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Author Topic: How come high intensity lasers deal explosive damage?  (Read 4245 times)

Deshara

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Re: How come high intensity lasers deal explosive damage?
« Reply #15 on: November 15, 2021, 03:48:52 AM »

they fire at a different wavelength. Normal lasers do energy damage (equal damage to all types) bc all they do is heat up the matter they're hitting -- catastrophically & enough to instantly vaporize a human, but still all it's doing is just transferring heat energy from the beam cannon to the target which affects shields the same as it affects hull as it affects armor.
The HIL is firing particles on a certain wavelength with such an amount of energy that when those particles reach their target they cause the matter they hit to, not just heat up, but to explode, like a fork in a microwave, in a way that doesn't just damage the matter that the particles hit but also hits everything around it with force, which doesn't do much to shields (which are in the vacuum of space & have nothing next to them to AOE), & doesn't do any more to hull than a normal laser does, but that outward explosive force wreaks havoc on the alignment of layered belts of armor, causing it to damage armor more than anything else
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DaShiv

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Re: How come high intensity lasers deal explosive damage?
« Reply #16 on: November 15, 2021, 07:10:06 AM »

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.

Happy to be corrected - good to see where the game is pulling that data from.

*Testing notes:

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.)

So the difference between 1x500 split into 5x100 hit strength is only about 1/3 less damage even against 1750 armor? Intuitively I would've guessimated a larger difference than that. Is that due mostly to how high the hit str vs armor difference is (since 100 and 500 are both much less than 1750), or other quirks of beam mechanics, such as armor being degraded per-tick?

What about the gap between 1x500 vs 5x100 hit str for 500 armor (light armor), and 87.5 (minimum armor for 1750)?

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.

Lots of mod beams use shorter range as a balance lever - I suspect most of the 500-800 range mod beams are going to be overtuned with the new HSA.
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Vanshilar

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Re: How come high intensity lasers deal explosive damage?
« Reply #17 on: November 15, 2021, 07:52:04 PM »

Happy to be corrected - good to see where the game is pulling that data from.

Yeah I think the main issue is just how hard it is to get clear numbers on a weapon's hit strength for beams, when hit strength is basically a "primary stat" like DPS when it comes to damage to armor and hull. It should be displayed on the weapon's stat card; many players (especially new ones) go into the game not realizing just how important hit strength is and this would make it more visible. And in this case even if somebody knew the armor mechanics, the actual value that's being used isn't readily apparent; testing this took some time (I had a lot of contradictory numbers at first due to how short the beam burst duration was). Also, if the game is splitting up the beam (due to multiple turrets), then the damage should say "5x100" just like for projectiles and missiles, to indicate that it isn't a single beam being fired. Guess I should stroll over to the Suggestions forum...

So the difference between 1x500 split into 5x100 hit strength is only about 1/3 less damage even against 1750 armor? Intuitively I would've guessimated a larger difference than that. Is that due mostly to how high the hit str vs armor difference is (since 100 and 500 are both much less than 1750), or other quirks of beam mechanics, such as armor being degraded per-tick?

What about the gap between 1x500 vs 5x100 hit str for 500 armor (light armor), and 87.5 (minimum armor for 1750)?

In this case it was going up against the 15% minimum. (Once the hit strength gets below 3/17, or around 17.65% of the target's armor, the damage will be at the 15% minimum, since 15% is just 3/20.) Without the minimum, it would've done 54 damage without HEF and 118 damage with HEF, rather than 150 and 225.

I've attached graphs of a hypothetical 1000-DPS energy weapon with various hit strength (1000, 500, 250, 100, and 50) and showing its actual DPS against armor and hull for different armor values. (The 1000-DPS value is for easy mental conversion, since every 10 DPS is basically 1% of your overall damage.) The first graph is for armor values up to 2000, while the second one is the same graph but magnified to armor values up to 200. Against 500 armor, at 500 hit strength it would do 500 DPS (500/(500+500)), whereas at 100 hit strength it would do 167 DPS (100/(100+500)). Against 87.5 armor, at 500 hit strength it would do 851 DPS (so, 85% of its damage), while at 100 hit strength it would do 533 DPS (so, 53% of its damage). Quite predictably, the lower the armor, the less a low hit strength affects the overall damage proportionally compared with a high hit strength weapon. In this case, a 100 hit strength weapon does 70% of the damage relative to a 500 hit strength weapon at 60 armor, 60% at 100 armor, 50% at 166.667 armor, 40% at 300 armor, then bottoming out at 32% at 566.667 armor. (Above that armor value, the 100 hit strength's DPS would stay constant at 15% of the original 1000 DPS, while the 500 hit strength's DPS would continue to decrease, so the 100 hit strength starts increasing in its relative damage again.)

