HypermagWeapons
Added Hypermag Weapons, end-game magnetic weapons which launch much lighter projectiles at far higher velocity and rate of fire, and are capable of targeting out to 1,200km, equal to Alien’s maximum range.
Why Hypermags over plasma or coils? Because they have 1,200km range, even the single hull slot Hypermag can shoot to 1,200 km. Hypermags can have sniper duels with the longest alien weapons while still capable of orbital bombarding.
The project requires Advanced Railgun Batteries, Exotic Hybrid Systems, Adamantane Armor, and Hybrid Armor to unlock.
The weapons launch small advanced Adamantane-Exotic composite projectiles at around 30km/s out to 1,200km. They are faster, more accurate, have a much higher rate of fire, and generally have higher DPS though lower per-shot damage. These weapons are also designed around shooting faster than PDs can respond rather than vanilla’s shooting more mass than they can burn away.
In exchange, they are much heavier, cost more Exotics, have less chipping ratio, and are less energy efficient. They even cost Exotics to shoot (though they shoot extremely light ammo compared to vanilla, so Exotics ammo cost is negligible.)
The Hypermags came in 2 variants: standard and rapid.
The standards are designed around having sufficient damage to penetrate all vanilla armor designs while having as high rate of fire as possible. They are lethal against all ships. But as they have a relatively low rate of fire compared to PDs and they shoot very light projectiles, PDs will have an easy time defending against standard Hypermags. Thus, they are best used with Rapid Hypermags or other spammer covering them.
Rapid Hypermags are designed around shooting as fast as possible, or rather around 2 slots of Rapid Hypermag defeating the rate of fire of 1 slot of Alien PD. They deal only ~4 damage, but spamming them will keep the enemy defense weapons busy and gradually chip away their armor. They also work as defense weapons.
All weapons are designed to have predictable economy of scale with larger slot sizes being more efficient, putting out more power per slot as increased rate of fire and shot velocity, costing less mass per slot, and having better energy efficiency. Nose slots are counted as 2 hull slots in the design balancing. So, the standard 1N slot has the same performance as the 2H slot, and the 2N slot has the same as the 4H slot.
Balance Note: 3N and 4N slots Rapid Hypermag do not get the higher rate of fire from their size, unlike their siblings. They are worse per slot as a spammer. This is due to the game’s incapability of handling the higher rate of fire. Instead, they get bigger projectile mass which gives them higher damage. Get the standard version on your 3N or 4N slot instead.
My test experience: A well-armored Dreadnought with 3N Heavy Hypermag Cannon and 2x 4H Heavy Rapid Hypermag Batteries has a decent chance of soloing an alien mothership in a skirmish by just retracting the radiator and no other command. They also perform well against agile alien ships as 30km/s is simply too fast to dodge in TI. Pure Rapid Hypermag ships can also fight against heavily armored ships just by grinding away enemy armor.
