Weapon Choice for Personal Fighter

[Olxinos]

That's because it is too detrimental. The amount of blocks you have to spend on increasing power generation and power capacity from the x6 power consumption is ridiculous, and is especially too much for a small ship like a fighter.

If you have enough spare power on your ship to install overdrive weapons, then you have TOO MUCH POWER in the first place.

Well it depends. On cannon/cannon at least, it may be worth it since you need very little power capacity hence lighter power systems compared to the mass of your weapon array. Actually, cannon/cannon/overdrive can be strictly better than both cannon/cannon/punch-through and cannon/cannon/ion but you need extremely efficient reactors (which most people would call "oversized" I guess) and a couple more docked entities to bypass the softcap which could prevent you from scaling up the damage otherwise.

Here:

(the yellow line is just here to make the 100% cap, i.e. equal damage cap, clearer)

These 3 curves make a few assumptions:
- capacitors give 1000 energy capacity per block instead of 1000*n^0.05 capacity per block (this slightly favors non-overdrive weapons)
- you're comparing cannon/cannon weapons
- you can multiply your energy generation by 2 (blue curve), 3 (green curve) or 4 (red curve) while maintaining the same energy generation per reactor block (not necessarily true, can either favor overdrive or non-overdrive weapons but most of the time the curves are close enough; also assumes you can bypass the softcap with docked entities, no need to use power-supply beams if the weapons are on turrets)

As you can see, cannon/cannon/punch-through isn't strictly better than cannon/cannon/overdrive on nearly any ship. You have to wait a bit until overdrive becomes strictly better than punch-through, but it happens sooner than one could think (for ships whose sum of dimension exceeds 150, roughly).
Hence, I think it may be used on fighters or frigates, even though punch-through is probably a better option for very small fighters indeed.

Overdrive even becomes strictly better than ion past one point but it isn't relevant here. (the maximum energy per second per block that can be achieved is ~1660e/s/b with a single rod of ~900 blocks which gives ~1m5e/s)

 

[Master_Artificer]

But when I put overdrive on something, I might as well put a whole nother 2-3 cannon cannon punch arrays for the same energy consuption...

 

[Olxinos]

But when I put overdrive on something, I might as well put a whole nother 2-3 cannon cannon punch arrays for the same energy consuption...

Sure, that's true, but that doesn't necessarily mean you'll get more DpS per mass even if you also take into account the mass of your power systems needed to supply your weapons: by doing so you may indeed increase your DpS twice, but you also increase the mass of your weapon array 6 times.
Whether it's still worth it or not depends on your weapon's base energy requirements and your reactor's efficiency. My point being that for cannon/cannon, overdrive is often better than punch-through (although maybe not for very small fighters, I admit, hence my first post's warnings about reactor efficiency)

Basically I'm just saying that overdrive higher energy consumption translates into higher power system "mass cost" and that sometimes this additional cost is counterbalanced by overdrive weapon blocks weighting virtually less than other weapon blocks (because of their increased DpS per block).

 

[Madman198237]

Well, the thing with overdrive is that it can let a compact weapon system (Especially when you can get enough power efficiency for fewer blocks than the cannon array would cost on a ship with limited space) pack enough punch to do what it needs to do. Especially when working with AI, you can't just add more arrays to the mix, because the AI won't target blocks and therefore might not get the maximum damage out of the shot. And a shot that can't kill a block of (Name your machine's target armor here, whatever it's meant to be able to kill must have armor equal to or weaker than this block) per hit is useless.