What I am thinking of is instead of just a particle beam like Aurora has maybe there could be different subsets that could be researched that do slightly different things, IE a plasma beam vs a particle beam.
You mean like in aurora?
Laser: Highest potential range, most dynamically changeable, turretablr. Piercing Profile. Spinally Mountable. Reduceable size.
Particle Beam: Highest damage at end of range, with no damage dropoff. Higher general range per HS excluding laser reductions. Piercing Profile.
Plasma Carronade: Deals explosive damage profile. Damage drops off extremely with range. Highest point blank damage.
Microwaves, mesons, Et cetera. So there are different beam types, but i wouldn't mind a few more if they could meaningfully have a reason to exist in the combat system.
I honestly would personally like if all the beams had more modifiers to how they preformed. A couple of ideas:
Meson Attenuation:
Five levels at most, each level increases meson damage by 1, decreases range to (1/level^1.5) it's previous range, with level 1 being 1 damage. If pulsar is using the current system of minimum range increments, having a range less than a minimum increment should render the meson innefective at the minimum range increment. Each level should require research to ascend.
Mesons with damage more than one have a random chance of having their damage partially absorbed by shielding, but will damage shields in the process and 1 damage will always leak through.
Plasma Carronade Encasement: Plasma Carronades with a metastable encasement to hold it stable briefly in flight.
Range increase in the same manner range tech affects lasers.
Will still have damage falloff proportional to original, so the initial damage falloff will be steep relative to the significantly weaker end of the range. This could lead to an interesting effect with rather long range carronades that hit 1-5 damage on the ending range of the weapon, sharply increasing at shorter range.
The main distinguishing part of this tech from other range techs is that it will also increase the size of the carronade a bit with each level.
Streaming particle beam: Particle beams which rake across the target as opposed to piercing. Each level halves the depth of a particle beam rounded up but widens it, to elaborate :
Intact Armor
OOOOOOO
OOOOOOO
OOOOOOO
OOOOOOO
Particle Beam Str 6 No Streaming
OOOXOOO
OOOXOOO
OOOXOOO
OOOXOOO
Particle Beam Str 6 Streaming 1
OOXXOOO
OOXXOOO
OOXXOOO
OOOOOOO
Particle Beam Strength 6 Streaming 2
OOXXXOO
OOXXXOO
OOOOOOO
OOOOOOO
And so forth. Streaming particle beams which miss should have a very slight chance of hitting their target anyway, doing small amounts of damage. The chance is slightly higher at higher streaming levels.