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[vicegrip]

Is there any explanation for why this particular beam weapon deals explosive damage when everything else except for the graviton beam deals energy damage? The graviton beam has an in game lore explanation at least, but I don't see one for this weapon.

[IonDragonX]

I agree that there is no lore explanation for HIL being HE. Its entirely because Beams are a different weapon type from all the projectiles in the game and Armor is the ultimate trump card against beams. I'm referring to game mechanics here. Beams deal diffuse damage over time instead of instantaneously like a projectile. Hence, when HIL says 500 damage/s it is actually 60 frames per second which equals 8.3 damage per frame. 1500 Armor reduces 8.3 damage every single frame until it hits a minimum damage (IDK what the minimum is). All that is making it a "tickle beam". Changing the type from Energy to HE does give the HIL at least a chance to cut through Armor.

I hope this rambling answer helps.

[Megas]

Answer:  So that high-intensity laser can do something.  It originally did energy damage (and DPS might have been 250 or 300 instead of 500), and it was weak.  It was blocked by shields, did not burn through armor very well, and it was slow and not very efficient.  It was almost as useless as Thumper.  The other beam alternative, Tachyon Lance, had 2500 range and was more effective against armor.

[Thaago]

I agree that there is no lore explanation for HIL being HE. Its entirely because Beams are a different weapon type from all the projectiles in the game and Armor is the ultimate trump card against beams. I'm referring to game mechanics here. Beams deal diffuse damage over time instead of instantaneously like a projectile. Hence, when HIL says 500 damage/s it is actually 60 frames per second which equals 8.3 damage per frame. 1500 Armor reduces 8.3 damage every single frame until it hits a minimum damage (IDK what the minimum is). All that is making it a "tickle beam". Changing the type from Energy to HE does give the HIL at least a chance to cut through Armor.

I hope this rambling answer helps.

This isn't actually how beam damage to armor works - while the damage is applied every frame and divided by the timestep, the damage for the purpose of armor reduction is not. Instead its set to 50% of its dps - so in practice beam weapons have slightly better penetration than a weapon firing twice per second (slightly better because earlier 'ticks' lower the armor so make later ticks more effective).

So for the HIL, it has 500 rated DPS which is HE, so 1000 vs armor. As a beam, its penetration is set to 50%, or 500, which is pretty good.

[SCC]

HIL is, in fact, the single best weapon against armour in the game, if you can keep firing the gun and hitting the target. Hellbore has a higher hit strength, but only half the DPS and lower accuracy.

[Linnis]

Just by looking at the name it seems like its an more intense version of the normal beam. Perhaps because of its intensity it causes fusion in matter that it hits causing the target to explode instead of just melting.

[DaShiv]

Armor is the ultimate trump card against beams. I'm referring to game mechanics here. Beams deal diffuse damage over time instead of instantaneously like a projectile. Hence, when HIL says 500 damage/s it is actually 60 frames per second which equals 8.3 damage per frame. 1500 Armor reduces 8.3 damage every single frame until it hits a minimum damage (IDK what the minimum is). All that is making it a "tickle beam". Changing the type from Energy to HE does give the HIL at least a chance to cut through Armor.

Actually it's the other way around - beams are some of the very best anti-armor options for high tech. Beams do have very short damage tick intervals (0.1s IIRC) but they retain hit strength vs armor of 1/2 of their DPS per tick. So for example, even though HIL might only do 50 damage per tick, each 50 damage tick penetrates armor with the efficiency of 250 HE hit strength (higher than Heavy Mauler), 10 times per second.

The real kicker though is how high the hit strength of burst beams are, due to their short burst length (and hence high DPS during the burst). Virtually every single burst beam punches armor very effectively, even PD burst beams:

Burst Beam	Hit Strength vs Armor
Burst PD Laser	175
Heavy Burst Laser	200
Rift Lance	500
Phase Lance	500
Paladin PD	500 (+100 frag)
Rift Cascade Emitter	500 (+1000 per rift)
Tachyon Lance	750

So while HIL does more continuous armor damage, burst beams can strip armor with far superior shield pressure and flux efficiency, which will be very useful for HSA builds next patch. Also: HSA in current dev patch includes +10% damage for all beams, which will further improve their armor stripping capabilities.

