Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Lasers are all wrong right now!

Right now they are back asswards.

Pulse lasers SHOULD be massive ALPHA weapons with huge cap usage but decent tracking with low rof to help with overall cap usage and dps balancing.

Beam laser SHOULD be dps lasers with NO 'alpha'. i.e. they do damage each second. Effectively very low damage but with very fast rof (1 second).

EDIT:

This would make lasers very very unique and more in keeping with actual laser physics (I know its a game but I want bright beams of laser all ova da place!)

It would also shake up the short/long range high/low dps tactics and give a bit of life into a lot of old tired arguments about what guns system to fit and how it 'compares' to the other systems.

So, really, you're just advocating a name change and not a change in mechanics?

Mate we fly spaceship submarines. This isn't even close to real.

I just want funner lasers!!

TBH I would just have their falloff = 1m!

They work nothing like that now. They are just guns that shoot light.

Imagine if pulse laser had alpha like arty could track but with low ROF and nearly capped you out when you fired the bloody things


Or had med/long range and slowly melted through your opponent. with 'constant' damage but were less of an issue with cap usage.




I'll leave you think about how that could potentially shake up how you would use amarr ships in combat.

Actually I think CCP has it about right. Aside from the fact that lasers would have the longest optimal range and falloff of any weapon system, pulse lasers would certainly have a higher DPS than beam lasers while requiring less power, and either one would fire in short bursts followed by a brief cooldown period. Pulse laser weapons would fire several very short pulses in one brief burst, with the laser fire abating just in time for the ablating material on the target to clear away somewhat so that the energy of the laser isn't wasted on vaporizing smoke. Beam lasers would fire an extended burst (lasting maybe a second) and then stop for several seconds while a cooling system flushed the firing mechanism, charge chamber, capacitor, and power transformer with pre-cooled antifreeze solution, and also delaying while the charge chamber recharged.

Beam lasers wouldn't have more range than pulse lasers, but they would deal about the same damage while draining power a lot faster, and requiring much more substantial power cables to connect to the ship's power supply. Either laser system would pause between firing both to cool and recharge the charge chamber. Now a laser system could be designed to drain power at the same rate with a laser that is constantly firing, and a cooling system running during firing, but this would actually waste energy and would deal less damage to the target because the impact site would not reach as high a temperature. There would be too much time for the heat to dissipate before the materials are blasted apart from the heat differential.

I support this thread +

I thought this was a legit post about lasers... I was wrong.

Lasers look and sound terrible in their current state...

So making a weapon system functionally different from the other turrets is cute.

Your comment is cute.

OP, that's a pretty good idea. Won't happen though.

oh, huge beam battles could be awesome, neverending lasers everywhere ... sadly it sounds like damage over time weapon (like cycle every second) i dont think ccp will go this way - more stress on server side
anyway effects could be tweaked to have proper lasers ;)

I like the concept of doing lasers more realistically.

So, for beams, the Gj/s translates fairly directly into damage output, with a fairly constant heat to the module rack and thus damage to the lasers every cycle. They end up tracking EXCEEDingly slowly because its either moving a physical collimator or adjusting gravitic lensing while the weapon is energized, necessitating extreme caution.

Pulse Lasers would end up as the end all, be all of arty weapons if you went to terrawat ranged lasers, as at that point, even a 1400mm projectile, or 425mm bit of antimater would be childsplay. They'd also either eat up the lenses almost instantly, or need to use a chemical lasing system, which would be consumed by the energy used in the laser.