Hyper-phasers

Hyper-phasers are the hyperspace firing path of a ship's phaser system. They deliver immediate fire against another ship at warp rather than launching a traveling projectile. The player uses the ordinary PHASER command; see Phaser command for its syntax.

Targeting

The firing ship and target must both be in hyperspace. The target must be inside the fixed beam and within the firing ship's scanner range. Hyper-phasers use the fixed HPBEAMW value of 5: the bearing offset must be less than five degrees, normally allowing whole-degree offsets from 0 through 4 on either side. This is equivalent in geometry to standard spread 3 with the default phaser bias, but hyper-phasers do not receive the standard spread's focus penalty. Multiple eligible ships in the beam can be hit by one discharge.

Hyper-phaser damage uses a separate distance curve with a 40,000-unit raw reach, then applies phaser mark and target-durability modifiers. Unlike standard phasers, a higher phaser mark increases hyper-phaser damage but does not extend that reach; the firing ship's scanner range can impose a shorter targeting limit. Damage approaches zero at the outer edge. The firing ship's ordinary phaser charge is not drained; each discharge instead costs 5,000 units of neutron flux and starts a short cooldown. Classic GE requires at least 6,000 flux to fire, while ge-next checks for the 5,000-unit cost and can load a pod if necessary. Firing can leave too little flux to sustain warp, especially in classic GE where a spare pod is not reliably loaded for subsequent travel. See Flux for the differences in automatic pod use.

Hit reports

Classic GE reports a hyper-phaser hit whenever a target is in the beam and within scan range, without checking whether the calculated damage is positive. Its damage calculation truncates to an integer, and the message formatter calls any value below two "no" damage. A zero-damage result and a one-point result can therefore produce the same hit message; the zero-damage path can also update combat attribution despite inflicting no damage.

ge-next requires positive calculated damage before treating an in-beam target as a contact. An exact zero produces no hit message; a positive amount below one point is reported as "no" damage, and one point as "negligible." This is the same contact/message threshold used by standard phasers, unlike classic's separate unconditional hyper-phaser report. See Phasers for the standard-phaser calculation and Classic bug: Phaser durability uses cargo capacity for a related classic damage issue.

See also

• Phasers
• Phaser command
• Warp travel
• Flux

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