Meson Blasters for Point Defense

It seems MM went Meson Blaster happy this time around. Anything meson blaster seems far superior to all other weapondry...

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Give me atmopshperic manipulation cannons, or give me death!

Yup they are the weapon of the discerning Evil Overlord of the Galaxy, small but beautifully powerfull and only use a small amount of supplies. Outside Organic tech these have to be the most powerful direct fire weapon in the game, and the PD blaster is just the ultimate in defence, bung this alongside some bomblets and you never need worry about drones, fighters, satalites or missiles..... In fact they are the only thing that stops the Capital Missle from being the best weapon in the game.

Yup they are the weapon of the discerning Evil Overlord of the Galaxy, small but beautifully powerfull and only use a small amount of supplies. Outside Organic tech these have to be the most powerful direct fire weapon in the game, and the PD blaster is just the ultimate in defence, bung this alongside some bomblets and you never need worry about drones, fighters, satalites or missiles..... In fact they are the only thing that stops the Capital Missle from being the best weapon in the game.

Meson PD seems to be the only PD that works. All other PDs simply don't work fast enough. Worth noting, however, is that meson PD is only about 6x as powerful all told, because it costs 2x the research to develop (you need both PD and meson research). This is still very good, as the alternatives are just not worth the space to use!

which is why some of us refuse to play stock.

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an se5a is a ww1 fighter, it is also a car.

Well, the alternative is that either all the weapons are the same, or one will demonstrate itself as the superior choice. I mean, how else do you score shooty-downy-things except by their ability to shoot things down?

LOL
You could have shooty-downy-things that are good at shooting down one type of thing, and other shooty-downy-things that are good at shooting down another type of thing...
To be a bit more concrete, what if you modded the game as such:
PDB: 10 damage, 500ms firing rate -> 20 damage/second
PDC: 20 damage, 2000ms firing rate -> 10 damage/second
So far it looks like PDB are the big winners, right? Well, what if you gave fighters emissive armor which deflected 9 damage from every hit?
Then the effective damage vs. fighters would be:
PDB: 1 damage, 500ms firing rate -> 2 damage/second
PDC: 11 damage, 2000ms firing rate -> 5.5 damage/second
But seekers don't have emissive armor, so they would use the first set of damage values. So in effect, you would want to use PDB when facing seekers and PDC when facing fighters.
Pretty cool, huh?

edit: fixed PDC damage vs. fighters

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Mr. Flibble says...
Game over, boys!

Eh, then I'd stick with the ones for shooting down seekers anyway. Fighters only get Combat Sensors and can't hit 250% eva. What would be fun is putting PDBs on fighters to create interceptor planes.

A couple other things to take into concideration. One is that when your ship is in range that all the in range weapons fire at once. Overkilling a fighter, your ship gets swarmed even though you have the firepower to kill all of them, you don't have the reload rate. for those fast moving fighters it would be nice to have a bunch of point defense weapons that have different ranges. that way they would pick different targets quicker (waist fewer shots on an already distroyed ship).

another thought is with formations and multiple ships you would have a similar effect to having weapons of different range, a couple of ships would still get swarmed....

modding a weapon that would have a real low damage but a very fast reload rate might be the thing to handle the fighter swarm. The other would be the area effect weapon damage.

armor with DR ~20 is enough 4 that

playing BM and my baseships are immune to almost anything

What about Tachyon weapons and other shield and weapon armour skipping weapons. I have always found they hurt most things fairly quickly.

What I think PD weapons need is independent targeting so that no two weapons will engage the same target and allow the use of mounts to give rise to point defence batteries only shoots once but with much more damage and perhaps range

Skipping armor is probably the fastest fighter kill. Shields don't scale up very quickly on fighters, and only produce about 100 points per generator. Armor, on the other hand, goes up much faster. Nullweapon PD would eat through fighters like popcorn, though. They skip both shields and armor, and fighters of any techlevel always have puny structure value and die instantly.

Yeah, especially since SE5 now behaves like MOO2 in terms of armor piercing weapons - once the structure is gone, BOOM! Don't need to destroy the armor! (Unlike SE4 where the AP weapons had to chew through the armor once they were done with the internals)
Ever considered creating specialized point defense nullspace cannons? Now THAT would be evil...

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Mr. Flibble says...
Game over, boys!

I might have a go moding the PD mounts and if that works the nulspace