Laser and LAMS overhaul 2.15 (OBSOLETE)

Needs Gladyon’s ProtecTech Industries’s plugins tools mod.

A laser overhaul to fix the following problems in the base game:

• Lasers are really bad against strong designs. 2-3 laser shields completely nullify them for a fraction of the cost of the weapon system.
• There is no real cost for going very fast. Practically all weapon systems perform better against slow things.
• Lasers only work with very long optic lines, can’t be effectively turreted(definitely won’t look good).
• Damage output on unmitigated lasers is too high, if you remove shields/smoke a <100K cost laser kills godlies costing over 500K in 10 seconds tops.
• There is no reason to use offensive continuous lasers with only 50% DPS.

Laser optics changes:

• Lasers have a fixed inaccuracy of 0.05° (+-1.75m error at 2000m)
• Longer optic lines have a smaller maximum firing angle. At 1m length that’s 60°, at 20m 12.5°, 50m ~5.56°.
• Focusing optics decrease damage lost with distance in air/water.
• You need 25% of your optic line to be steering to have the maximum possible firing angle.
• Optic visuals toned down, maxed out they are only ~45% as thick as a 6-steering line in vanilla.
• Material cost up from 20 to 50 for both focusing and steering

This way there is a tradeoff between firing angle and longrange damage, every setup has some use.

Laser energy changes:

• Laser pump energy output(DPS) reduced to 20% of it’s previous value.
• Power cost/energy doubled, so it’s 40% of a vanilla system with the same parts.
• Cavity storage is untouched, so it got a relative 25% buff compared to DPS. A bit more leeway to play around with silly setups.
• Cavity costs halved, pump costs up to 150%.
• Energy readings changed, so 1 power = 1 laser energy and 2 laser energy = 1 damage (0.5 damage with continuous).
  Just a cosmetic tweak to makes things easier to folllow.
• LAMS inaccuracy decreased to 0.2° from 0.5°, in practice a ~2.5x buff on effective range (around 300-500m now).
• LAMS node cost up from 30 to 200 since they do not need to be spammed as much with the new range.

Adding a laser won’t triple your crafts’s power need, and defenseless fliers can last a little while against a laser in the same weightclass.
LAMS might still be a bit too good despite the 1/5 damage, will see.

Laser defense changes:

• Laser shields no longer cost energy, only engine power.
• Continuous lasers have twice the AP of pulsed, with the same half damage as before.
• Instead of directly reducing damage shields now cut laser AP to 1 / (2 * SHIELD_STRENGTH), 50% – 5%. Only the strongest shield hit counts.
• Wavefront cuts laser damage in half, but quadruples the amount of AP the laser has after hitting shields (100% at STR1, 20% at STR10).
• Smoke reduces damage to 30% for each layer, 50% with wavefront.
• APS smoke shells removed.
• Frequency doubler cost up to 200.

Now there is a drawback to going fast, stacked smoke is the only perfect laser defense but it gobbles up resources at 100 m/s.
Against 1 layer of smoke no wavefront is slightly better, against more wavefront takes over so it’s not a clear-cut case which one should you use.

Adding more doublers is very costly: every 100 AP in itself costs more than the rest of the system with engines.
You get a much better volume efficiency against strong shields but potentially throw away damage against weak ones/smoke/soft targets mostly made of wood/flight surfaces.
Continuous is very good against shielded flyers, no overkill on soft bits and same total DPS as pulsed.

LAMS changes:

• Option to target only out of water/under water projectiles
• Options to target only projectiles with a diameter above X mm and/or below Y mm (missiles are 500mm)
• Option to stop firing when under smoke
• Inaccuracy reduced to 0.05°
• Damage loss at range increased(only does 75% at 500m, 56.25% at 1000)
• Improved targeting:
  – will look for another target when the previous one is starting to get further away
  – stricter angle/distance checks
  – less possible downtime against destroyed projectiles

Burst lasers:

• Cavity storage up to 125%
• Default cavity discharge rate is down to 25%
• Destabilizers are now affecting the entire coupler, not only the cavity line they are on
• Each destabilizer doubles discharge rate, up until using the entire cavity in 1 sec at 5

Misc:

• There are now 10 wireless AI channels available.
• Better tooltips all around.
• Fixed a vanilla bug causing pulsed lasers to have 1 AP with some setups.
• Fixed a vanilla bug causing the first layer of smoke to count as 2.