Posted by: MarcAFK
« on: November 10, 2015, 11:08:46 PM »Space shotgun would be a railgun.
3) Rear area garrison : There is a thread somewhere calculating the PPV / resource cost of all weapons, and PCs win. A few old hulls refitted with big, scary looking Space Cannons reassure the civs wonderfully, even if they aren't much *actual* use. Obviously, you wouldn't want to use them anywhere you think there might be a real fight, but they are the cheapest way of releasing better ships for front line duty, without the civs getting jitterryThis also makes sense from an RP perspective. In home waters, your biggest threat would be theft and a space shotgun is pretty effective at stopping that.
Maybe for balance they should require less power or reload faster than the equilivent lasers?
If anything should become civilian it should really be gauss cannon, as mentioned CIWS which are Based on gauss are already civ, though I would prefer if hangers became civilian systems, historically WWII merchant vessels were protected either by escorts, added guns, freighters modified entirely into warships (limited effectiveness) or catapult launched escort planes. They couldn't recover the planes however.
Maybe for balance they should require less power or reload faster than the equilivent lasers?Well...
Unless I'm extremely mistaken, cloaking isn't powerful enough to have any application for beam combatants.Dunno about other peoples attempts, cloaking is only effective for getting missile toting ships in closer to use shorter range higher damage missiles. I guess at extremely high tech levels, you could slap them onto beam fighters so they can get that much closer, but by those tech levels it'd be useless anyways, and you'd probably want lasers anyways for their longer range.
Carronades aren't terribly attractive weapons, their main draw apart from low research costs for large calibers is low crew requirements. Limited applications in Jump Point Monitors that are meant to repel an assault in a single salvo while making the locals feels safe (PPV cares about damage, not range or rate of fire).
Infrared lasers are even cheaper, with a better damage profile and more options... but for cheap bulky ships crew quarters are a bigger expense than the weapons themselves.
Plasma Carronades and Particle Beams could get a little boost, at their best they are hardly better than purpose-built lasers in the narrow range of conditions in which they work at all. For carronades, it would be interesting if they lower mass than other guns of the same caliber, like their age of sail counterparts.