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Energy weapon costs?
selden677
Member Posts: 8 Arc User
in The Academy
If I equip regular antiproton beams and equip herald antiproton beams will I get the -10 weapon power tax? Aren't they the same energy type?
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themadrigogs
Member Posts: 207 Arc User
There is no "-10 weapon power tax," at least not like that. All energy weapons drain your energy by some amount (with a few exceptions), and that happens regardless of what weapon types you are using. The only reason to use all of the same energy type on your ship is to maximize the bonus from energy-enhancing consoles. And yes, all antiproton weapons are grouped together for the purpose of +AP consoles.
I should point out also that the weapon power drain only occurs while the weapon is firing. So it is simultaneously firing weapons that can really hurt your damage output, like loading all cannons on front and turrets in back. My rule of thumb is that you start to do less damage when you have 5 or more energy weapons sharing the same firing arc, but that's probably inaccurate.0
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Some ships can support firing 8 guns nonstop for quite a while, with a build designed to handle it.
More specifically, the first energy weapon you fire costs you nothing, but the second one and every weapon after that's fired during the cycle of another weapon will incur its cost (the only exception I know of to this is the Experimental Romulan Plasma Beam Array, which has no cost). This cost can be reduced by a few things such as the Engineer's captain ability Nadion Inversion and the Arbiter's ship trait Emergency Weapon Cycle. The cost differs by weapon type. All beams incur a 10 point cost, turrets cost 8, dual cannons cost 10, dual heavy cannons cost 12.
The common way to overcome weapon drain is "overcapping." I believe it works as follows but I haven't payed enough attention to all the systems to say I'm certain I'm correct. You cannot have more than your maximum weapon power level (usually 125 but this can also be surpassed a few ways) but let's say if there was no cap that you'd have 135. After 3 weapons drains you to 115 that extra 10 power you would have had begins to be restored into the system even while weapons are still firing, allowing the fourth weapon to fire with less "penalty" from the previous 3 weapons. Obviously stacking weapon power this high comes at the cost of other effects that might improve your maneuverability or survivability or have some other positive effect on your ship.
The universe has a wonderful sense of humor. The trick is learning how to take a joke.
I'd like to start by blaming @sarcasmdetector and a bunch of other nerds on /r/stobuilds for helping get this info.
First let's talk about what weapons firing and what happens that's relevant to this conversation:
Weapons have a firing cycle. By default beam weapons fire for 4 seconds and recharge for 1. All non-heavy cannons fire for 2 and recharge for 1, and heavy cannons fire for 1 and recharge for 2. All weapons fire pulses of damage at the start of each second of a cycle by default (frequency increased by some firing modes). These times (timing between shots, firing time, and recharge time) can be decreased by 'weapons haste'. When a weapon is triggered, if any other weapon is in the firing part of the cycle, the weapon being triggered will instantly drain power, which it will instantly grant back to the system at the end of its cycle. Each pulse of damage that is triggered during the firing cycle recalculates damage (including weapons power), criticals, and all of that. During a weapon's recharge period, it does nothing at all.
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One major way of affecting this is to decrease the power your weapons end up draining.
Power drain reduction, such as Emergency Weapons Cycle or Weapons System Efficiency, decreases the amount the weapon attempts to drain. This follows the formula: multiplier = 1/(1+Σ%). If you have Weapons System Efficiency active, that 25% reduction goes into the formula (1/(1+25%) and comes out as a .8 multiplier, taking a drain of say 10 power down to 8 power.
Power Drain resistance affects the amount that weapons attempt to drain - say the beam has had it's power drain reduced to 8 by WSE and you have Nadian Inversion active at it's default 100 resist, your multiplier for resists is the same formula: multiplier = 1/(1+Σ%). The multiplier from resist is .5, taking the 8 down to 4.
It's important to note that all sources of reduction stack additively, and all sources of resistance stack additively, but resistance and reduction stack and apply separately from each other. If you're familiary with damage categories, an analogy could be cat1/cat2, but here there's a clear order of application, not that it should matter. (the 50% from EWC and the 25% from WSE make a multiplier of 1/(1+50%+25%), or ~.57, but as mentioned above stacking WSE and NI results in independent multipliers.
