Weapons

You can read a firefight by its colors before your scanner resolves a single hull, but the color now belongs to the weapon, not the faction. Learn the families below and tracer fire becomes a language.

A note on how guns behave out here. Two families. Bolts — cannons and missiles — are things that fly: they have a bolt speed and a travel time, so fast thin ones are pressure and slow fat ones are punishment you are allowed to dodge. Missiles now steer, but not perfectly: they track on limited control surfaces, so hard lateral breaks can force an overshoot. Missiles that miss run out their burn and detonate. Beams are lasers: they do not travel and they do not pulse. Hold the trigger and a beam stays LIT — a continuous line straight down the barrel to the first hull in the way, chewing damage into it several times a second for as long as you keep it on target. You do not dodge a beam that already has the angle on you — you break its line of sight or its aim. It is a weapon of holding, not of timing. Ship guns fire where the hull points, so a pilot’s aim is only as good as their flying — but an emplacement is another matter (see Defensive emplacements below): its barrel slews to track you on its own, and a tracking beam is a nasty thing to be lined up by.

The hardware tells the same story before anything fires. Cannons carry compact barrels and throw visible slugs; heavy and rail patterns use longer housings and larger rounds. Missile mounts carry racks, with strike missiles slimmer than broad torpedoes and cruise bodies. Combat beams share the green, blue, yellow, and red family colors but remain continuous lines. Mining cutters and salvage arrays keep their industrial shapes and colors: they are tools, not recolored guns.

Your capacitor is one shared budget — engines, shield recharge, and weapon fire all pull from it. But the guns do not pull evenly. Point light or plasma at a hull — a beam, or the Pulse Cannon’s energy bolt — and you spend real charge: hold a beam under boost while your shield is climbing and you will feel three draws fighting over one pool. The kinetic guns barely register. A railgun, a heavy slug, a slug repeater each take only the small kick it costs to cycle the mechanism, then throw their mass and let you keep firing on past where an energy weapon would be waiting on charge. Energy weapons live or die by your capacitor; kinetic weapons lean on it hardly at all.

Beam families now include a heavy beam pattern, and it is a weapon that rewards commitment. Tap it and it lands like a thin, calm lance — a clean line, barely above an ordinary beam, and honestly a little weak for its size. But keep it welded to the SAME hull and it winds up: over about two and a half seconds of unbroken contact its bite climbs from that soft opening to half again as hard, and the line answers in kind — the calm pencil roughens into a hotter core, then a full crackling storm of forked lightning as the damage peaks. What you see is exactly what you’re dealing. Let the trigger go, or swing the beam onto a different target, and the wind-up is gone: the storm collapses back to the calm line and the next hull starts you over at the bottom. So a heavy beam punishes flinching and switching, and pays out for the pilot who picks one throat and holds it. The draw on your capacitor stays flat the whole time — the ramp costs contact, not extra power. Railguns sit at the other end of the scale: a single superfast slug dragging a thin, bright trail with a stack of glowing rings falling away behind it instead of ordinary bolt bloom. The overcharged Heavy Railgun pushes that same idea further — a slower, costlier coil charge buys a slug fast enough to read as near-hitscan, marked by a tighter, denser wake than the base rail’s.

Guns that make you wait

Most guns fire the instant you pull. A railgun does not. Hold the trigger and the coil bank starts filling: rings gather in front of the barrel and draw inward, tightening and brightening, and the shot leaves the moment they close. It is a beat on the base rail and closer to a full second on the heavy one, and the bank is drinking from your capacitor the whole time it fills.

Let go early and you do not get that power back. The coil bleeds it off as heat over about a second — but it bleeds, it does not dump, so a trigger you release and re-press picks up near where you left it rather than starting cold. Twitch on it and you pay again for ground you already bought. Commit to the hold and it costs you exactly once. Run the bank low and the coil does not jam, it just fills slower, so a nearly dry ship still gets its shot away eventually — later than it wanted to.

Everyone plays by this. A raider with a rail on the rack telegraphs the same gathering rings you do, for the same length of time. Learn to read them and a rail duel becomes a question of who is willing to stand still.

Your hull

The Vindicator frame now carries three hardpoints. Pilot controls still map two triggers in-flight today: the left fires weapon set 0 — the Pulse Cannon, now firing twin bolts side by side out of one honest, crisp gun. The right fires set 1 — the Energy Beam, an instant-hit lance that strikes the moment you pull it, lighter per tick but with no travel and no lead. They fire independently: hold both and you put bolts and beam on the same target at once, pressure and punch together. Both triggers rebind in settings. (Arena doctrines and NPC brains can drive all mounted hardpoints.)

Keep the fire on target and watch the numbers climb: a beam held on one spot, or cannon hits landing close together, stack into one rising damage count over the hull instead of a flat stream of hits — proof you’re not just tagging armor, you’re wearing it down.

Korrathi (scavenger) hardware

Blood-red and built from whatever survived the last victim.

