Pulse Beak or Burst

Pulse, 'cause it give less stress to the power management.
I wish one day I'll have something like the military lasers from the original Elite. They were fast and devastating.
 
Pulse lasers every time. Beams are devastating but will suck your power dry and overheat in no time flat, during which time you could have been constantly pounding away with pulse lasers.
 
Pulse lasers every time. Beams are devastating but will suck your power dry and overheat in no time flat, during which time you could have been constantly pounding away with pulse lasers.


A lot of the time that's true, but I have Beams on my Viper MKIV and with A rated power plant and power distibutor and all pips to Weapons, I can fire the beams almost non stop, they rip shields down
 
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beams, for the sounds and the visuals! pulses for more rational reasons. i mainly fit beams, though. bursts have very rare usecases for me.
 
Serious question, since many of you seem to have experience - what if you manually pulse the beams? Do they then behave like pulse lasers in the heat & power department? I'm thinking it would be analogous to different automatic weapons in FPS - if you shoot in short bursts, your accuracy is much better, but boy is it handy to be able to fire a constant stream of bullets when you need to.
 
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It all depends on the ship and loadout, really.

I prefer beams, but they're very power hungry. If I can't run beams, I use burst lasers. Pulses when I have no other choice.
 
I would usually go burst or pulse. I liked the sound of burst more, but I ran pulses on my Vulture for a long time. Beams have a large power requirement and can be hard to fit in the many of the ships I flew. This was before engineers which can make fitting much easier.
 
I tend to use pulse lasers normally, or beam if I've the power to feed them. I don't normally use burst lasers mostly as I've never found them useful. Also, don't dismiss turrets. They may do less damage in comparison to gimballed weapons, but they can be targeting your enemy whilst you're still turning to get them into the fire arc of your gimballs. I've a pair of turreted assault cannons on my Python, and the sound of bullet against hull is just as satisfying as listening to rain on your window :)
 
I see the search function is invisible again.

Serious question, since many of you seem to have experience - what if you manually pulse the beams? Do they then behave like pulse lasers in the heat & power department? I'm thinking it would be analogous to different automatic weapons in FPS - if you shoot in short bursts, your accuracy is much better, but boy is it handy to be able to fire a constant stream of bullets when you need to.

I don't know how the timing mechanics for sustained weapons work in ED (well weapon as singular, mining lasers aside) but in any case the beam has distributor draw and thermal load stats which are way worse than on the pulse. So assuming you lose no damage by pulsing what is intended to be a sustained weapon, you would have DPS that scales to how fast you pulse it but will likely be no better than pulse if it can even compete, and the heat generation/distributor draw would still be less efficient. The reason you put the beam on in the first place is throw efficiency out the window for a relatively small edge on DPS.

It's like buying an original land rover and comparing it to the fuel efficiency of a smart car; yes you can reduce the fuel consumption by driving it less or in small bursts, but to make it the same distance, you're still doing it at a far lower efficiency.

Wouldn't recommend it but then again, experimenting and failing is more noble than theorycrafting.
 
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