Oh, hello. I am terribly sorry for disappearing on you guys. Maybe I don't have what it takes to dedicate myself to a project yet. I apologize.
I might make a few statements though.
We're not ready to diverge from the Trans-Newtonian ship movement and introduce acceleration/ship agility quite yet. se5a has stated interested in creating a "Newtonian Pulsar" after Pulsar4x 1.0
In a real military situation, analysts would realize that undirected, constant random movements would effectively dodge any unguided aimed shot against a ship with the size, speed, and acceleration of a Trans-Newtonian ship. If your computer is constantly making minor adjustments to course, you can easily dodge anything when we're talking about the speeds and accelerations involved. This is not an unrealistic situation under the universe's rules, and the only solution I see to counter this is to have either guided beam weapons, or faster-than-light ones. As i said before, I like my scfi to have a little hardness to it. If I have extra time I may introduce light-speed sensors and communications as well.
As of right now, there are no plans to introduce non-lightspeed beam weapons.
What about this bit of techno-babble that falls in line with pre-existing lore: Beam weapons fired upon ships of significant tracking distance away don't need to actually travel the whole distance physically? Specifically, it uses the same technology as jump engines to "jump" through the distance between the two vessels in much shorter time it takes to just span it directly. If we want to get less silly, we can say the space between the target and the shot is dilated to be much shorter, but only along the firing vector, whereas such distortion would be interrupted if anything of significant mass cuts through it (which is not a concern for shooting because of how fast projectiles are and how big space is).
Now how does this link to other auroraish or possible pulsar lore? Well, in the case of active sensors, really. We explicitly need an active sensor lock, and active sensors are heavily dependant on ship tonnage, correct? Perhaps we can justify our firing system as working by locking in on the gravity well to create a "lagrange point" in which the shot can exit.
Because of how small these space dilating tunnels/jump tunnels are, any masses in excess of the very small ones of beam weapons (except for carronades, but carronades could do with working differently at some point...) would disrupt these pathways rather than be able to take them, but as mentioned before, the previous disruptions would be unaffected due to how little time the projectile spends in it. This will mean One Cannot Simply beam a massive point blank missile on someone's face.
At this point, finding a justification for misses is easy: The Beam Fire Control could be considered the exact component that creates these dilations/beam jumps. Missing would be considered an inability for it's internal tracking to accurately dilate space evenly or place the exiting jump "point" on an appropriate firing position.
Mechanically? Beam weapons would work exactly the same as they did in aurora, except without strict luminal restrictions. Maneuvering to cheese shots isn't an option (in the way it's mentioned in this thread), just going fast enough or being far enough to foil the tracking or range of the turret or the fire control (as going above tracking speed, or hanging out at the end of the BFC range means lower accuracy for the shooter). Beam weapons are treated as hitting their target the increment they're fired, or a second later at the very most.
Thoughts? Or is this just going too far?
I might just be an outlier that thinks that casually skirting luminal-speed limits isn't a huge issue for certain cases, as otherwise we'd have to address the silliness of flopping between systems almost instantly.
EDIT: Oh, and an explanation of damage dropoff for such weapons: we can say that a lot of the kintetic energy could "leak", optical precision degrades, etc due to the turbulent nature of such dilation of space and/or formation of unstable micro-jump points. A jump point could well enough knock out the sensors and shields on a ship, so i figure it could do quite a number on whatever you send through based on how far it's got to go. Thusly, range damage dropoff could just as well remain as well.
+speculative
huge cone of effect weapons (big sweeping laser: unguided, but effectively undodgeable, leading to longer effective range: tends to only do topical damage, can hit multi targets?)
You might be looking at this a bit roughly, for an effect like that, we have two interpretations for that:
1: A sweeping laser - ...You do know the game's combat takes place in 3D space, right? The 2D display isn't actually relaying that the fights between ships cannot vary along 3 axis, it just simplifies overall fleet movement on a large scale. A sweeping laser would suffer normal laser miss chances, and either has rather low damage output on a single pass of a ship or ludicrous power requirements. Just connecting with even two ships in a single shot would be an experiment of extreme difficulty on it's own. Hitting three or more can very well be considered impossible due to 3d formations that can be abstractly considered to exist.
2: A "conic laser" -
You mean... a flashlight? Inverse-Square law, remember.
If it spreads out enough to illuminate an entire ship at the very least, (the very most smallest spread allotted), to do even a single point of damage depth you'd need damage equal to it's cross section, which is a huge amount of power, that is wasted due to a majority of it being spread out even further at any range beyond that.
The best, closest thing to actually believably working in this sort of manner at the scale this combat takes place would be plasma carronades as you physically would look at them. And even then, the expectation for them isn't hitting multiple ships, but rather allowing very-near-misses to become grazing hits, essentially.
I wonder if cross section of a ship should affect the accuracy of weapons against them?