Tertiary Weapon Effects - An Experiment, with Pics

[Vader_is_Bored]

So, I just did a little off-the-cuff experiment with tertiary weapon effects and got some rather unexpected results. And then I took pictures of those results because I figured no one would believe me otherwise.

I was slapping together a small sniper beam turret for a ship I've been making and I couldn't decide what tertiary effect to use. Many people here on the forum seem to swear by pierce effect, so I decided to try that. And then I decided to try Overdrive, Explosive, and Punch-through also, just to compare them all.

Here's the size of the weapon I was using for this:

Spoiler: Test Weapon Stats

I maintained the exact same ratios and block counts for all four effects I tested.
The target for all my tests was a 50m cube of Power Caps, covered with 1 layer of Adv Armor, with 220Shields (just the core) and 500Shield Regen per Second.

Here are the results of a single shot from each variation(each on a widely separate part of the targets hull):

Spoiler: Pierce Effect Test

Spoiler: Punch-Through Effect Test

Spoiler: Overdrive Effect Test

Spoiler: Explosive Effect Test

And for those who don't want to open the pictures, I'll summarize:
Pierce: Destroyed 1 Adv Armor and 3 Power Caps
Punch-Through: Destroyed 1 armor and 4 caps
Overdrive: 1 armor and 3 caps
Explosive: Destroyed 5 Advanced Armor Blocks, plus 19 Power Capacitors behind that

I was honestly expecting them all to be more or less the same, but apparently not. Explosives appear to be the winner by a huge margin.

Of course, this wont scale up due to the artificial cap on explosive effect at 10%...
Hmm... maybe i need to do another experiment with 10% explosive vs. 100% pierce but with the weapons total block counts being equal...

 

[Lecic]

Hmm... maybe i need to do another experiment with 10% explosive vs. 100% pierce but with the weapons total block counts being equal...

Wait, did you only have pierce at 10%?

Also, I would suggest you test this out against thicker armor. The results will not be nearly as favorable towards the explosive.

 

[Nickizzy]

We need explosive to be much stronger. Youed need like 200% explosive effect for 5 block radius(bc balancing), but it would be awsome!
[DOUBLEPOST=1458167685,1458167650][/DOUBLEPOST]Bad word choice, we need explosive effect to be more expandable.