Weapon Summaries?

[Xelanthol (OP)]

Can anyone link to a detailed read about weapon types and what they do? (For ship design and roleplay purposes!)

Reading about particle beams, it's talking about torpedoes.  Is that right? :S

[user-unknown]

There is some info on the wiki but its somewhat out of date.  I did start trying to update it but haven't had much time recently.  Anyway, a very quick overview:

Lasers: standard energy weapon, range up to ~ 1 million km at very high tech and increases with weapon size, damage falls off with range, needs power, can be turreted, good armour pentration
Particle Beams: range is similar to lasers but all sizes have same range, damage constant over range, needs power, cannot be turreted
Mesons: shorter range than lasers, range increases with weapon size, only ever does 1 point of damage but always ignores shields and armour, needs power, can be turreted
Plasma carronade: very short range, very damaging, needs power... not sure if can be turreted, I've never used them!
Microwave: short range, can disable sensors and fire control on target, and does 3x damage to shields, needs power, cannot be turreted
Missiles: very long range (10s to 100s of millions of km), can be shot down, missiles must be manufactured and loaded onto ships individually
Gauss Cannons: rapid fire low damage, does not require power, can be turreted.  very useful for point defense
Railguns: does more damage than lasers but splits it into 4 chunks meaning that armour penetration is less, requires power, cannot be turreted
CIWS: an anti missile system which uses your gauss cannon, sensor and turret tech to determine capability.  will automatically engage missiles about to hit the ship on which it is installed.

Regarding the particle beam/torpedo thing, they used to be torpedos but are now beams.  Some of the descriptive text has not yet been changed

[Xelanthol (OP)]

Oh thank you! I wasn't aware of that.  How come we can't mount particle beams onto turrets? And with that being the case-Is the only way to have an accurate particle beam ship is to have a very fast ship? (I haven't read too too much into targeting but that's my understanding)

Awesome list by the way.

[Din182]

Yes, you only need to be as fast as the enemy, but if you're going to be using them, you will want to be faster anyways. And the fire control targeting speed needs to be at least your ship speed too.

[Lucifer]

How come we can't mount particle beams onto turrets?

I can only imagine that, by design, they are like the railguns, IE they are very long devices (probably almost as long as the ship itself).  It could make sense since they inflict constant damages over the range.

[Xelanthol (OP)]

Right on-Thank you guys, I'm starting to piece more and more together.   Is there any way to work around the targeting issue or must I have a fast ship? It would be cool to have a large ship with a battery of rail guns/particle beams to offer long range fighting support, but I don't want to have to deck it out with engines just so it could hit something if they are behind my line sort of deal (as in sort of protected).   Any suggestions?

[Din182]

No. Although you could make a Fast Attack Craft and put a particle beam on it. It would still be pretty fast, and it only needs 1 engine.

[Xelanthol (OP)]

Blargh, it would be nice to have long range cannons (well I guess they would be mid-range comparatively) rather then needing to use missiles.  Darn! Thank you for the responses, every bit helps me learn.

[nafaho7]

A good place to look for information about the various weapon systems, if you are interested in specific numeric values for range and such, would be the Aurora Wiki.

aurorawiki dot pentarch dot org

The front page will provide links to a several pages relevant to your request.

Now, if you are interested in using large vessels to laugh at incoming missile swarms, and find the idea of using missiles of your own is less than exciting, may I recommend exploring the joys of the Meson Cannon?  Put enough energy mounts(and fire controls) onto a large vessel, and you can swat incoming fire from the sky.   The emphasis, however, is on the words enough energy mounts.   If you use them, you can not afford to skimp on the number of weapon barrels in play.   If you do, you only waste your research points and lab time.   The Bureau of Ship Design will have more on this.

[Xelanthol (OP)]

That was definitely a good read, and meson cannons look awesome, but if you can fire up too 10m, how come beam fire controls only go up to 1.4? is there a way around that?

[Erik L]

That was definitely a good read, and meson cannons look awesome, but if you can fire up too 10m, how come beam fire controls only go up to 1.4? is there a way around that?

Speed of light. 5 second turns. If they went further, they'd be supraluminal.

[Yonder]

That was definitely a good read, and meson cannons look awesome, but if you can fire up too 10m, how come beam fire controls only go up to 1.4? is there a way around that?

Those ranges are a little counter-intuitive. You can't ever actually have a range over 1.4m km, but increasing the tech level does other things for you. As an example with meson cannons, the larger the beam the larger the range, so what that really means is that once you get to 1.4m km range for some of your beam sizes, any subsequent research will begin to make the larger beam sizes completely obsolete. That's still an advantage though, because it makes your smaller weapons just as good as the larger ones used to be, so you can fit more of them.

Lasers have a different mechanism, since the damage drops off linearly as you go along the "maximum range". As you increase the "range" of the lase you don't actually ever do damage at 1.5m km, however you go from potentially doing 1 damage at 1.4m km, to doing 2, then 3, then 4. (Or going down to smaller lasers.)