C3 Beams

[Flip]

Maybe I am.

The beam is good to quickly kill small ships and to take down the shields of big ones, and then the pulse can hammer at their subsystems for ages with no power or heat problems.

[TorTorden]

Maybe I am.

The beam is good to quickly kill small ships and to take down the shields of big ones, and then the pulse can hammer at their subsystems for ages with no power or heat problems.

Good point, I noticed how fast eagles, sidewinders and even imperial couriers would whisk out of existence under those beams, granted I got three of them...

[Roger Wilco Jr]

The beam is good to quickly kill small ships and to take down the shields of big ones, and then the pulse can hammer at their subsystems for ages with no power or heat problems.

Are you referring to beams overheating if you hold the trigger and they start pulsing about 1/2 second on, 1/2 second off, until you let off the trigger and let them cool for a few seconds?

I fell in love with fixed beams with the Asp, and it's the only laser I've ever used since. I found myself back in a Vulture today and I outfitted it with 2x C3 fixed beams. I'm not having any ship heat problems, but they do start pulsing after about 5 seconds. There's nothing better for taking down shields, but the pulsing does get annoying working on the hull & systems. I always figured that they were still delivering more average damage than pulse or burst lasers, but now I'm not so sure and want to try out some different configurations.

So far I've spent about 2 hours jumping to high tech systems. They all have C3 fixed beams, but I can't find ANY other C3 lasers, fixed or gimbaled. They do exist, don't they?


P.S. Here's an interesting tread on the main forums:
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=140240

[Flip]

Continuously firing the beam while boosting around nav beacons can quickly cause the ship to overheat. The pulsing is caused by the power being insufficient to maintain continuous fire. If you give more power to the weapons, the beams will pulse less (but of couse you'll either be slower, with weaker shields, or both).

But having a single beam on the Vulture works around that pretty well. with 3 pips to the weapons, my beam only starts pulsing after a moment if I also fire the pulse.

[Roger Wilco Jr]

Well, I don't know if C3 pulse or burst lasers exist or not. I've read about them in several places, but I gave up looking for them. I see that coriolis.io does not list them as options, so I assume Frontier dropped them. Instead you can get 3E gimbaled, or the 3D fixed which I tried. After testing a few hours, it does feel like it takes a bit longer to take out smaller targets, but it is much faster to kill larger ships. What I find amazing is that the pulses cost 70K and the beams cost 1.2M, but the pulses use half the power so I can use them with A rated thrusters, and they actually seem to work better.

But I do miss the beams! I fell in love with the look playing Homeworld, and with the Shadows on Babylon 5 (not to forget E:D).

[robfm81]

B5 shadows were awsome

[TorTorden]

Reminds me somewhat I got the whole series (babylon 5) on DVD, I should get back to watching that someday...

[JohnLuke]

I don't think the OP had a chance to post where he found 3C beams in the area of HIP 20277. I was looking for 3C-G beams in the same area this weekend, and found them at LTT 9810 - Kerimov Dock.

Just in case anyone else in is the same area of Arissa L-D space and looking for them.

[robfm81]

Now have dual gimballed beams on my vulture. Love it. Melts small ships in one pass. Recharges fast with the 4a power.