Should I put this in?
youtube.com/watch?v=B-zdVrxDk3o
Or is it too cheesy? (surely not :D)
Yes. Yes you should.
of course! IT LOOKS AWESOME!
oh yeah, even better! make it so!
Heck yeah!
Put a little flare at the convergence point to finish the effect off 
Ewww, it just doesn’t make sense really…
I am not a fan.
Who doesnt want their own death star?
main beam being the same as the convergent beams looks wrong… it should be higher power
and it’s repetitive - always the same… that grates. some randomisation please
Not a fan.
I like the throbbing/pulsing beam effect. I also quite like the shimmering in the second clip that was probably just a video rendering artefact.
But the converging beams, nah. Nonsensical, and just look weirdly wonky when not straight ahead.
I don’t really think it is needed, but if people want it, it should be made very special. It should be very powerful, but can only fire very very rarely; I’m talking a fire interval of 20000 at least. The flare at the convergence point is a good suggestion. Also, I would like to see the third middle beam pause longer at the convergence point instead of just punching straight through so quickly. Make that converging process a little slower so with such a large fire interval, it would be easier to see that it was about to fire. It would be kinda cool if the three beams were colored yellow, red, and blue respectively, and then the beam coming out of the convergence point be a white (hot?) beam.
yes! that would be perfect, as long as it gets added.
I strongly dislike this effect. It just looks silly to me, there’s no sense in it.
Convergent beams shouldn’t be a bunch of beams firing at a point in open space, and somehow magically combining to focus on one point…
Rather, they should be an array of beams firing into some mirror or crystal or something that could actually focus them. (i.e. several turrets firing at another turret, which relays the combined beam, or from the edges into a large parabolic mirror.)
did you ever play “Massive Encounter”? That did linked arrays of beams really really well.
EDIT: Oh, and thought for the future (more shooting for the stars) … If you did something where a turret fire an enhanced beam thanks for the support of other beams on the same ships… You could have other ships support the array too 
At 20k interval the beam would have to deal something like ~500 damage or something crazy.
I like the beam, sense be damned, it looks cool :D. I think it’d look better if the beam itself was animated slower. Space the 3 beams out more, first beam, pause, second beam, pause, final beam, pause, attack beam.
Interesting feedback. I appreciate that it doesn’t make physical sense, but hey, it’s a gratuitous effect, and normal physics went out the window the minute the ships made noises and didn’t engage at 500,000 kilometre distances.
I think it need more work before it goes in, and I need to release a ‘finished’ version of the game any day now, so I might hold this back for a later patch, and have a ‘beta’ patch people can download with it in, to ensure the balance and effects look right.
Super long range, super slow firing, super high powered beam… Tracking 0.1 or something. That’d make for a nice siege weapon to break up those engineless formations with, but essentially useless against much else that isn’t caught up in a net of tractor beams. 
But but but… Seeing a bunch of energy beams crisscross across a cruiser, from turret to turret, before an almighty blast from the main turret… Thats gratuitous too! And less implausible looking It’s all about the build up, right?
i think i’d also prefer it if it’s a super-weapon - so it has the long recharge interval mentioned earlier… tracks really badly, and ideally can only fire dead-ahead (or very little deviation).
this will look quite silly firing backward, and the firing rate - and especially the angle of fire in demo-2 just looked wrong to me. (that’s apart from the previously mentioned absolute repetition of the effect)
Well, if they focussed on something, it might be a “laser-pumped gamma ray burst”, or somesuch.
It also occurs to me that if it were a spinal mount, full ship aimed mega-weapon, the non-aligned wonkiness would be banished.
You are missing the growing ball of energy where the three beams meet - Growing a little bigger as the second and third beams reach the convergence point. The final laser is the same size as the other three. That looks completely wrong.
You should read the guide about this here:
entertainment.howstuffworks.com/ … /printable
Quote from the guide:
“The main cannon and eight tributary lasers fire beams that converge at the outer perimeter of the Superlaser dish in an amplification nexus.”
true, true