Pulse Megaweapons?

[Nickizzy]

Because

I don't know what it was, but it one shot my 67M shields. He said it as a pulse-ion

Use for either armor pen or as anti shield. Would it work, is it good, or is it terrible?

 

[AtraUnam]

Many people use beam/pulse/ion as a shield breaker.

 

[Batavium]

Beam + Pulse + Ion or as i like to call it an Ion Sabre.

A large version does a lot of Shield damage.

It needs a very large powerpool. It can only fire in a small short burst. It is a short range weapon. The reload time is long.

But if you can hit your enemy with it then it will often drop most if not all shields. Depends a little on how big your target is.

 

[Panpiper]

It needs a very large powerpool. It can only fire in a small short burst. It is a short range weapon. The reload time is long.

As Batavium said. I feel however that the downsides are too huge. The quantity of power storage needed for a large beam/pulse weapon (or 'any' pulse weapon frankly) is truly enormous, requiring significant build sacrifices. Given the really long reload time, if you happen to screw up your first shot, your own shields may already be down by the time it's ready to fire again. The extreme short range of the weapon makes it very much an offense only, first strike weapon, and then only if you are firing from surprise. Versus an aware defender, they are not going to let you get to that sort of range without you suffering a whole lot of fire first (or even ever, if they have the thrust to weight advantage).

I have built ships using a beam/beam/ion weapon however. That has a recharge of only 15 seconds, so the investment in power capacitors for the weapon is much more reasonable. It has a 'much' greater range, which means that it could conceivably be used defensively as well as offensively, and doesn't require 'do or die' charges into the fire of the enemy. Admittedly such a beam/beam/ion system does not normally have the ability to drop someone's shields with a single shot, but it's much greater range and much shorter reload time means it is actually more likely to drop shields over time, than the short ranged, long reload time beam/pulse system.

 

[jayman38]

Because

Use for either armor pen or as anti shield. Would it work, is it good, or is it terrible?

It worked well enough for that opponent on that server, because the ranges were all set so much farther than in the vanilla game.
The ships were only 100m apart, and the pulse was still touching him. I think the vanilla game pulse range is only about 10-40 blocks. With such a short range, your opponent could see the pulse effect and actually be able to thrust out of range by the time the pulse actually "fires".

I can see a fun opportunity to release a group of pulse drones at short range after the armor plating has been vaporized. I imagine them swooping in and wiping out hundreds of system blocks per pulse. However, at that point, even small turrets can break lots of system blocks, so it would be a waste of resources to use drones.

 

[Tamren Shade]

I feel we need to do some experimentation with Pulse-Ion weapons and report back here. As I described in my other thread, I too had my 60% Ion Shields one shotted in a much smaller scale engagement.

 

[Panpiper]

So, I'm sitting there minding my own business when some neutral ship flies close to me. Somehow I don't notice until it fires on me. In an instant, I see my shields vanish!

I promptly hit jump. At this point I have likely taken little to no damage other than shields. I open nav and plot a jump to a sector one away from where I was. I recharge my ten second jump drive, and jump a sector away. I check my nav, do I see the enemy marker? If not, I hit my scanner and check again.

At this point my turrets uncork. The enemy has devoted large resources to a point blank weapon they are NOT going to get to use a second time. Their option at this point is to either fight a loosing battle with a ship that has devoted it's mass to dishing out actual damage at a decent range, or to themselves jump away. Except they are now logged as enemy, and I can track them down, blockade their homebase, etc..

Have I missed something?

 

[Batavium]

Have I missed something?

What i do is have a radar jammed ship. Sneak close. Hit my Jump Inhibitor. Fire the Ion Sabre. Then shove a Nuke without even waiting for a lock right into the Ships Core. Multi Barrel 25+ Nukes some WILL hit even with AMS defence. Where more often then not all the Weapon Computers are. Result one death in the water Space Duck.

How I hunt.

 

[DrTarDIS]

Last I remember, Pulse-whatever weapons were scary-good against unshielded ships, but needed a LOT of factors to be in their favor. Them detonating "inside" the other ship and just doing fixed damage to everything the wave hits is a system-shredding nightmare.

But they are easily the hardest weapons to use in combat. you have to be in "front" of your target's movement vector for any reasonable amount of destruction.
Vs stations they are epic-winning. vs anything in motion....not so much.

 

[AtraUnam]

With the single exception of anti-shield beams heres why long reload weapons suck.

• Incredibly hard to aim, by the time it relaods you have to make a completely new guess as to how to lead your target, as opposed to say cannon/cannon which allows you to constantly adjust your aim.
• Very punishing to miss, miss with a cannon/pulse and you just lost 16 seconds of damage, miss with a cannon/cannon and you only lose 0.1 seconds of damage.
• Require additional power capacitors too use, this is a straight up intrinsic negative with no counterpart in fast firing weapons
• Do less damage, due to the way damage works on a decreasing curve, alpha weapons actually do less damage per unit of power consumed than fast firing weapons.

 

[-Moose-]

I have actually had quite a bit of success with pulse weapons. I think people run into issues when they try to make it a primary weapon. This -as said by Panpiper- requires large build sacrifices.

However Pulse really shines as a Secondary weapon on a destroyer.

Having an array of 5 outputs of 75 block cannon pulse explosive each is enough to bore through advanced armor and any system it runs into. Having 2 to 4 of these arrays considerably increases the shots per reload.

Another trick I like to do is use a smaller beam/pulse/ion as an opener. In tandem with having a dedicated shield breaker. 1000 blocks can easily be devoted to the entire system and this can be a devastating opening shot.

 

[Nickizzy]

With the single exception of anti-shield beams heres why long reload weapons suck.

• Incredibly hard to aim, by the time it relaods you have to make a completely new guess as to how to lead your target, as opposed to say cannon/cannon which allows you to constantly adjust your aim.
• Very punishing to miss, miss with a cannon/pulse and you just lost 16 seconds of damage, miss with a cannon/cannon and you only lose 0.1 seconds of damage.
• Require additional power capacitors too use, this is a straight up intrinsic negative with no counterpart in fast firing weapons
• Do less damage, due to the way damage works on a decreasing curve, alpha weapons actually do less damage per unit of power consumed than fast firing weapons.

Could you use them on drones with like 40k power cost? That beats a whole lot of those points. Also, how large of a weapon do you need to oneshot all system blocks in the sphere?

 

[AtraUnam]

Could you use them on drones with like 40k power cost? That beats a whole lot of those points. Also, how large of a weapon do you need to oneshot all system blocks in the sphere?

aproximately 375,000 damage when using missile/pierce iirc.

 

[Nickizzy]

aproximately 375,000 damage when using missile/pierce iirc.

I thought pulse-missile didn't work? And why not use beam or some other secondary instead?

I still don't get block counts. How small can I make a ship for it to have a good pulse weapon.?