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There are three main ways of increasing weapons power:
Overcapping is what happens when you put more power in weapons than the subsystem has. To clear up some misconceptions at the start:
Let's start with power transfer rate (PTR) (just for the record "power regeneration rate" means this). By default, ships have "100%" (aka stock value), which is 5 power/second. Unlike what you would expect, increasing PTR does not increase the power/tic, it increases the tic rate. At the default 100% value, you transfer 5 power once a second. At 200%, you transfer 5 power twice a second. At 400%, you transfer 5 power four times a second. Also, the tics start from the moment power needs to flow - you hit the button and the first set of 5 power goes.
Overcapping is simply the 'extra power' (the value you 'have' over the actual cap) flowing back into the weapons subsystem that's been drained by weapons. So if you had 8 beam weapons go off a hundredth of a second apart, with an overcap of 75 and a PTR of 400%, you'd instantly have 70 power drained. Every fourth of a second, 5 power would re-enter the system. The important thing that happens is that after 1 second, each beam is firing a second pulse of damage, but instead of 70 power drained, they're going at 50 power drained. One of the interesting things of overcapping is that there is a maximum cap to reach (your power drained, or your PTR times your active firing time, whichever is lower), above which the extra power isn't helpful because it won't ever be put in the system. However, the extra speed is always useful since it gets your power there faster.
There is also simply dumping power into the system. Many abilities that grant power (EPS Power Transfer, EPTx, Batteries) will instantly increase your current power in that subsystem by the relevant amount. This isn't something that you can depend on for all of your cycles, but it is useful to know, and ties into the third thing:
There are also some buffs that refresh their value. Specifically, I mean Supremacy and the Plasmonic Leech. Some people mistakenly view these as just extra total power to be included in the overcap. This greatly undersells their value. These, when triggered or re-triggered, instantly add their power back to all subsystems. For aux/engines/shields you won't usually see this, as you're not usually getting that power drained, but you will for weapons if you look. Plasmonic leech triggers every cycle of every energy weapon. This means that the moment the weapon drains its 10 power, then fires, the 2.5 power/stack you might be getting from leech is instantly offsetting that 10 power for the next weapon. This makes it much more powerful than a normal overcap since it moves much faster than PTR. Supremacy is similar, but more complicated. It's once per shot, but only active during FAW or CSV (outside of which it should be treated like normal overcap).
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So let's look at a real-world example - say my ship, fully buffed. I'm going to round a few starting values to make it easier, but let's go with the following statements as true:
Of the 8 beams, the first won't drain. They all will attempt to drain ~6.7 power if they can, since the 50% reduction is a 1/(1+.5) multiplier. Of the power my beams attempt to drain, only 40% will apply since Nadian Inversion is a 1/(1+1.5) multiplier to the attempted drain. This would result in a drain of 18.76 power, however, each beam is also refreshing 2 power (from the plasmonic leech), resulting in an actual drain of 4.76 power. The moment the first beam drains its .68 power my PTR kicks in and restores that, and then .25 seconds later (when the weapons have presumably all triggered), it tics again, setting my weapons power back up to 125.
This is why you love engineers.
Take away the EWC and the NI (aka step back a year as a tac), and the situation goes differently:
My 7 beams actually drain 70 power; however, 14 is instantly restored from the leech, leaving me with a net drain of 56 power. My PTR kicked in on the first beam (reducing its effective drain to 1), so I'll only see a drop of 51, which decreases by 5 every .25 seconds until 3.5 seconds are up and the PTR has restored all the missing power. Also note that having the overcap of 75 is completely pointless here, as it'll only ever need to restore 56.
This is also why the KCB+Assimilated Module were very popular - the 500 drain resist would have taken an initial drain from 70 down to 11.6, which gets dealt with by the leech (hence why it appeared to make you immune to
SCM - Hive (S) - [02:31] DMG(DPS) - @jarvisandalfred: 30.62M(204.66K) - Fed Sci
Tacs are overrated.
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