Beam/energy weapons

[frdnwsm]

Yet another area where the Manual is vague. Some energy weapons are called beam weapons, some are called cannons. What is the distinction? Ordinarily I'd say that cannons fire something resembling solid/explosive ammunition, but it appears this is not the case.

Laser cannon. Clearly an energy beam weapon, but they call it a cannon. Hmmm.

Mass drivers and Gauss Cannons, to me, fall into the category of what, in other space games as well as Sci-Fi literature would usually be termed particle beam weapons.

Some tech miniaturizes beam weapons, some miniaturizes cannons. Seems like an arbitrary distinction to me, since the definitions themselves are vague.

Anyone able to give some clarification to this melange of confusion?

[martin77]

Cannons hit at impact with an number of damage at once.
Beams hit over time (tick) with damage dealt over a period of seconds.
Mass driver and gauss cannons are projectile weaons and have, cause of this, no range dissipation

[Red Earth]

It does seem arbitrary. Other than the miniaturization I don't know of a difference. Are any mod options different? I thought point defense might be cannons only but I'm not able to check right now.

[frdnwsm]

Mass drivers and phasers can both be used for PD weapons, despite apparently falling into different weapon categories.

[frdnwsm]

Another misnomer among weapons; graviton CANNONS? The don't fire any sort of projectile, they emit gravity wave pulses. The whole cannon vs beam distinction is completely screwed up.

[Eupolemos]

Martin77 pretty much said what needed to be said.

There are beams (fusion, ion, deathray, plasma), and then there are the rest.

These have differenct minor effects, which could all fall under then cannon-theme. But to beam or not to beam, that is the question. The rest is fluff.

[FuturistGuy]

And regardless, until you have at least optitronic comps with battle scanner? Beam weapons are useless. You probably would need a beam to hit bonus to even make optitronic comps work. More than likely, you need cybertronic comps with battle scanner. Even so, waves of MIRVed missiles probably overwhelm your pd, and pop go all of your very expensive target drones...

[bilbous]

A cannon would seem to fire a short duration burst at higher intensity than a beam weapon. A laser cannon firing a continuous beam at this intensity would likely explode killing the operator.

[Red Earth]

I thought for a second I saw a clear difference between them. Cannons had multiple procs and beams one hit per cycle, but then I saw that phasors were cannons and hit once per shot so that's not it either.
I seems to me like there was meant to be a specific difference but over time with redesigns and rebalancing they abandoned it.
The AI ship design templates have separate entries for cannons and beams, like they each serve a different purpose. I don't ser what though.

[Syrris]

Originally posted by Red Earth:

Cannons had multiple procs and beams one hit per cycle,

It's the other way around.

[martin77]

ok you will see 3 projectiles with, for example, gauss cannons but it will be count as damage per triggered shot.
On Beam weapons you see one single Beam, but all the time the beam is on the target it will count damage.