How much energy do miltary lasers use ingame ?

[Lone_Wolf]

While playing I noticed something weird with the naval grid oxp (inceases shield recharge) :
In tough fights the energy banks drained very fast
The effect is strongest when firing mil laser a lot .

Testing with low recharge rates confirmed firing mil laser continously is able to drain energy banks even if it's the only energy user.

Military Laser lists energy as 1.1 in weaponinfo .

Wiki doesn't contain a description of the Weapon_Info object.

Looking in the sourcecode finds weaponinfo definition in src/Core/OOEquipmentType.h .

Unfortunately no description what weaponEnergyUse relates to.
energy used per shot / per second / something else ?

[Lone_Wolf]

Testing a cobra3-player with forward military laser and no other equipment showed energy_recharge_rate = 11; is still not enough to compensate the energy used in continuosly firing a mil laser until it cuts off due to overheating .

The number in weaponinfo.energy seems to be per shot .

[phkb]

From Equipment.plist

Creating laser weapons

Note: introduced with Oolite v.1.81

Laser weapons must have a name beginning "EQ_WEAPON_", and then should have a weapon_info dictionary describing them. This dictionary has the following keys, all of which can be omitted to keep the default value:

* range: The maximum range in meters, default 12500.
* energy: The energy used per shot, default 0.8.
* damage: The damage done to the target per shot, default 15.0.
* recharge_rate: The time to recharge between shots in seconds, default 0.5. A value of 0.1 will appear to be a continuous beam. Values lower than 0.1 are not recommended as they may cause the weapon's power to vary significantly depending on the frame rate.
* shot_temperature: The amount of heat generated per shot, default 7.0. Lasers will not fire at heat of 217.6 or over.

So, yes, per shot.

[phkb]

Testing a cobra3-player with forward military laser and no other equipment showed energy_recharge_rate = 11; is still not enough to compensate the energy used in continuosly firing a mil laser until it cuts off due to overheating .

The military laser is high-end gear, and places a huge demand on energy reserves. That is by design. I don't think anything should be able to compensate for its energy demands if you're firing it continuously. It's *supposed* to drain your energy. That's the downside of using it.

In my testing in a strict game, the military laser will consume around 2/3 or 3/4 of an energy bank of a stock Cobra Mk3 when fired continuously until the weapon overheats. It then takes around 10-11 seconds to recover that energy. Theoretically, Naval Grid shouldn't have any impact on this as it deals with shields, but I haven't tested that combo.

[Lone_Wolf]

So it was in the wiki, just not where I expected it.

[Cholmondely]

So it was in the wiki, just not where I expected it.

None of this stuff seems to be on the wiki. All the links above go to the GitHub vanilla game code pages.

I presume that the lack of this sort of detail on the wiki is due to the influence of Commander McLane and others, who felt the game was more enjoyable without this sort of intricate detail being available to players.

[Lone_Wolf]

The quote by pkhb a bit higher shows part of the 'creating laser weapons' section of equipment.plist .

[Click 'read more' on it and you'll see

Spoiler

that the weapon_info.energy is per shot and defaults to 0.8