Interesting that there was this question around when I just got back to Aurora. Yeah, it was of course advanced lasers in advanced spinal mount, but...
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So I think the original creator got in the database and messed with things. Which is permissible, just realize that bugs with that are going to be required to be reproduced under a clean DB.
I feel honored to be thought of as someone with such capability, but I have no idea how to do that. Funny is that I actually came here again to search for a way to do it on the forum, because I would like to make some personal modded adjustments for my new game. However I did not find anything via search, so could someone point me on how to open this stevefire.mdb?
It is a lot higher than a regular laser, in addition when I checked out the entire range of advanced lasers I noticed a problem. In the past an advance laser did about 25% more damage for it's size without any extra power requirements. For example a 12cm advanced laser did 6 points damage but only required 4 points of power to recharge. This is no longer true. The 10cm Advanced laser shows as a 4 cm laser with damage 0, range 0, and 1 hull space size. I think something may have slipped into the database. The current lineup is 4cm, 5cm, 8cm, 12cm lasers on the design screen with damage starting at 0, 1, 2, 4, and 10 respectively. They all need the same amount of power as their damage output. The actual sizes on the pulldown menu do not match these however. There they go the standard 10cm, 12cm, 15cm, 20cm etc. On the high end this pattern is reversed with the 80cm advanced laser saying it is a 210cm laser. I did this double check with a fresh database just to make sure that there wasn't any problems with something I had done previously. Also all of the above data was without using any spinal beam modifiers. I will be putting a bug report in for this.
I myself reported this issue already some months ago, though I only mentioned that low grade advanced lasers have no effect and apparently no other advantage in trade at all. I stopped thinking about it after they at least got awesome strong (though still needing just as much energy/ no better dps), which made them good capital weapons. The wiki was still misleading with the claim that they are "more accurate versions of the standard laser", but I assumed it was just outdated like on other occasions too.