No weapon solves this. In order to disable a ship, you must beat it into submission. I want the ability to disable ships without destroying them. A mechanic like this would make a lot of sense in lore, considering ships are supposed to be some rare commodity.
We do have such weapons, namely all of them that cause damage. A kill disables, only overkill destroys. (I know you mean something that disables without killing, but killing them works.)
This is why I write that the best support weapons are the ones that kill enemies the fastest, not gimmicks that inflict status conditions other than death.
Come to think of it, heavy energy weapons annoy me. Heavy Blaster competes with the best of them, and for a ship with a large universal, Mjolnir and maybe other heavy ballistics beats all of them.
- High intensity laser is weak, although at least it is cheap. I only use it to force AI to keep its shields up beyond blaster range.
- Autopulse laser gets outperformed by a heavy blaster if the fight drags on past six seconds.
- Guardian PD is good - for a beam. I only use it if I have nothing better available.
- Plasma Cannon is overpriced, but only has 20% more DPS than heavy blaster. Its main advantage is more range, but paying 16 or 18 more OP for it is usually not worth it.
- Tachyon Lance is nothing more than an overpriced and overglorified long-range EMP cannon. At least autozoom was gone - that made it unusable for player.
Also, when we kill ships and behold the glorious white flash and other explosion effects, I expect the ship to explode, with pieces flying outward. That... does not happen.
I actually prefer Pulse to Heavy Blaster. It's only got about half the DPS, but it's more flux efficient and has better range. The rate of fire also keeps up more pressure. Autopulses are by far my favorite heavies though. They might be outperformed in sustained fire, but you don't want to sustain fire for that long or else you risk fluxing yourself out.
Support weapons's I'm dubious about. The Tachyon Lance certainly wrecks my piloted ships, but AI are just too perfect about shielding them, plus it's virtually unusable by a player. I'd like to run a sniper Apogee with that, but I can't get the AI to stay at 4000 range and actually shoot anything.
EMP in general, if it hits, is great. The main reason being that it can significantly weaken ships BEFORE I get their armor down. Weapons or engines, doesn't matter. Sure I would rather just kill the ship, but when it comes to cruisers and capitols it might take two or three passes to break through, and being able to stop their return fire makes that much easier to accomplish.
Beams are far too weak though. There's not a single beam weapon that can overload the shields on a destroyer, let alone a cruiser/capitol, and they don't really do much to unshielded targets either. With the beam's soft-flux gimmick they need some more punch.