I am not sure I would say that. It’s not exactly a “fast” armor stripper for very high armor compared to the best options in the game. But even if it’s doing minimum armor damage of 10%(skilled) the entire time it’s still doing 96 armor damage per second.
Oh I'm not saying Heph's not good at armor, I just mean that I think of it as anti-hull first, and anti-armor second. So it's more like "great anti-hull with pretty good anti-armor" as opposed to something that you get for the armor-breaking ability.
I am not sure why I cannot write this calculus (line intergrals was a long time ago) to get a theoretical armor kill time but like. Killing 2000 armor with one of these will take less than 20 seconds clearly. 10 seconds seems like a high estimate.
Well I did a derivation of it in the past (see
here), assuming that each shot hits the same armor cell, and taking account the inner/outer cell dynamic. Attached is a graph of the time to fully strip armor for 1) Mjolnir, Heph, and Hellbore, using the approximate assumption of beam-like continuous DPS (as opposed to discrete shots), 2) Mjolnir and Heph plotting the number of discrete shots it takes for each armor rating in increments of 50 armor rating, and 3) Hellbore plotting the number of discrete shots it takes for each armor rating in increments of 1 (easy to find since it's just the breakpoints between 1 and 2, 2 and 3, etc.). You can see that continuous damage vs discrete shots doesn't really affect the solution that much, except in extreme cases like the Hellbore, so approximating it as continuous damage is usually a pretty good approximation (and makes it much easier to work with).
For certain values of armor, Heph actually beats Hellbore in time to fully strip armor. Of course, Heph also uses up more flux, but at this point, raw damage is going to be more important. You can also see that even at higher values of target armor, Heph takes only around 25% longer than Hellbore to fully strip armor. Plus this doesn't account for Target Analysis, (elite) Ballistic Mastery, etc.
The fatal flaw in this analysis is the assumption that all shots will hit the same armor cell. That's never going to happen, and different weapons will have a different spread. Mjolnir has a very high hit rate due to its faster projectile speed, with Heph not far behind, while the Hellbore's slower projectile speed and its wider spread means that a lot of shots will hit all over the target ship or simply miss. CapnHector's "probability wave" approach (in the threads
here and
here) accounts for different projectile hit distributions, and I think represents the most sophisticated analytical model of Starsector combat to date.
However, I've been going more toward analyzing the results from the Detailed Combat Results mod, since it represents actual, experimental data on how each weapon performs. That's where it comes out that the Hellbore's higher hit strength relative to the Heph is pretty much canceled out by its lower hit rate, so in practice they end up doing about the same damage per point of flux spent (this was in 0.96a, Heph is probably actually better now). And Heph's much higher DPS is what kills enemy ships faster, which is what you're looking for (the weapon set which maximizes the ship's kill rate of other ships, or alternately, minimizes the time-to-kill). Hence why I say, in practice, it's always been Mjolnir or Heph that ends up being the best in the large ballistic slot, at least thus far for the ships I've tested. Their high DPS is simply better than anything else you can put into that slot.
Maybe the new Storm Needler is good, but then you'll have to find some good anti-armor and anti-hull weapons to complement it, and I'm not sure what you'd put in the other slots to make that work.
My bad, HB means Heavy Blaster to me. The comparison certainly seemed a bit random, but looked on brand after thumper and ACG 
Oh, fair enough, however in the post you were replying to, "HB" was referring to Hellbore, heh. Another example where OoA (overuse of acronyms) leads to more confusion, not less.
Regarding the inner/outer cells, Vanshilar is 100% correct. However, it’s hard to eyeball a weapon’s performance when you have residual outer cells contributing fractions of the total armor well past the failure of the inner cells. All that to say, even though armor doesn’t work in way that I outlined in the guide or how it’s being presented above, it’s useful to estimate a weapon’s damage over time using the simplification and comparing it against other simplified examples.
Oh, I think the way you outlined it is correct, it's just that it didn't account for the inner/outer cell in some of the analysis. For 100% to 20% of the base armor, the results end up being the same (if multiplying the DPS by 80%). It's going from 20% to 0% armor (when the damage to inner cells are passing through to hull, while the damage to outer cells are continuing to hit armor) where it's different.