• Scrap Cannon: the single blaster every raider carries. Weak, cheap, everywhere. One raider is a nuisance; three are a problem.
• Twin Blaster: two bolts per pull in a shallow fan. Less a lance than a wall; bad news in a knife fight, easy to outrange.
• Breach Torpedo: slow, fat, and rude. You can see it coming and you should act on that information. Eating one is how frigates die.
• Reclaimed Cutter: the capital-grade beam standard on every Warlord and Ravager — the same wreck-stripped stock as the Crimson Lance, just remounted rougher. A straight, sustained blood-orange line, no crackling envelope; that’s how you tell it apart from the prize below.
• Crimson Lance: the red capital laser, and a prize. A belt marauder carries one bolted to a frigate mount — it hits far above its weight, and when it dies the Lance breaks loose as salvage. Kill the marauder, fly over the wreck-light it leaves, and the Lance is on your mount. A true heavy beam: crackling crimson envelope, long reach, and worth the fight it takes to earn.

Teralith (corporate) hardware

Militia service weapons, maintained to spec, fired by people with paperwork.

• Patrol Laser: the green-bronze service laser on every militia hull, matched to the hull’s own organic-armored plating. Slightly lighter than a good pulse cannon; the shields make up for it.
• Strike Missile: mid-weight ordnance. Tracks, but turns hard enough to be jinked.
• Cruise Missile: long-reach capital ordnance. Slow enough to dodge, heavy enough that you dodge it every single time.

Blackwater (trade) hardware

Green guild kit. Civilians shoot back; they just don’t shoot first.

• Guild Laser: the convoy’s defensive standard. Modest, reliable.
• Toxic Missile: a chemical deterrent with a nasty impact. Tracks on a moderate seeker. The lingering cloud the guild brochures promise is not in service yet.
• Slug Repeater: a cheap red kinetic repeater. High cadence, small bite, the sidearm of ships that would rather be leaving.
• Railgun: a long, bright punch — a beam-thin trail with a stack of rings falling away behind it. Costs you a held beat to fill the coil first. If you see the rings, it is already past where you were.
• Heavy Railgun: the same coil-gun stretched past sane spec. The bank takes the better part of a second to fill and drinks hard doing it, and the slug leaves fast enough that there is effectively no flight time left to see — you register the shot, then the hit, with nothing readable in between. What you DO get is the wake: rings packed tighter and burning hotter than the base rail’s, dragging longer behind an overcharged core. Slower to cycle and heavier on the capacitor than the base rail, and it bites hard enough per hit that you will not mind the wait.

Defensive emplacements

Stations do not just sit there. A defense station rings its hull with turrets, and a turret is patient in a way a pilot cannot be: it does not chase, it does not tire, and it swings its barrel straight onto whoever it hates most and holds the trigger. Standings decide the hate — a militia picket lights up pirates and leaves your convoy alone; a pirate picket seized on a frontier belt will open up on you, the militia, and any civilian foolish enough to drift into its arc.

• Picket Turret: the standard emplacement beam. Cold ice-blue-white, the same on every station regardless of who is holding it — an emplacement’s fire reads as an emplacement’s, not a faction’s. Slow cadence, heavy bite, and reach well past what the fighters trying to run its line can answer. You do not dodge a picket by out-flying its aim — it tracks. You beat it by staying out of its range, killing it, or being somewhere else.

Watch for these on the routes that matter. A hostile picket parked at a belt’s edge is not scenery; it is a toll gate with teeth, and one day the ore you are hauling home will have to run past it.

But a station is not invincible — it runs on a shield, and a shield can be broken. Pour enough fire into a defense station and its shield falls; the moment it does, the whole picket goes dark and its turrets stop dead. That is your window: a disabled station is not destroyed, just switched off, and its shield climbs back if you let up. Beat it down and run the gap before it wakes, or keep the pressure on to hold it silent.

Prototype hardware

Tools, not arms. These mounts are utility prototypes: they deal no damage, no pilot will fire one in anger, and tagging a bystander with one offends nobody.

• Mining Beam (Prototype): a Teralith grabber field. Hold it on a belt rock and its unsteady grey cutter drains Ferrite into your hold — sometimes a Gem rides along. It looks like a vibrating industrial cut, not weapons fire. Working a rock is not a tap; expect to sit on target for the better part of half a minute, exposed while the beam chews and the progress crawls.
• Salvage Array (Prototype): a Blackwater wave scoop. Hold it on a derelict hulk and side-on smoky blue hoops pull from the wreck back toward your ship, stripping Generic Salvage into your hold — sometimes something nobody can date comes with it. Salvage is the same commitment: a long held strip, not a quick scoop, which is why wreck-pickers die in dangerous fields.
• Repair Bolt (Prototype): a Blackwater packet meant to patch a friendly hull at range. (Remote repair: not yet in service.)

See also: Ships for what those weapons are bolted to; Pilots for who pulls the trigger and why.