2) Ballistic weapons are less unviersal. You compared 2 different types - assualt and close support types. Which is wrong already. But anyway lasers are equally effective against both shield and armor. While your ballistic weapons not. Ideally you have to turn off kinetic weapon when shields are down, if you are not stomping enemy easily.
That's downright nonsense. Go look at my post that the OP has linked, a combined kinetic/high explosive combination using Dual Auto cannon and Light Assault Gun respectively nets 3x the effective dps on both armor and shields. If anything ballistic weapons are MORE versatile on a ship-wide scale because they allow for more efficient, denser, hard flux causing, and higher effective dps.
That's not even mentioning that beams get penalized a flat amount vs armor whereas projectile based weapons are based on the damage per shot.
3) Ballistic setup generates about 300 flux. Beam setup generates 150 flux. Equal? What? Oh god, they are hardly equal. While It is good to have higher dps, in Starsector it is usually better to emphasis better flux management. And from your video we see that even lower dps tactical lasers are good enough to do their work. But they also give you more room in terms of flux.
As I've already explained half a dozen times the
EFFICIENCY, the Flux -> damage ratio is better for ballistic weapons unless the beam mounted ship has above approximately 70% flux.
And
again you're getting more dps per slot, per OP, which means on a practical level there's more OP for utility or vents, not only that but you can choose to stop firing the less efficient weapon on a situation by situation basis while still retaining higher effective dps.
Also, as I said, there is no reason to compare weapons with other weapons. Because in actual game we have weapons attached to particular ships, you don't have lasher with energy mounts - so this little experiment in the end will not tell us about actual game balance. You have to compare weapons bearing in mind to what ships they may be mounted, and how they will interact, in which situations in actual game. For example even some strongest weapons will not be unbalanced if there are no ships to utilize their full potential, or some weaker weapons will be considered good just because they are used by some strong ship and because these weapons are suitable for certain ingame situation, which occurs often.
Your blatant denial of mathematical problems is starting to bother me. This test is perfectly valid for looking solely at weapon balance.
So weapon stats and CR/shipsystem bonuses are not the only factors deciding how balanced game is. Comparing just stats is wrong, you have to compare gameplay. Of course balance is subject of change, but for now I don't see any strong point to change weapons balance alot.
You somehow have an opinion in complete contrast TO a fact. It's blowing my mind
Graviton Beams are also easy to underrate. They don't hit hard enough to be your primary armament (especially since they are terrible against armor), but they make great supplementary weapons on ships that have spare medium energy hadpoints but are already pushing the limits of their flux/op capacity. For a fairly low 10 op cost, you get a beam with better range than its alternatives that puts very efficient pressure on shields, making it harder for the enemy to fight back and resist your main battery. I've personally found them to be great filler weapons on an Eagle with a 2 Mauler/1 HVD split in the main guns.
They will also kill fighters purely by the virtue of being beam weapons.
Gravitons are actually probably the best beam out there in terms of efficiency but still suffer from the same CR/Skill scaling problems.
The question is if you had the option of replacing those Gravitons on your Eagle with Autocannons... would you?
I know I would!
That does bring up an interesting thought though. An entire subset of weapons being intentionally weaker gives greater control over ship-wide balance in a sort of backwards kind of way.
You're comparing different damage types there as well, making this an apples and oranges situation.
Tactical Lasers do 75 DPS, soft flux, and ion cannons do 50 DPS hard flux (against shields). Both do "energy" type damage, so they will have differing effectiveness against shields. Though ion cannons have a distinct advantage when not against shields, this is a comparison of effectiveness against shields, so that should be irrelevant for this test. Why not take an afflictor, load it up entirely with Tactical Lasers for one loadout, and Ion Cannons for another, and put it up against, say... a wolf with no weapons.
It's not a question of damage types, it's a question of weapon types. If you go have a look at my post you'll discover that the damage types are broadly irrelevant because the effective dps is what is actually calculated, the buck doesn't stop with the damage type.
Your test is a bit... dodgey.. However there is a more sensible option involving tweaking the values on both weapons however I can already tell you how that ends.
If you give an energy weapon a 1-1 base ratio and have it generate hard flux, it walks all over nearly every other weapon type in the entire game, beams worst of all.
In my experience, beam weapons are best deployed en mass on a ship that has been set up specifically to make use of beam weapons. In that context I find them quite devastating. Slower acting than a ballistic kinetic/HE mix yes, but no less effective. They are to me an all or nothing weapon; either use a ship with all beams or a ship with none at all (graviton and PD being an exception, as they both have uses in their own right).
I've set up many ships with exactly that intention, they
work but I wouldn't call them devastating.
Slower is synonymous with
worse due to a number of factors but the one that springs immediately to mind is "Dead ships do significantly less damage"
The focus fire requirement is a significant downside as well, anyone who has ever flown a Conquest can attest to the value of being able to damage, disable, or kill, multiple targets at once.
Sheesh that post got long
(hue hue), think we got a little closer to a consensus though.
Edit: Oops I almost forgot something: There's a slight issue with your test because of accelerated ammo feeder... It's not a big deal in the long run but it's worth removing unless you've got something associated with it to test.
What kind of interests me is that the dps of two tactical lasers at absolute maximum flux is
225, but that isn't actually possible because the dissipation of the Lasher is greater than the flux buildup of the tactical lasers.
Also note that the flux dissipation is
220 with a 1.0 shield ratio meaning that in theory it's
impossible for a Lasher to die to two tactical lasers unless the hard flux of the Beam Lasher is at 100% with his shields
RAISED. The ballistic lasher has to CHOOSE to raise his flux and can dissipate it at any time by simply not firing meaning that the death of the Beam Lasher is almost guaranteed. If he raises his shields hard flux is forced upon him and eventually damage leaking will occur. If the Beam Lasher wants to be able to out dps the dissipation of the Ballistic Lasher he has to sit at what is essentially "overload" levels.
Edit#2: This is actually shown at 2:10 on the video. At any time the Ballistic Lasher could overload the Beam Lasher by firing, or force damage upon him if the Beam Lasher lowered his shields to avoid the overload, this would as mentioned lower the flux of the Beam Lasher, lowering his dps below the required threshold.