Hi Boulder
First - no
I guess there will never be beam weapons in "Pioneer" (or Phoenix).
Sure you can Dogfight, to just engage a fight to see how it is to fight (brutal) you can press [CTRL]+[F12] this will spawn an "Interceptor" (police version) close to you.
(for the FFE MOD it's replaced with "Viper". Buy an "ASP" if the FFE MOD is active or a "Cyrapi" or "Draco" and fit a 10MW weapon and at least 5 shields, you should be able to win against the spawned police vessel it has only a 1MW weapon mounted)
The Reason why (first of all i'm no coder) is that Tom Morton never thought of beam weapons for Pioneer, to implement them could be impossible.
I see a big problem with the field of view in Pioneer, unlike for FE2/FFE it's a "bended" non-isometric perspective which would mean the beams would make a "curve" (you can notice this already with the plasma projectiles). Further if you have beam wepons your enemy will have to and i strongly assume they get unbeatable.
The AI pilots are quite hard since the behave has been altered since "alpha 9" release, i assume that you won't stand a chance with beam weapons it's already very hard and if the AI can point on you and using beam weapons you will be even faster burned to ashes (i have one single victory i've made myself since this change).
Unlike FE2 you can hire a co-pilot and depending on his capabilities your chances to win will be better, if your pilot is good in intercepting a ship you can depend on him to shoot a enemy down, he usually does that better as you. Overall i don't like it to be that hard and if possible i will change this. "Phoenix" is somewhat less hard as "Pioneer" because the specs are quite low this gives you better chances if you have an agile ship.
As a hint, turn off your engines and fly manually, accelerate and decelerate as well as over to left or right so the AI can't point on you well.
Be sure to be in manual flight mode when you turn your ship around in this manner you can flip your ship on a spot (that's how i outsmarted the AI but since "alpha 9" the AI uses this tactic too).
The problem with the beam weapons is also bound to how it's solved in "Pioneer" the plasma projectiles are a bunch of "blobs" each blob has a certain mass and when this mass hits you the impact is what mass effects on your hull, in this way you can hit or graze. Dunno if this could be solved with a sort of beam, that would be an endless row of "blobs" but no real beam at all.
The plasma projectiles are quite slow compared to the beam or pulse lasers in FE2 i assume it would look very funny if i would let the lasers spill endless rows of blobs to have something like a beam.
I can't make any promises, if that would be to solve i assume the dev team of Pioneer would have solved it already since this is one of the oldest requests for "Pioneer": "can i have beam weapons?"
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To the music.
Thanks the whole bunch are Amiga Soundtracker or MED modules, i've uploaded what i have on my notebook to my onedrive (89MB, 277 modules):
Amiga Soundtracker Modules
Some prob. fail, some play only on the amiga in the right manner, some are very cheap.
You can play them back using WinAmp or the MOD plug player with which i converted the modules.
Open MPT
(Dunno if i can ever achieve this but i would like soundteracker and midi music for "Phoenix" open mpt is a library which can be used for such, it would suit the game and they use very little space).
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Keep in mind that this is a WIP, the game hasn't a balanced economy yet (from my pov) and the "FFE MOD" First Encounters ships aren't improved yet, i noticed large ships are quite clumsy.
Assumed you would like to have all ships together in "Phoenix" you would have to extract the "lmrmodels" as well as the "ships" folder from the mod.
remove all dummy files from "ships" (those with 0 bytes) and create a new zip file from them.
The FFE mod changes a lot of things and didn't only adds ships it replaces all of them resp. disables the standard ones.
The amount of ships gets very large due to this and it will prob. take a long time to load them if you start the game (especially if the model cache must be rebuild).