[STATS] Cruiser Plasma weight and range

Light Plasma on cruisers apparently weigh more than normal Plasma, and only very slightly less than Heavy Plasma. Im assuming thats not right.

Also, the ranges for the 3 flavours of Plasma dont seem to make sense. Normal has the longest range, followed by Heavy, then Light. It would seem more logical to have the ranges, from longest to shortest: Light, Normal, Heavy (or the other way around).

The arguement either way goes: Heavy projectile has more initial energy but burns thru it faster, hence shortest range, OR Heavy projectile has more initial energy therefore has longest range.

I suspect more people would be happy with Heavy having the shortest range (otherwise nobody would load anything but Heavy), but thats just a guess.

I think there’s more to it than that. There’s also tracking speed, armor and shield penetration, damage, and firing interval, not to mention credit and crew costs.

From what I’ve seen, heavy plasma is like artillery: it goes far and hits hard. But it’s expensive, heavy, and slow, making it only useful against slow or stationary ships. Light plasma can hit much faster ships, but to counter that, it has limited range. I’m not sure where Normal fits into all of this, but as you can see, there are more tradeoffs than range and weight.

That said, there is probably lots of room to juggle these numbers.

The tracking speeds, damage and refire all seemed “right”, that is, the light is faster, normal slightly slower, heavy slower still.

So while they may also needs tweeking, its mainly the weight and the range that seem out of place.