EVE General Discussion

:bittervet:

Very Big Laser Mk I, Very Big Laser Mk II etc...
Big Laser Mk I , Big Laser Mk II etc...
Medium Laser ... etc, etc.


Just get it f*ing over with.

The scheme for laser names is definitely the most confusing name series in the game. The only way I can make sense of them is using the market window's organizer. If you gave everyone an unsorted list of laser names and tested their ability to sort them into their respective categories 90% of players would mess up. This new arrangement doesn't help much either

1. Drop afocal, anode, modulated, modal, focused, particle stream and especially gatling. Tachyon can stay. The idea of a gatling laser is silly enough, applying that name to a turret with a single visible barrel is just ridiculous. The rest of the terms are techincal and don't give any clear indication of what the weapon's advantage is. What does it mean if my gun is modulated? How is my laser focused and afocal? You can include cool technical terms in the item descriptions where they belong - I love reading about how my laser's frequency is modulated and the beam incredibly focused, but not when that stuff is stuck in the item name.

The other classes of weapons get to circumvent this problem because they all either include bore sizes or 'neutron, ion, proton' in the case of blasters. There is no confusion about what size class any railgun belongs to, for example, even though they have different brand names like scout and gauss gun.

2. Include the laser's type and class directly in their names. A medium beam laser should be called a medium beam laser. A large pulse laser should be called a large pulse laser.

3. The easiest way to convey laser performance in the title is just to include some kind of numerical value. Either list the output of lasers in joules (increasing by an order of magnitude with each size step) or even list the width of the beam. Once that is done, differentiate the meta levels with brand names.

The name structure would be as follows:[power output] [brand name] [small/med/large/X-large] [pulse/beam] laser. Players will be able to see the size class of the laser immediately, while the power output signifies whether the beam trades alpha damage for rate of fire. The conundrum of 'dual' and 'quad' beams or weapons like the "Focused Anode Pulse Particle Stream I" are gone.

Small Beam Examples -
Medium Beam Laser I => 5MW Small Beam Laser
Dual Light Beam Laser I => 2.5MW Small Beam Laser (still in the small size class, but reduced power indicates a RoF tradeoff)
Dual Modal Light Laser I (the meta 2 version) => 2.5MW "Collider" Small Beam Laser

Medium Pulse Examples -
Heavy Pulse Laser I => 50MW Medium Pulse Laser
Focused Medium Pulse Laser I => 25MW Medium Pulse Laser
Focused Anode Pulse Particle Stream I (see how confusing this one is?) => 25MW "Collider" Medium Pulse Laser

This probably echoes most of the other opinions in this thread but if you see anything egregiously wrong with this scheme do tell.

There is actually a very valid point right here; in that Lasers are Amarr and Amarr aren't known for their use of arabic numbers - if anything, they let words do the talking; preferably religious words at that. Let the Caldari railgun and Minmatar projectile manufacturers worry about their compensation numbers.

eg. we learn that Neutron > Ion > Electron for blasters and once established it isn't hard to remember - and this is acomplished without a numerical calibre.



The key would be words that spring out as "oh, this one is weaker than that one is weaker than this other one".
The problem to keep in mind is that in Amarrian Lazor developer factory lines, less barrels is more; so we actually need to apply words that make the extra barrels appear as a weakness rather than a strength. One Big Frackin' Lazor is better than Three Big Lazors so to say.

For instance, a Dual Light Pulse Laser could be renamed Split Light Pulse Laser as split sounds "weaker" than Dual or even Light by itself.
This may be tricky to follow through with though.

Gatling is bad.
Dual or Spiral is much better.

I must once again reinforce that watts or joules would make terrible name components for lasers.
Powergrid uses watts.
Capacitor uses joules.

I don't want my 100MW laser to require 50MW of powergrid, while the T2 version requires 65MW of powergrid.
I don't want a 200kJ laser to use approximately 60GJ of cap per shot, with each meta level using a different amount.

There are plenty other units to use.

I just thought about something: In EVE, the ship's PG is measured in MW and handily, all turrets have a PG requirement.

Why don't we just bring to two together?

Ie,

* Medium Pulse Laser II -> 12 MW Medium Pulse Laser II (needs renaming to light as per CCP's OP).
* Medium Beam Laser II -> 14 MW Medium Beam Laser II

* Heavy Pulse Laser II -> 231 MW Heavy Pulse Laser II (although, needs renaming as per Gnautons post to medium)
* Heavy Beam Laser II -> 275 MW Heavy Beam Laser II


* Mega Pulse Laser II -> 2750 MW Mega Pulse Laser II
* Mega Beam Laser -> 3250 MW Mega Beam Laser


I know it's not "realistic" as lasers are rated on output power not input power, but it makes sense in from a progression of numbers point of view, the extra bonus is that each size of guns has a big power difference. Smalls are double digits, mediums are treble digits and large are four digits.

Granted, it's not as clean as pure names though.

The PG is all the power that's being fed into the laser, every second.

The wattage of the /beam/ is dependant on how long it's on for (and how many joules are delivered in that time).

Obviously, the higher meta items have a more efficient capacitor and cooling system.

my 2c is this. most of it is fine, but the lights just look really dumb. just make it really simple and neat and concise.

across the board.

Dual Modulated Light Energy Beam I becomes Dual Modulated Energy Beam I (no change)
Medium Modulated Energy Beam I becomes Light Modulated High Power Energy Beam I

The problem with classifying lasers via the wattage thing does overlap with the Powergrid requirements, which will cause some confusion. However, real-world classification of laser is based around wattage, as you are describing continuous power output. So, if the naming convention were to be adopted, we'd have to explain away the perceived inconsistency between power-grid and laser output. My idea was that we do indeed follow the power grid aspect, but not to a complete tee. Standard Rating is one thing, but discrepancies could be easily explained by more efficient modules and the general idea is to have a rating that is always less than the power-grid requirement. This is because the laser's rating is based on outgoing power, not the power requirement, therefore higher power-grid usage is explained through the lasers only having a certain % of electrical efficiency

Small lasers use small amounts of powergrid, so Dual Light Pulse Laser would be Dual 2 MW Pulse Laser. Powergrid-wise, this would also be within acceptable range of efficiency, and changes to the requirement could be chalked off to efficiency improvements

Large Lasers by comparison would step into the GW range, so a Dual Heavy Pulse Laser I could be rated as Dual 1 GW Pulse Laser. Whilst PG is something like 1500 MW, this could simply be the actual power requirements due to efficiency

In summary, it is quite possible to do the Wattage naming convention even with the overlap with the powergrid. You just have to make sure that whatever you do name a module, that it fits in with powergrid usage and reasonable (or believable) efficiency rates. The modules basically shouldn't be named in a way that allows one to have over 100% efficiency in power-grid usage

Of course, with the tier 3 battlecruisers, the ability to fit large turrets could simply be explained through specialised power systems for supporting the huge guns.

Please hire this man.