Lots of mod beams use shorter range as a balance lever - I suspect most of the 500-800 range mod beams are going to be overtuned with the new HSA.

Yeah, I guess I hadn't considered that many mods (not just LoA) have fun burst beams, to make them stronger against armor. So they'll probably need to be adjusted once HSA gets changed.

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DaShiv

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Re: How come high intensity lasers deal explosive damage?
« Reply #18 on: November 15, 2021, 11:35:08 PM »

In this case it was going up against the 15% minimum. (Once the hit strength gets below 3/17, or around 17.65% of the target's armor, the damage will be at the 15% minimum, since 15% is just 3/20.) Without the minimum, it would've done 54 damage without HEF and 118 damage with HEF, rather than 150 and 225.

I've attached graphs of a hypothetical 1000-DPS energy weapon with various hit strength (1000, 500, 250, 100, and 50) and showing its actual DPS against armor and hull for different armor values. [...]

Great visualization! It looks like the difference between 100 and 500 hit strength is relatively moderate (about 1/3) at the extreme ends of the scale (residual armor and >1500 armor), but really becomes huge in the low-middle tier of armor values (about 250-550 armor). That's actually not too terrible though, since armor gets stripped pretty quickly at those low values down to residual armor. All in all, the 1k DPS is high enough that even the reducing the hit str from 500 down to 100 doesn't become too catastrophically useless so long as the armor gets removed at a reasonable pace (ie multiple instances of the same weapon, or additional armor-busting weapons) so that the weapon can start hitting residual armor, although it's not very efficient as standalone armor-stripping compared to HIL or Tachyon Lance.

Could you prepare a similar chart for the average sustained DPS (ie factoring in 0 DPS during burst cooldowns) vs various armor values for the actual vanilla large beams:
  • High Intensity Laser: 500 HE DPS, continuous
  • Tachyon Lance: 1500 DPS, burst
  • Rift Cascade Emitter: 1000 DPS, burst, 1k from 1 rift per burst (assuming due to max range)
  • Paladin PD: 1000 DPS, split hit str, burst (assuming max burst rate is sustained), 100 frag per burst
(Edit: Also, what are the sustained DPS values for each weapon vs 1750, 500, 87.5, and 25 armor.)

So HIL should obviously do the best here given that this is the actual job that it's specialized to do - it's HE and also won't suffer DPS loss during burst cooldowns. However, the question is how competitive the other beams are vs armor to offset HIL's horrible performance vs shields (which will become very relevant with HSA). Thanks!
« Last Edit: November 16, 2021, 12:04:22 AM by DaShiv »
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Jackundor

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Re: How come high intensity lasers deal explosive damage?
« Reply #19 on: November 21, 2021, 11:08:19 PM »

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.

Exactly. Be shield or be peeled.
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Maethendias

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Re: How come high intensity lasers deal explosive damage?
« Reply #20 on: November 28, 2021, 03:48:03 PM »

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.

acutally, energy AND armor are the ultimate trump card to beams...
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Vanshilar

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Re: How come high intensity lasers deal explosive damage?
« Reply #21 on: December 21, 2021, 07:26:24 AM »

Could you prepare a similar chart for the average sustained DPS (ie factoring in 0 DPS during burst cooldowns) vs various armor values for the actual vanilla large beams:

Sorry about the late reply, had some RL matters plus this needed some modifications to the Excel file so I'm trying to get caught up on some past posts now.

The weapons' DPS themselves are relatively more straightforward to model. However, the scripted effects (Tachyon's EMP which can do some additional damage, Rift Cascade's rift bursts, Paladin PD's bursts) are pretty difficult to model since they hit different locations, i.e. their damage isn't constant. So it's hard to account for them here. So the graphs show only the regular weapon damage for each of the weapons:

High-Intensity Laser: 500 HE DPS, 500 flux/sec, 250 HE hit strength (i.e. becomes 500 hit strength in the damage reduction calc)
Tachyon Laser: 346 energy DPS, 462 flux/sec, 750 hit strength
Rift Cascade Emitter: 231 energy DPS, 692 flux/sec, 500 hit strength
Paladin PD: 667 energy DPS (during burst), 500 flux/sec, 100 hit strength

Out of all these, the Paladin PD has the highest raw DPS, at least while it still has charges. So for low values of armor (or hull), it will actually out-DPS the Tachyon Lance and the Rift Cascade Emitter. It also means that it bottoms out in DPS early, so in theory, against very high armor (around 1850 or higher), the Paladin PD actually does more DPS (while it still has charges) than Tachyon Lance, because it's already subject to the 15% armor damage minimum while Tachyon is not.