[Amazigh]

Paladin PD

500 (+100 frag)

Remember that the paladin fires 5 beams that converge on the target point, so that should be:

Paladin PD - 5*100 (+100 frag)

[SapphireSage]

To answer your question gameplay-wise*, the HIL got changed from a 250 Energy DPS beam to its current 500 HE DPS during some point in 0.8 or 0.9 because when it was energy previously it didn't do anything that the Tachyon couldn't do better aside from consistent damage. It had issues cutting through armor like the other sustained beams do, had issues with shields as you would expect of a larger version of the tactical beam, and had a miserable firing turn rate that it may as well have been a hardpoint while firing and thus got out maneuvered by anything that wasn't a slow cruiser or capital on the ships that could mount it. Meanwhile, its direct burst-beam competitor, the Tachyon Lance, not only had better armor punching, and potential overloading capabilities thanks to its burst damage, but it also had a higher listed DPS and could EMP out weapons and engines as well. Only thing HIL had over it was OP and lower Flux/second or higher Flux/damage ratios.

So to give the HIL a niche that the Tachyon couldn't just do better, and thus a reason to use it as well as a new sustained-beam role type, the HIL got modified to HE damage. The DPS also got doubled in order to maintain its shield pressure capability and it also makes its armor stripping much more threatening, though at the cost of higher flux/sec to compensate. Now, if you want a ship to completely strip the armor of and destroy an enemy that dares to put its shield down while in range of you, or better yet, too terrified to ever think of putting its shield down for even a second next to this beast you can slap an HIL onto it and watch as it decimates a target the moment their shield goes down.


* Gameplay almost always comes above lore in StarSector priorities. That is, the lore will change if necessary in cases of conflict to ensure that good gameplay comes out on top.

[Megas]

To answer your question gameplay-wise*, the HIL got changed from a 250 Energy DPS beam to its current 500 HE DPS during some point in 0.8 or 0.9 because when it was energy previously it didn't do anything that the Tachyon couldn't do better aside from consistent damage. It had issues cutting through armor like the other sustained beams do, had issues with shields as you would expect of a larger version of the tactical beam, and had a miserable firing turn rate that it may as well have been a hardpoint while firing and thus got out maneuvered by anything that wasn't a slow cruiser or capital on the ships that could mount it. Meanwhile, its direct burst-beam competitor, the Tachyon Lance, not only had better armor punching, and potential overloading capabilities thanks to its burst damage, but it also had a higher listed DPS and could EMP out weapons and engines as well. Only thing HIL had over it was OP and lower Flux/second or higher Flux/damage ratios.

Not only that, but lance also had much more range until one of the 0.7.x releases.  It did not penetrate shields until one release some time later added a glitch (good-bad bug) that made them hit through shields, and with positive feedback, Alex made it the scripted weapon it is now.

Back then, Paragon using heavy blasters as main damage guns while using tachyon lances as long-range snipers (with range possibly greater the modern beams from battlestation with Targeting Supercomputer) was an effective build.  It was fun sniping things, and it made enemy Paragon that sniped at you while hiding behind fog-of-war scary.

[DaShiv]

Remember that the paladin fires 5 beams that converge on the target point, so that should be:

Paladin PD - 5*100 (+100 frag)

Per weapon_data.csv, Paladin PD ("guardian") does its damage in a single burst: 1000 DPS, 0.2s burst size, 0.1s burst delay, 1 ammo used, 20 ammo max. This is consistent with the data format for the other weapons and with the in-game weapon card; thus, as far as I can tell the "5 beams" is simply cosmetic. Hit strength for beams is calculated as 50% of the actual beam DPS value from the game's data.

[Kohlenstoff]

An storyline explanation for explosive damage could be an fast pulsing Laser. Every pulse would cause explosions on armor surfaces.

[Nafensoriel]

An storyline explanation for explosive damage could be an fast pulsing Laser. Every pulse would cause explosions on armor surfaces.

Wouldnt have to be a pulse. If you wanted to storygame the technology any beam of sufficient strength will cause microfusion/fission events at the impact point.

In fact, this has been studied for decades(since at least 1982 if my memory serves me correctly) and is actually doable with today's technology under controlled conditions. It's a fundamental aspect of laser-induced fusion reactions. This is similar to the effect of firing something at greater than .13c within an atmosphere having the potential to cause atmospheric fusion and fission.

/edit because I hit enter rather than wait when making coffee...
For graviton and Tachyons not behaving the same way they are fundamentally different particles. It could be easily story gamed that both do not have the same type of energy transfer. For example, tachyons are greater than speed of light particles theoretically. They might not impact with the same kinetic impact of normal matter and instead "rip" normal matter as they pass through. For gravitons it's even easier as you are dealing with gravity disruption and not actually impact force... again more ripping less punching.

