Something that’s been brought up in a private discord chat. You know how ATR is able to respond with station lasers? Let’s dial that back a bit. Railguns.
What if we had a large, single shot high power railgun that relied on solely your distributor to fire? It would have massive alpha damage, but otherwise be cumbersome to outfit correctly.
There’s more than a few CMDRs I’ve spoken to that would love to have just a massive MAC cannon on their ship. But balance is surely an issue if you can just toss it on a Fer De Lance with zero issues.
So I think as a base line, a distributor draw of 72MW will be enough to completely drain a standard 8A weapons capacitor. Or run 62MW and be just out of reach from a standard 7A distributor’s 61MW, while a G5 weapon focused cluster cap 8A would be able to fire two of them. Or run it at 77MW and not even a weapon-focused conduit 6A will run it. Or even 100MW and a Lightweight G5 engineered railgun would just barely fit that metric.
It would have three to five times the thermal loading of a 4A Plasma Accelerator to compensate that it runs on a full capacitor. And the only way to reduce those draws would be sturdy (thermal+integrity) or lightweight (distributor) engineering.
Thirdly, you’d still have to contend with the long charge delay holding the fire key before it actually lets loose. Let’s give it, say, 4 to 6 seconds to actually fire.
Ammo capacity would be limited to 40 (yes, it has ammo as does the other railguns), requiring you to synth or restock more often.
In reward? You’d have a weapon that would be doing three to four times the alpha damage of a 4A plasma accelerator, as the railgun’s standard thermal-kinetic split, in a weapon firing one shot every 20-32 seconds minimum, fit for large ships. It mirrors the absolute damage dealt to a +50/+25% resistance ship as a plasma would deal in absolute. This hopefully disincentivises high cap stacking Cutters, and forces them to concede to running Resistance boosters. It won’t out-DPS efficient conduit plasmas if you’re a skilled pilot, but it will give large ships a chance to stand their ground.
But really, we all know why we want this. We want a weapon that is the absolute pinnacle of weapons. Something to revel in the sheer magnetude of. A fully fledged MAC gun to call our own, probably something the size of the large grid railgun from Space Engineers. Something that will tear a 12-inch hole clean through a battle cruiser.
Let’s make it happen.
(No, I know I mentioned ATR, but this isn’t going to do damage to your generators. I’m not that stupid.)
edited:
Did some maths now that I'm off work. Efficient 4A plasmas will dish out 155 damage per shot at a little under 40 dps, assuming your capacitor doesn't run dry (which it should never with efficients). So we're expecting a stock version of this class 4 railgun to deal +50% more damage than this.
For a shield or hull with these resistances, first divide 155 absolute / 3 = 52. Then multiply by the resistance value. For kinetic, this is 65. Double the other 2 thirds of thermal damage to 104, and multiply by the thermal resistance value to get 156. Add those together and you get 221 damage total to be expected out of one shot of this railgun (288 if we're talking efficient conduit plasmas). This... does end up being 11 dps given 20 seconds of downtime, unfortunately, so perhaps this shouldn't be too hard on the distributor, or 36 dps over 6 seconds when not accounting for capacitor drain. The higher 77 or 100MW distributor figures posited earlier seems fine: it will result in 18 overall dps after recharge rate is accounted from an empty capacitor, as you'll have to wait for both the distributor and the weapon itself to charge, and the distributor will continue charging as the weapon is charging. Or roll with 72MW if you believe the weapon shouldn't be inaccessible if you do not have access to engineering. (Probably not an argument since Horizons is available to everyone now.)
Range is probably going to be the standard 1000km/3000km figure from other railguns.
What if we had a large, single shot high power railgun that relied on solely your distributor to fire? It would have massive alpha damage, but otherwise be cumbersome to outfit correctly.
There’s more than a few CMDRs I’ve spoken to that would love to have just a massive MAC cannon on their ship. But balance is surely an issue if you can just toss it on a Fer De Lance with zero issues.
So I think as a base line, a distributor draw of 72MW will be enough to completely drain a standard 8A weapons capacitor. Or run 62MW and be just out of reach from a standard 7A distributor’s 61MW, while a G5 weapon focused cluster cap 8A would be able to fire two of them. Or run it at 77MW and not even a weapon-focused conduit 6A will run it. Or even 100MW and a Lightweight G5 engineered railgun would just barely fit that metric.
It would have three to five times the thermal loading of a 4A Plasma Accelerator to compensate that it runs on a full capacitor. And the only way to reduce those draws would be sturdy (thermal+integrity) or lightweight (distributor) engineering.
Thirdly, you’d still have to contend with the long charge delay holding the fire key before it actually lets loose. Let’s give it, say, 4 to 6 seconds to actually fire.
Ammo capacity would be limited to 40 (yes, it has ammo as does the other railguns), requiring you to synth or restock more often.
In reward? You’d have a weapon that would be doing three to four times the alpha damage of a 4A plasma accelerator, as the railgun’s standard thermal-kinetic split, in a weapon firing one shot every 20-32 seconds minimum, fit for large ships. It mirrors the absolute damage dealt to a +50/+25% resistance ship as a plasma would deal in absolute. This hopefully disincentivises high cap stacking Cutters, and forces them to concede to running Resistance boosters. It won’t out-DPS efficient conduit plasmas if you’re a skilled pilot, but it will give large ships a chance to stand their ground.
But really, we all know why we want this. We want a weapon that is the absolute pinnacle of weapons. Something to revel in the sheer magnetude of. A fully fledged MAC gun to call our own, probably something the size of the large grid railgun from Space Engineers. Something that will tear a 12-inch hole clean through a battle cruiser.
Let’s make it happen.
(No, I know I mentioned ATR, but this isn’t going to do damage to your generators. I’m not that stupid.)
edited:
Did some maths now that I'm off work. Efficient 4A plasmas will dish out 155 damage per shot at a little under 40 dps, assuming your capacitor doesn't run dry (which it should never with efficients). So we're expecting a stock version of this class 4 railgun to deal +50% more damage than this.
For a shield or hull with these resistances, first divide 155 absolute / 3 = 52. Then multiply by the resistance value. For kinetic, this is 65. Double the other 2 thirds of thermal damage to 104, and multiply by the thermal resistance value to get 156. Add those together and you get 221 damage total to be expected out of one shot of this railgun (288 if we're talking efficient conduit plasmas). This... does end up being 11 dps given 20 seconds of downtime, unfortunately, so perhaps this shouldn't be too hard on the distributor, or 36 dps over 6 seconds when not accounting for capacitor drain. The higher 77 or 100MW distributor figures posited earlier seems fine: it will result in 18 overall dps after recharge rate is accounted from an empty capacitor, as you'll have to wait for both the distributor and the weapon itself to charge, and the distributor will continue charging as the weapon is charging. Or roll with 72MW if you believe the weapon shouldn't be inaccessible if you do not have access to engineering. (Probably not an argument since Horizons is available to everyone now.)
Range is probably going to be the standard 1000km/3000km figure from other railguns.
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class 1, 2, then 4 would seem reasonable for a high power energy weapon, and it’s distanced enough away from its miniature counterparts. But a more nerfed class 3 could see some use too probably.
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