The HIL does more damage to armor of course, but if you reduce it in half, i.e. against hull, then the Paladin PD actually does more DPS below around 50 residual armor. Of course, that's while it still has charges.

Rift Cascade Emitter always does less significantly less damage than Tachyon Lance, but a substantial amount of its DPS comes from its rifts I assume.

So against low armor values or against hull, Paladin PD (while it has charges) is actually pretty competitive. It's also the most efficient against shields. Paladin PD lasts about 12-13 seconds with Expanded Magazines I think before it runs out, so it might not be too shabby against low-armor targets. Then again, that's what you'd expect PD to be.

At 1750 armor:
HIL does 222 DPS (vs armor)
Tachyon does 104 DPS
Rift Cascade does 51 DPS
Paladin PD does 100 DPS

At 500 armor:
HIL does 500 DPS
Tachyon does 208 DPS
Rift Cascade does 115 DPS
Paladin PD does 111 DPS

At 87.5 armor:
HIL does 851 DPS
Tachyon does 310 DPS
Rift Cascade does 197 DPS
Paladin PD does 356 DPS

At 25 armor:
HIL does 952 DPS
Tachyon does 335 DPS
Rift Cascade does 220 DPS
Paladin PD does 534 DPS

All of these are while Paladin PD still has charges, otherwise its sustained DPS is 30% of its burst DPS. Also, you can just divide the HIL values by 2 for the DPS that it does vs hull with that residual armor value, instead of vs armor.

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intrinsic_parity

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Re: How come high intensity lasers deal explosive damage?
« Reply #22 on: December 21, 2021, 08:33:19 AM »

DPS is kinda not that useful of a metric for armor, because every time you deal damage, you change the armor value and thus change the DPS.

Better to think about 'time to strip armor', and 'flux to strip armor'.
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Zuthal

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Re: How come high intensity lasers deal explosive damage?
« Reply #23 on: December 21, 2021, 12:43:09 PM »

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 ;)

Even far below the intensities required to potentially cause microfusion or fission, a high intensity laser hitting a surface will heat that surface to extremely high temperatures, causing a thin layer of it to turn into a hot, high-pressure plasma cloud that violently explodes, pushing a crater into the material. That is how at least some forms of laser machining work IRL.

Having a pulsed laser is useful for higher efficiency in this, because the plasma cloud can dissipate between pulses, but if you have an insanely powerful laser - and a multi-gigawatt beam like the HIL can, if focused to a small enough spot, already do that - you can just keep driving energy into the plasma, creating essentially a continuous explosion that drives a deep crater into the material.
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Alex

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Re: How come high intensity lasers deal explosive damage?
« Reply #24 on: December 21, 2021, 12:52:56 PM »

Even far below the intensities required to potentially cause microfusion or fission, a high intensity laser hitting a surface will heat that surface to extremely high temperatures, causing a thin layer of it to turn into a hot, high-pressure plasma cloud that violently explodes, pushing a crater into the material. That is how at least some forms of laser machining work IRL.

Having a pulsed laser is useful for higher efficiency in this, because the plasma cloud can dissipate between pulses, but if you have an insanely powerful laser - and a multi-gigawatt beam like the HIL can, if focused to a small enough spot, already do that - you can just keep driving energy into the plasma, creating essentially a continuous explosion that drives a deep crater into the material.

(Just wanted to say, this is exactly my headcanon for the HIL :D)
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Nafensoriel

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Re: How come high intensity lasers deal explosive damage?
« Reply #25 on: December 21, 2021, 01:41:55 PM »

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 ;)

Even far below the intensities required to potentially cause microfusion or fission, a high intensity laser hitting a surface will heat that surface to extremely high temperatures, causing a thin layer of it to turn into a hot, high-pressure plasma cloud that violently explodes, pushing a crater into the material. That is how at least some forms of laser machining work IRL.

Having a pulsed laser is useful for higher efficiency in this, because the plasma cloud can dissipate between pulses, but if you have an insanely powerful laser - and a multi-gigawatt beam like the HIL can, if focused to a small enough spot, already do that - you can just keep driving energy into the plasma, creating essentially a continuous explosion that drives a deep crater into the material.