TLDR: A terawatt or petawatt laser is far less likely to melt and far more likely to cause the impacted object to "explode"... at least in real life. In scifiland anything is possible

[NephilimNexus]

It is a common sci-fi trope that laser weapons tend to be weak against starship shields but very effective against armor and hull.

Since explosive damage weapons in this game tend to follow that formula that might be why they picked it.  It is not to imply that the beam suddenly creates a massive explosion the way a conventional cannon shell would, rather that's just how the damage effect plays out.

Other sci-fi weapon tropes we're all familiar with:

Ion weapons disable things rather than destroying hulls.
Plasma weapons tend to do even damage against all resistances, but their bolts can be dodges like projectiles.
Projectile weapon do more damage to shields than armor (stopping a solid mass is tricky for an energy based shield, while armor was invented precisely to stop solid mass attacks)
Kinetic-kill weapons tend to bypass armor and go directly to hull, but do less damage per shot overall.
Disruptors, like plasma, tend to do generic damage unless hitting something organic.  They also tend to spread out like shotgun pellets over range.
Neutron weapon kill crew but leave ships intact.
Missiles can be designed to focus on shields or armor but never both.
Rockets are best used in swarms (see also Macross Missile Massacre).
Torpedoes are large and slow but devastating.
Lasers tend to be the weakest choice of weapon but also the most accurate (they really can't miss).
Railguns are doom weapons but suck your batteries dry.

The list goes on.  Some people break from convention but most stick with it because it's familiar and lets people leap right in without having to check the cliff notes.

[Vanshilar]

Per weapon_data.csv, Paladin PD ("guardian") does its damage in a single burst: 1000 DPS, 0.2s burst size, 0.1s burst delay, 1 ammo used, 20 ammo max. This is consistent with the data format for the other weapons and with the in-game weapon card; thus, as far as I can tell the "5 beams" is simply cosmetic. Hit strength for beams is calculated as 50% of the actual beam DPS value from the game's data.

In the case of Paladin PD, the game does split them up into 5 individual beams which can hit or miss independently (such as if some beams happened to graze a target while the others didn't), and they thus end up with only 1/5 of the hit strength. This is not directly coded in weapon_data.csv. Rather, in guardian.wpn, the fact that there are 5 turrets defined (the turretOffsets, turretAngleOffsets, hardpointOffsets, and hardpointangleOffsets parameters) automatically tells the game to split the beam into 5 components with each getting 1/5 of the beam's damage and hit strength. So in this case, each beam's hit strength is only 100. This makes it so that the Paladin PD can have high DPS, yet low armor penetration. This can be verified via testing*.

This is used to great effect in the Sylphon mod, where the large energy weapon Radiant Dawn Emitter has 600 DPS for 600 flux with 1000 range and only costs 19 OP. Normally that would be too strong; however, it's split into 8 beams, so it only has 37.5 hit strength when it would normally have 300 hit strength. Thus the fact that it's a beam (soft flux) limits its utility against shields, while its low hit strength limits its utility against armor and hull, limiting its power, allowing it to have massive "on-paper" stats. It's basically 8 tactical lasers tied together.

Part of the issue here is that not only is how armor works rather opaque, but the hit strength of a weapon is not given anywhere directly in the game. For projectiles it's fairly easy to figure out (the hit strength is the same as the damage per shot), but for beams (and especially burst beams) there's no alternative except to go digging into the game files. Then there's the whole "multiple beam" thing to consider as well. It should be easy enough to add a "hit strength" field onto the weapon stat card, especially when this is a very important stat for weapons.

*Testing notes:

Spoiler

This can be verified in-game by removing most of the turret data so that there is only 1 turret. The Paladin PD's damage against armor will noticeably increase. For example, setting the weapon to a 1-second burst (a 0.2-second burst is too short, leading to differences in how many damage ticks each burst get), it will normally do around 142 damage to the low-tech practice target (1750 armor), and around 212 damage with HEF on. This is basically the 15% minimum damage (which would theoretically be 150 and 225, respectively). But if Paladin PD were reduced down to 1 turret by changing the four above parameters, it will do around 218 damage, around 440 with HEF on, against the same target, when the theoretical amounts would be 222 and 450 damage, respectively. (Beams always do slightly less than the theoretical amounts due to various game engine properties.)

[close]

Edit: As a side note, HSA makes the Plasma Drivers in the Legacy of Arkgneisis mod very attractive next update. Depending on how much the Doom is nerfed (and how much the cryoblaster is nerfed), the Cabal Aurora or possibly the SWP Gorgon may become a very powerful HSA flagship.