If you're building a beam-gun as a projectile-spewing cannon (i.e., one that uses CMP/SUR)... make sure your SUR has been resized and positioned correctly. If using a Beamspear... um... well, Beamspears are just fancy-looking FX, but they're really just a very small collision sphere at the tip of the projectile, and we cannot modify the size...

I wanted to raise a question about your guess on the meaning of toughness. I actually tried playing with it last week, and I now think that the toughness attribute may actually be used for NPC "threat assessment".

I don't know how it stacks things up, but I would guess it somehow compares your values to the NPC/NPC's wing. I did NOT see a significant effect on weapon degradation from varying the toughness, even when I reduced all of myweapon toughnesses to about 0.01 and ran about with no shield - although I DID see significantly more NPC attacks.

For most standard FL weapons the default toughness seems to be just the hull damage/sec it can cause divided by 100; there's a toughness rating for shields, but certain other devices that theoretically would have vulnerabilities such as CM droppers don't have this.

It would be nice to get a reality check on this from someone who has done thorough testing; I can't find any prior discussions of toughness here.

HMMMMM. Gosh... I must (sheepishly) admit that I was going along with what I thought Toughness was doing from previous notes I'd read (or thought I'd read). If you're right, then Toughness could be used to do some really interesting things, like... you could (maybe) make a CM or Mine dropper that dropped a shot that had a really absurd Toughness, causing the AI to make shooting it a priority... or do the same thing with other equipment, to make sure that the AI tended to take out the "weak sheep" first...

Good work with the missiles, but I must admit that Victor @ Ioncross figured out a lot of this quite some time ago. He just never wrote it up so nicely, and he didn't share it.

Another factor that we found to be cruicial to missile balancing is making the darn things take up cargo space. Big bad missiles that do a lot of damage take up a lot of space and thus can't be fired from light fighters. Big missiles should also turn like a brick, which makes them useful only against capships and the like.

I've also had some fun developing some 'non-lethal' missile based weapons. My favorite is the 'concussion' missile, which does just a bit of energy damage but packs a big impulse. Net result is you can kick people around with it, which has some interesting strategic implications. It's particularly effective against people trying to run away on thrusters as they can't fly in a straight line.

We've also developed a CD gun (basically it fires a CD that doesn't maneuver, but also doesn't require ammo), a concussion gun, EMP missiles, dumbfire rockets, and a few other surprises.

We also have a variant that acts like an anti-missile system. The warhead has a large proximity range and a larger explosion radius. Anytime a missile gets within the proximity range, it detonates and destroys any nearby missles.

A word of warning about large explosion radii for missiles/mines. Any friendly NPCs caught in the blast will turn instantly hostile. Even if they take only a little bit of damage. This applies to bases as well, so watch out.

Missiles can be fun if done right.

One intriguing thing about cruise disruptors is they seem to have this anti-missile missile capability out-of-box. In Asgard 2.2, one faction had an uber weapon, the ammoless Death Missile, with an obscene damage rating. It didn't have much speed advantage over standard missiles, though, and our favorite enemies got extremely good at targeting us with Hornets and firing on "incoming missile" or visual acquisition. I lost track of how many times I was killed by my own missiles...