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Right now, cannons are dramatically better than beams for reliably killing ship HP - both Armor HP and Structure HP.
When a ship is entirely out of Armor HP, it has the problem of armor still existing, and in a moving battle, beams run into the problem that they're continuing to hit armor blocks as they deal damage, resulting in very little, if any, damage reaching the structure. For beams to be effective at killing systems, they need the entire outer hull of a ship to be stripped away somehow, which requires either absolutely enormous waffleguns or massive amounts of missiles (and to be honest, if your missiles are hitting your target, they're probably doing a better job at killing Structure than your beams ever could).
Cannons have the benefit that the shots are able to cleave through armor and reliably hit systems on the other side, provided the armor isn't enormously thick.
Of course, beams are balanced against Armor HP in that they're not able to penetrate a ship without first killing its a armor, but after that point, they're nearly useless.
I personally recommend adjusting Beams so that there's no penetration while hitting a ship with Armor HP remaining, but so that they also have 10-20% of the penetration against armored blocks that they would have had if they were hitting unarmored blocks. Cannons will still be better for killing structure, of course, but at least beams won't be totally worthless against large ships when compared to cannons, and cannons will still scale better than beams at large sizes because they're receiving proportionally less damage reduction as they get larger (EHP of advanced armor vs. linear damage growth).
When a ship is entirely out of Armor HP, it has the problem of armor still existing, and in a moving battle, beams run into the problem that they're continuing to hit armor blocks as they deal damage, resulting in very little, if any, damage reaching the structure. For beams to be effective at killing systems, they need the entire outer hull of a ship to be stripped away somehow, which requires either absolutely enormous waffleguns or massive amounts of missiles (and to be honest, if your missiles are hitting your target, they're probably doing a better job at killing Structure than your beams ever could).
Cannons have the benefit that the shots are able to cleave through armor and reliably hit systems on the other side, provided the armor isn't enormously thick.
Of course, beams are balanced against Armor HP in that they're not able to penetrate a ship without first killing its a armor, but after that point, they're nearly useless.
I personally recommend adjusting Beams so that there's no penetration while hitting a ship with Armor HP remaining, but so that they also have 10-20% of the penetration against armored blocks that they would have had if they were hitting unarmored blocks. Cannons will still be better for killing structure, of course, but at least beams won't be totally worthless against large ships when compared to cannons, and cannons will still scale better than beams at large sizes because they're receiving proportionally less damage reduction as they get larger (EHP of advanced armor vs. linear damage growth).
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