I am trying to better understand what the various weapon types are supposed to excel at. Their stats give some information, but I feel like there is either more to it than what is shown, or that I'm misunderstanding how they work.

My main point of confusion is between Plasma Cannon and the regular Cannon.

Cannons: Seems to be the 'basic' weapon choice, with a bit of explosive damage, but mostly impact damage. Takes a lot of hits to get through armor, but once it starts hitting soft spots, it seems to do well.

Plasma: On paper it looks like it shouldn't be as effective at damage as the cannon, since it seems to lack impact damage and relies solely on explosive damage that isn't much higher than the cannon, and yet it does incredible amounts of damage to CVs, causing chain reactions inside in just a few hits.

At a glance, it looks like the cannon is supposed to be the balanced middle ground, while the railgun is skewed towards its impact damage, and the plasma cannon is skewed towards its explosive damage.

Where I get confused is that in practice these weapons seem way more different than their stats suggest. The stats differ, obviously, but not substantially. A plasma cannon may have a bigger explosion, but its not really doing much more damage with it. So why does it seem like it takes 1/10th as many shots to put down a CV than the regular cannon does?

I tested two similar CVs, one had 5 medium cannons, the other had 4 medium plasma cannons. In both cases, I tested them against the Combat sector involving a captured radio station, and also against a light Zirax CV (Kuerva cutter, or something?). In both cases, the plasma-based CV drastically outperformed the cannon-based CV, putting down enemy ships in a fraction of the amount of time, even one-shotting some of the bandit CVs at some points. The cannon CV took far longer to get any real progress, needing a lot of shots to chew through weak spots and trigger much internal damage, even when shooting at areas that I knew were near generators, thrusters, and other devices that explode.

So what am I missing? Why are the plasma cannons so much more destructive? What is the Cannon's "job" if the plasma cannon seems better at everything?

Also, what does the 'DPS' stat factor? It doesn't seem like a light cannon, light laser cannon, and light plasma cannon really do the exact same damage, and it doesn't seem like going up to medium would be double the DPS just due to doubling the base damage stats, since the lower tiers fire faster and reload less often.