Posted by: Yonder
« on: October 20, 2011, 02:10:29 PM »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.)