The TLDR went into this ;)
Alex oddly enough put a proper pulsing laser into his game either by intention or chance.
Typically the ablation threshold of a CW vs pulsed laser is slightly less than half the usable energy of a pulsed beam. The thing is a "pulsed" laser is often measured in nano to attosecond pulses so visually(when using actually visible wavelengths) you would perceive a solid beam.

It is less about the continuous explosion occurring but rather when you are penetrating thick layers of metal(like starsector armor) there is a cool effect that happens once you penetrate past the explosion size and duration of whatever material you are cutting... The GAS then becomes a main cutting element as well by detonating in a wonky teardrop/doughnut shape. Theoretically, if you had a powerful enough laser and a thick enough plate of metal/material you would actually begin spalling and fracturing the structure perpendicularly from the impact point until you fully penetrated the material. We see this now with some really brutal spalling on high-powered cutting lasers. You'd be surprised at how fast those little chips can fly(and how far!).

Lasers are fun in that as you scale in energy magnitude they start to behave entirely differently with the exact same application of physics :D.
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DaShiv

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Re: How come high intensity lasers deal explosive damage?
« Reply #26 on: December 21, 2021, 10:38:52 PM »

Sorry about the late reply, had some RL matters plus this needed some modifications to the Excel file so I'm trying to get caught up on some past posts now.

The weapons' DPS themselves are relatively more straightforward to model. However, the scripted effects (Tachyon's EMP which can do some additional damage, Rift Cascade's rift bursts, Paladin PD's bursts) are pretty difficult to model since they hit different locations, i.e. their damage isn't constant. So it's hard to account for them here.

Thanks - interesting stuff! Rift Cascade Emitter is obviously going to be a ton better once you factor in rift damage - in fact, most of its damage will be coming from rifts, not the beam itself. HIL is good for chewing through heavy armor, while Paladin PD does really well vs residual armor (thanks to frag damage). I think it shows that burst beams fare pretty decently vs armor without the specialization penalty from HIL, definitely more so compared to non-HIL continuous beams. Nice to see that all the different large beams have their specific use cases, with HIL/Paladin PD being more specialists (vs strong/weak armor respectively) and Tach/RCE being more generalists.
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OmegaMan

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Re: How come high intensity lasers deal explosive damage?
« Reply #27 on: December 22, 2021, 03:40:36 AM »



I've attached graphs

You had me at graphs....  you win
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Vanshilar

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Re: How come high intensity lasers deal explosive damage?
« Reply #28 on: December 22, 2021, 11:20:44 AM »

DPS is kinda not that useful of a metric for armor, because every time you deal damage, you change the armor value and thus change the DPS.

Better to think about 'time to strip armor', and 'flux to strip armor'.

Granted, in this case DPS isn't constant but continually changes as armor is depleted, so the graphs are more accurately instantaneous DPS (i.e. DPS at that moment in time when the armor happened to be that amount). However DPS is more commonly used in the gaming community as a measure of offensive "goodness" than total time or energy (i.e. flux) needed.

In this case, I don't know if the time or flux needed is even well-defined yet; you'd have to specify if you mean when the armor is first breached, or when the armor is completely gone, because there will some time when the inner armor cells are already depleted (and thus the weapon is doing hull damage), but the outer armor cells still have some armor present. You'd also have to define other parameters like how often the weapon hits.

If you'd like to calculate time or flux needed to strip armor yourself though, be my guest. These graphs here simply calculate a value based on the damage reduction formula (W * H / (H + A), where W is the weapon damage, H is the weapon hit strength, and A is the armor value), and each cell already looks like this:

Code
=SUM(B$4:B$9*C$4:C$9*IF(E$4:E$9="Kinetic",0.5,IF(E$4:E$9="HE",2,IF(E$4:E$9="Frag",0.25,1)))*IF(F$4:F$9*IF(E$4:E$9="Kinetic",0.5,IF(E$4:E$9="HE",2,IF(E$4:E$9="Frag",0.25,1)))/(F$4:F$9*IF(E$4:E$9="Kinetic",0.5,IF(E$4:E$9="HE",2,IF(E$4:E$9="Frag",0.25,1)))+$A23)<0.15,0.15,F$4:F$9*IF(E$4:E$9="Kinetic",0.5,IF(E$4:E$9="HE",2,IF(E$4:E$9="Frag",0.25,1)))/(F$4:F$9*IF(E$4:E$9="Kinetic",0.5,IF(E$4:E$9="HE",2,IF(E$4:E$9="Frag",0.25,1)))+$A23))*IF(G$4:G$9="Always",1,IF(G$4:G$9="vs Armor/Hull",1,0)))

(It accounts for using up to 6 different weapons together, different weapon amounts, damages, and types for each of those weapons, and a couple of other things, so it does have more capabilities than what's utilized here.)

