What are railguns good for?

[telegraph (OP)]

I have seen considerations that they are good for early point defence. But if I can wait for Gauss technology to catch up - should I research railguns at all? Is there any other viable role for them?

[Jikor]

Railguns have a lot further range than gauss. They can't be mounted in turrets however so they are really only good on fast ships. They are great short range weapons though. Gauss guns will only do 1 point of damage each shot but fire a lot of shots which is what makes them good PD weapons. Railguns on the other hand can do more damage per shot at the higher calibers so you may get 4 shots of 5 damage each at close to 200km.

[telegraph (OP)]

Aren't meson cannons better for the fast ships? They are also close-ranged, and do less damage, but they bypass hull and shields.

[Victuz]

Unless I'm wrong mesons are energy weapons tech, if you don't have a scientist with a bonus to it than it's probably going to be faster just to research railguns/gauss.

[niflheimr]

Railguns are also impressive at armor stripping and critical hunting. While lasers will penetrate and do some very good damage close range , a volley of railguns will wreck the target.

They are also easy to fit - a 4*5 damage takes 450-500 . It takes you at least 1500 tones to get the same number of shots from a quad laser turret. And 6k km/s is more than enough to track ships in range. Also the damage , in my experience decays less with range than lasers.

The con is that you don't have the same penetration value - it takes a couple of shots to get to the juicy stuff inside the tin cans.

Mesons are good but they are way too short range and only do 1 damage - properly designed modules will survive quite a couple of shots.

[Nathan_]

Railguns are also dirt cheap, a 10cm V1/C1 railgun costs only 1 MSP to repair. Likewise their tracking requirement and range will be less, so the size of the FC needed for a railgun is less than what you'd need for a turreted laser. I'm thinking of putting a weapon on my support ships, and it will either be a railgun or a reduced size laser, maybe a mix of the two.  Meson cannons and HPM are weird in that no matter how big they are their damage is fixed, especially the anti-shield bonus for HPMs, but they'd be crazy powerful if they weren't.

[Bouchart]

Railguns are very useful at point defense or as range, so early on when you can't research much they make for a good weapon in any situation.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

Railguns are very flexible while only requiring relatively small fire controls. They're great on multirole ships (since a valid 'installation' requires low tonnage) and as flexible PD/anti-ship weapons.  Even larger anti-ship railguns (>=20cm) can be used effectively in the antimissile role; this doesn't tend to be true of other large beam weapons, as the turreting requirements are prohibitive.