All that to say, the HAG is still doing the Lord’s work and doing it well, despite other options being equally good or better. I don’t compare the Hellbore and HAG against each other but I do make comparisons against the Mjolnir. They share some of the same space. Likewise, I don’t think the HIL or Plasma Cannons are direct competitors.
Yeah I feel like it depends on what the ship needs. Mjolnir is better than Heph at anti-shield and anti-hull, but Heph is better at anti-armor. Against [REDACTED], Mjolnir does something like 20% more DPS to hull, but Heph is something like 25% more flux efficient spreadsheet-wise. But in practice, high DPS leads to flux efficiency on its own, since the enemy ship has less time to generate flux and thus does less damage to you, plus has less of an opportunity to retreat and regen. So it's always a bit of a toss-up. On my flagship Onslaught I use center Mjolnir with Heph on the sides to get the best of both worlds in a sense; if I'm focusing on finishing off ships and flux is an issue, I can turn off my anti-shield weapons and the Mjolnir usually does enough shield damage to keep their shields down, while Heph is more flux efficient. But either one is usually pretty good.
Eh based on the discussion above I'll also include a graph using the continuous DPS assumption for time-to-kill, hitting same armor cell, for the Mjolnir (533 DPS, 400 energy hit strength), Heph (480 DPS, 120 HE hit strength), Plasma Cannon (750 DPS, 500 energy hit strength), Hellbore (250 DPS, 750 HE hit strength), and HIL (500 DPS, 250 HE hit strength). No bonuses of any kind. It's noticeable that up to around 1000 armor or so, the Heph, Plasma Cannon, and Hellbore all have similar times. HIL is best but it doesn't do much to shields since it's a beam (soft flux). In theory, the ballistics will actually do a bit better by comparison since they can have (elite) Ballistic Mastery.
Tachyon is more difficult to analyze due to the scripted damage. For what it's worth though, I took an Executor, used a practice target that's 1750 armor, 100k hull, stuck a Tach and a HIL on it, so there were 3 distinct damage areas: the Tach hit area, the HIL hit area, and the Tach's scripted damage which hit at the center of the practice target. None of them overlapped so they were totally separate. No bonuses of any kind. Firing both weapons simultaneously and continuously, when the practice target blew up the HIL had done about 52k hull damage. So the Tachyon's main beam (hitting its armor area then hull underneath) and the Tachyon's scripted damage (hitting its own armor area in the center and then hull underneath) combined did around 48k hull damage. So pretty close to the HIL in overall damage output. However, on an actual target, that scripted damage hits all over the place so it's hard to account for it analytically (it'll waste a lot of its damage on hitting armor all over the place, but it'll also disable weapons and engines which help quite a bit), and unfortunately, Detailed Combat Results does not report beam damage accurately, so it's hard to know if it's better or not.
Since this has turned kind of into a weapon balance thread, I'm going to throw out a hot take: I think the IR autolance is actually slightly overtuned right now! Gravitons are in a good place for what they are, but that hull melting, intelligent AI, instant hit blamo is just really good.
Even hotter take: The IR Autolance + smodded Expanded Magazines is in a pretty decent spot, but Detailed Combat Results' buggy reporting of beam damage (usually inflating beam damage) makes people think it's better than it actually is. Oh I use it all the time, I think usually I use it more than Graviton, but I sort of ballpark it as being roughly 1-2 times the armor/hull damage of an HVD (since I use HVD pretty frequently, this lets me ballpark what the actual damage likely was from DCR), and pretty-close-to-zero shield damage since it's soft flux. It's hard to tell though since DCR results are inaccurate for beams; I haven't found a good way to test it. In theory I can gather it statistically (compare battle results of no-beam runs with battle results of many IRAL) and infer the hull damage dealt, but that takes a lot of work.
In 0.96a my Conquests used s-modded Expanded Magazines just for the one IRAL on their medium energy slot, to help kill off smaller targets more quickly. That's a good complement to their projectile weapons.