The important point is all that can be put into a single Excel cell. If you want to calculate the total time or flux needed, you're basically integrating across these cells and figuring out when the armor value crosses 0. Doable, especially since I've already coded in an armor simulation spreadsheet before, but not something I want to tackle right now. Much easier to look at the graph to get an idea of how much damage the weapon will do.

Thanks - interesting stuff! Rift Cascade Emitter is obviously going to be a ton better once you factor in rift damage - in fact, most of its damage will be coming from rifts, not the beam itself. HIL is good for chewing through heavy armor, while Paladin PD does really well vs residual armor (thanks to frag damage). I think it shows that burst beams fare pretty decently vs armor without the specialization penalty from HIL, definitely more so compared to non-HIL continuous beams. Nice to see that all the different large beams have their specific use cases, with HIL/Paladin PD being more specialists (vs strong/weak armor respectively) and Tach/RCE being more generalists.

Yeah I think when I have some time in January to look at how Rift Cascade Emitter works more, I may be better able to account for the rifts. The graph doesn't account for it nor for the frag damage from Paladin PD (only the beam itself, which is energy damage).

Rift's weapon card says it does 1500 damage per burst. Doing a couple of quick tests in the simulator, it looks like at max range it does around 2100 damage per burst (i.e. the regular 1500, then a 600-damage rift), going up to about 4500 total damage at point-blank range, against shields, due to the additional rifts. (Yes the weapon card says the rifts are 750 to 1250 damage, but it seems like they're centered a bit away so they don't do their max damage.) So at max range the actual DPS (assuming rifts match the weapon's hit strength, even though we know they'll be somewhat different) will be roughly 140% of what's shown here, while at point-blank range the actual DPS will be roughly 300% of what's shown here. At point blank range they may even have better DPS than the Paladin PD, though you'd have to be ramming the enemy ship to get there heh.

Funny thing about the Paladin PD, it gets affected by the +200 range from Elite Point Defense, so its range is actually not too shabby compared with the 1000-range beams, especially with HSA which nerfs the 1000-range beams more. It also has the best raw damage/flux ratio between those beams, so among the beams it's the best vs shields. It's still worse than its closest projectile analogue the Autopulse Laser though in both DPS and damage/flux efficiency. Not sure if there's a way to take advantage of the Paladin PD being able to fire through friendly ships; I'm still struggling to find a case where beams with HSA are better than the equivalent projectile weapons.

Yes it looks like HIL is HE (obviously), Paladin PD is anti-shield and anti-hull (but bad vs armor), while Tachyon and Rift are more generalists. The big question mark is how much Rift will do once the rifts are accounted for; it has a significantly higher flux cost than the others, so it "should" do significantly more damage than the others. Rift damage also varies by range so you'd have to figure what range do you think the weapon will generally be used at.
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DaShiv

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Re: How come high intensity lasers deal explosive damage?
« Reply #29 on: December 22, 2021, 04:30:35 PM »

Rift's weapon card says it does 1500 damage per burst. Doing a couple of quick tests in the simulator, it looks like at max range it does around 2100 damage per burst (i.e. the regular 1500, then a 600-damage rift), going up to about 4500 total damage at point-blank range, against shields, due to the additional rifts. (Yes the weapon card says the rifts are 750 to 1250 damage, but it seems like they're centered a bit away so they don't do their max damage.) So at max range the actual DPS (assuming rifts match the weapon's hit strength, even though we know they'll be somewhat different) will be roughly 140% of what's shown here, while at point-blank range the actual DPS will be roughly 300% of what's shown here. At point blank range they may even have better DPS than the Paladin PD, though you'd have to be ramming the enemy ship to get there heh.

It's a lot better than point-blank range for max rifts: 1 rift spawns at max range, then 1 additional rift per 200 units less than max range up to 5 rift max. For a capital, that's 1 rift at 1950 range and 5 rifts at 1150. (Compare: standard large energies have 1225 max range on a capital.) So RCE basically has roughly Tach Lance DPS at Tach Lance range, and roughly Plasma Cannon DPS at Plasma Cannon range - at least on paper.

The wraparound mechanic also annihilates smaller omni-shield ships, like Remnant frigates. RCE is an extremely underrated weapon.
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