Capacitors + Heating, Recoil, and Pulse Lasers.

Alright, so I just had a few things that I wanted to point out, and they were mostly related, at least vaguely, so I thought I'd do it here.

First, there's the subject of capacitors. Obviously in real life, almost all of the energy weapons would require capacitors to be fired. No matter how high the output of our reactors, they wouldn't be able to fire anything over a few grams with a rail or coilgun, and it would still be far less efficient to do so. This also has the unintended consequence of making it impossible to use real life equations to calculate their properties, which is, again, unrealistic and makes it harder to optimize. I would assume that it uses some sort of internal equation to approximate a capacitor, because the speeds that they can shoot at are not possible in real life with continuously powered ones. It'a also just strange that rate of fire has no impact on energy draw outside of the loader itself.'

Including a capacitor system would have the benefits of being more realistic, giving more direct control, making it possible to calculate at least some things, and differentiating these types of weapons: Because as they currently exist, all the ballistics are *fairly* similar to one another, and (back to realism again) feel weird, and not like how you would expect them to. In particular, their high rates of fire just feel ridiculous. These types of weapons should be more about lower fire rates, but much more powerful shots. This is how they act in both fiction and in real life, with coilguns usually being able to fire slightly more rapidly (Although this is in part because of another one of my points), and Railguns being super powered but very slow firing superweapons. Conventional weapons should be able to have higher rates of fire, or be able to shoot larger projectiles more easily, but at slower speeds. By having big capacitors to store energy, we can rework the weapons to do this. Interestingly, while going through the concepts section of the game's infolinks, I found a part about electrical material properties, which included some that were explicitly stated to be for creating capacitors, which leads me to believe that it's either a leftover from a removed feature, or something that may still appear in the future.

Related to these topics is the nature of lasers as they currently exist in the game: as continuous beam lasers. This means require a constant power source rather than bursts from a capacitor, so they are actually pretty much fine as they are (except maybe for being too OP, pls nerf :^)). However, in real life there are lasers that use bursts of energy over tiny amounts of time instead. These types of lasers, known as pulse lasers, concentrate tons of energy into a beam over a tiny fraction of a second to do larger amounts of damage, at the cost of a down time between shots. From my understanding, the advantage is that they can do more damage, and affect more laser resistant materials, without needing to constantly stay on the same target. This makes them good at the longer ranges where beam lasers suffer from inaccuracy, being unable to focus on a single spot, and making them highly inefficient. Once the beam can focus on the exact same spot for extended periods of time however, they become far more effective than their pulse laser counterparts. This isn't something that I'm as desperate for, but seeing as it's related, I thought I would at least bring it up.

I'm beginning to run out of steam, so I'll try to wrap this up now. My last concerns are about 1.) Heat and 2.) recoil. As it exists, heat practically doesn't exist. It's never longer than the reload time, and it's always ridiculously short, even when parts of weapons are suffering from excessive meltage. This is highly inaccurate, and weapons over heating poses a major problem, particularly in space combat. At the very least it needs to be increased, especially with capacitor weapons, and maybe a larger redesign of heating mechanics should be at some point too, but idk. In any case, I don't have any more in depth ideas on the subject, and I certainly don't have the energy to write about them. And with what little focus I can muster, I must ask this: Does recoil even exist in the game atm? Because if it does, it seems like it's way to weak. If not, that's something that probably should be done at some point. And with that I'll bring my ramblings to a close.

I'm not trying to put down qswitched , or take away from all of the great stuff he's done, but the game isn't flawless, and these are my observations and thoughts on what should be done to improve both the accuracy and player enjoyment.

So what do you think about capacitors? Will they be added? Should they be added?
Any other comments, questions, and/or concerns are also welcome