cannon, except that they fire multiple shots at once and then have to recharge, rather than firing lower numbers of shots in rapid intervals. They also have the ability to scale up, so you could have a 10cm railgun that would behave like that, and a 30cm one would act the same way, but would require more power per shot and each hit would do more damage. I'm not certain of their actual damage profile, but it seems logical that it would be single squares for smaller ones, and then either craters or single-column penetration, depending on whether the game treats them as if they're flattening on impact like lead bullets or if they're moving at such high velocities that they penetrate before they have a chance to spread the kinetic energy of the impact across a larger section of armor.

[RulerOfNothing]

I believe that railgun shots have the same damage profile as carronades and particle beams, which is some sort of hybrid between the laser's deep penetration and the wide craters formed by missile impacts. The main advantage of railguns is that they have a considerably higher power efficiency than energy weapons (a railgun does one third more damage than a laser of the same calibre, but consumes the same amount of power per shot)

[Girlinhat]

I believe the main power of railguns is their accuracy.  They have the same damage output as lasers, but fire multiple rounds of lesser power, ergo shorter falloff, shorter effective range, and lower total damage.  But they fire in triplicate, so if you're trying to hit an FAC with a laser you might have a 50% hit rate.  If you're trying to hit an FAC with a railgun, you've got ~87% chance to score a hit of some kind.  Lower power per hit, but you're more likely to make some contact instead of none.  If the enemy FAC/Fighter has shallow armor, then doing low damage can still wreck them.

[Sirus]

But you can't put railguns on turrets, so their effectiveness against FACs and the like is limited by the speed of the ship mounting them. Stick a laser on a turret, and at least you can track the targets more effectively.

It's mostly personal preference, though.

[Girlinhat]

Yes, that's regrettable, but makes for some fun FAC dogfights I'm sure!  I'm also not sure about energy use.  Do railguns consume less energy, hull space, or mineral cost to produce?

[Bremen]

No, the main benefit of a railgun is it doesn't use corundium, which I am often short of

All in all, I consider railgun and laser mostly equal; The railgun does slightly more damage, but has slightly less range and penetration. The railgun can't be turreted, but the laser uses valuable corundium. They all about cancel out, and I mostly just pick based on theme and mineral availability.

Before anyone jumps in about how important range is, its worth noting that maximum range for lasers and railguns is limited by fire control rather than weapons tech at anything more than base tech. So what range means for those two weapons is more "damage falloff due to range".

[Girlinhat]

Lasers, railguns, and carronades all suffer with effective range.  With a linear (or not) falloff, you're doing shit damage at max range.  If your firecon matches half of your weapon range, you're probably doing good with damage.  There's something to be said for maxing your range and pumping damage at all times, but sometimes it's just no worth the investment.

On the other hand, you only need firecon research to increase the range of all weapons, so you get a lot of use from one piece of research, and you can increase your firecon size to utilize up to 4x range, so if your firecon rating is 1/4 of weapon range you can still squeak out your max range.

[Bremen]

Lasers, railguns, and carronades all suffer with effective range.  With a linear (or not) falloff, you're doing shit damage at max range.  If your firecon matches half of your weapon range, you're probably doing good with damage.  There's something to be said for maxing your range and pumping damage at all times, but sometimes it's just no worth the investment.

On the other hand, you only need firecon research to increase the range of all weapons, so you get a lot of use from one piece of research, and you can increase your firecon size to utilize up to 4x range, so if your firecon rating is 1/4 of weapon range you can still squeak out your max range.

Yes, damage at maximum range can be pitiful. On the other hand, pitiful damage is infinitely more than none. If you're faster than your enemy and have a higher maximum range, you can sit there plinking at them till they blow up. Unless they have fast regenerating shields, at least, which is one reason my heavy beam warships are usually shielded.

[Flying Dice]

^
Which is why laser-armed ships are best against Swarm Queens; no wasted ammo draining their shields, and you don't have to get within meson range.

Yes, damage at maximum range can be pitiful. On the other hand, pitiful damage is infinitely more than none. If you're faster than your enemy and have a higher maximum range, you can sit there plinking at them till they blow up. Unless they have fast regenerating shields, at least, which is one reason my heavy beam warships are usually shielded.

[Flying Dice]

So it turns out the ruins on my conventional start Mars are only TL-2... but there are roughly 1950 installations.

[Girlinhat]

I SM'd in some ruins once.  Got a lot of interesting things.  A few components and a few research labs with intact data, but mostly things like fuel stockpiles and 500 units of infrastructure.  Even poor ruins can give you non-tech things like installations and whatnot.

[forsaken1111]

So it turns out the ruins on my conventional start Mars are only TL-2... but there are roughly 1950 installations.

Thats still kind of awesome. Lots of free stuff and you can make up a story about the secret soviet military base on Mars you've unearthed.