Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Now what is this about, you might ask and I will try to go into detail as much as I can.But let's start with some boring stuff first.

We currently have railguns, blasters, pulse lasers, beam lasers, autocannons and artillery turrets. And to get it out of the way, I can only talk about the former two of them, so I invite someone who likes and uses autocannons to jump in if it fits here.

The turrets I'd like to discuss are 150mm medium railguns, dual 250mm large railguns and medium quad light beam lasers and large dual heavy beam lasers.

For the most part those are more or less a joke in terms of damage and range.

They make up for their lack of range and damage in a little better tracking and very easy fitting but the question is, why do they exist?

Looking at medium 150mm railguns, at that range you can usually make better use of blasters instead of fitting them or you would use pulse lasers instead of the quad light beam lasers.

Now the question is, what to do with them?

I think they should get a range and damage increase, so that they aren't the odd short range, long range gun anymore and I propose a 20-30% shorter range than the medium, medium long range turret range as in:

The medium 150mm railgun get's 20-30% less range than a 200mm medium railgun and so forth.

I don't make the rules but a range and damage increase is always followed by a tracking gimp and for that range increase, my gut says 10% less tracking.

Sound okay?

Oh and I didn't forget about autocannons, I just don't like and use them, so someone who does may jump on my train here and talk shop.

It's interesting now that you mention it since all the medium autocannons - 180mm, 220mm and 425mms receive a healthy amount of use. The 650mm Artillery has received some use as well, particularly since the hurricane powergrid nerf.

Quad Beams are sometimes seen on Mallers since I think they have lower fitting requirements than even Focused Medium Pulses and don't track THAT badly if you pilot right. But 150 Rails and non-425mm large rails definitely don't receive much use. In respect of large rails, I think it's mostly because the ships that would typically fit 425mm rails don't have any fitting issues (Rokh and Naga) so there's never any real need to make use of the lower fitting requirements of smaller large rails.

Yeah but autocannons are the short range guns in that case and I didn't look up if artilleries also come in three sizes or not.

I have heard that those quad beams are not so bad and I believe the sentiment, it's just that I miss some range with aurora but that's more a case to case basis and what people like to fit and for what purpose.

I thought, I bring it up and see if I'm not the only one who thinks that.

better tracking (more than now), much lower fittings as is and slightly lower sig res would make them worth using more ,
say 350 -375 for the 2 different sizes (assuming 3 ofc) could at least make them better at killing bc's and make battleships more viable in the current meta

The dual 150mm rails have the exact same range with the 150mm rails. Also the Duals have almost half tracking make them even worse.
At my starting days i used a Thorax with dual 150mm rails and they were worse than 5 unbonused med drones. I used dual 150mm cause my skills were low to use 5x 200mm rails, but in one mission my rails killed half of what my drones did and I never used duals ever again.

The dual 250mm rail has the same range as the 250mm rail and of course worse tracking make them bad to use.

That is not what I said. I said at that range the smallest long range turret provide it would be better to use the short range gun instead, which would be blasters and pulse lasers in that case.

Honey, can you see what I mean now that you put values in your own words?

Imagine you engage a daredevil in that Thorax and you have dual 150mm rails on. Even webbed you will have a hard time doing damage to that ship.
If you would have taken electron blasters, that daredevil would explode very quickly.

Don't take this the wrong way, I am not saying those smaller long range guns are bad. I am comparing the range envelope on them to their bigger sibelings.

Sure you can use tech 2 ammo, don't we all?

For a better picture let's use the Zealot with medium beams and aurora M. And let's say that Zealot has no tracking enhancers or computers on.

With heavy beams, aurora M give you 81 / 91 km
with focussed medium beam, aurora M it's 70 / 78 km
and with quad light medium beams and aurora M it's 32 / 33 km.

Now everyone, can you see where this going?

I use duel 250s on my current megathrons as they are much better at tracking and fire way past blaster range.

It was the speed that was causing issues with the 425s. Duel 250s are much better at landing hits at close to mid range on cruisers and at long range I can now whack frigates far easier.

This guy knows what hes talking about.
Although perhaps they could put the change into the sigres of the gun (after all, in several cases they are just a dual mount of the biggest gun below them)