Phasers: Difference between revisions

Latest revision as of 18:56, 13 October 2026

Standard phasers are immediate energy weapons aimed by relative bearing. One shot can strike every eligible ship inside its firing arc, not only the ship whose scan bearing was used to aim. No scanner lock is required. At warp, the PHASER command switches to the distinct hyper-phaser path.

Charge and readiness

A standard phaser must be operative and charged to at least 60% to fire. For a player, an accepted shot drains its charge completely, whether it hits one ship, several ships, or none. Unlike a projectile, a standard phaser has no travel time: its eligible targets are checked during the firing attempt.

An undamaged phaser recharges on the ship's roughly six-second system updates. Each successful recharge spends 57 units of neutron flux and adds 10 percentage points per phaser mark, up to 100%. For example, a Mark-1 system starting at zero needs six recharge passes to reach firing strength and ten to become fully charged; a Mark-5 needs two passes to reach full charge. The actual wait depends on when the next ship update occurs, and charging pauses when sufficient flux is unavailable. A damaged phaser does not charge until repaired.

Higher charge produces proportionally more damage. A shot fired as soon as the system reaches 60% has 60% of the charge-dependent force of an otherwise identical fully charged shot. See Phaser command for firing syntax and command-level checks.

Firing arc and spread

The chosen relative bearing is added to the ship's heading to establish the beam's centerline. Every eligible ship is tested against that line independently, so an accurately aimed shot can hit several ships at once. Standard phasers do not require the target to be locked or within the firing ship's scanner range. A ship outside scan range can therefore be struck if its position happens to fall within the beam and damage reach. Planets do not obstruct the beam.

The optional spread setting widens the accepted arc while reducing the force delivered to each target. At the default PHABIAS of 2, the comparison uses an angular offset strictly less than spread + 2 degrees from the centerline. The damage factor below applies before charge, distance, phaser mark, and target protection:

Spread	Angular offset tested	Focus factor
0	less than 2°	100%
1 (default)	less than 3°	about 83%
2	less than 4°	about 67%
3	less than 5°	about 53%
4	less than 6°	about 40%
5	less than 7°	about 30%

These are offsets on each side of the centerline, not the full arc width. Both versions compare whole-degree directions; classic GE truncated the angles and introduced a small port/starboard edge bias. ge-next 0.3 rounds them instead. See Classic bug: Phaser spread bias for the boundary cases.

Cybertron firing

In classic GE, a Cybertron can decide to use its phasers because a target meets its combat AI's distance and attack conditions, then call the standard firing routine. That routine spends the full phaser charge even if the beam finds no target it can damage. The AI's distance check is not the same as the phaser damage calculation: a target can satisfy the former while the latter falls to zero at long range.

This matters more in ge-next because phaser damage retains its fractional value. The firing calculation now distinguishes an exact-zero miss from a positive contact below one damage point, which can be reported as "no" damage, and from a contact that causes damage. If every tiny positive result caused a Cybertron to fire, it could repeatedly waste a full charge on distant contacts with no effect.

ge-next therefore lets the standard firing routine's target sweep decide whether the Cybertron actually fires. For each eligible ship in the beam, it calculates the result after range, spread, phaser mark, target durability, and any hyperspace reduction. A Cybertron ignores a calculated result below 0.5 damage points. If at least one target reaches 0.5, the Cybertron spends its charge; otherwise it keeps the charge for a later opportunity. This is part of the normal firing path, not a separate preliminary shot or a guarantee that the target will take hull damage. A result from 0.5 up to but not including 1 is a contact, but the routine reduces it to zero before applying hull or shield damage. The 0.5 cutoff applies to Cybertrons, not players: a player's allowed shot spends its charge even if it misses, and a smaller positive result can still be reported as a no-damage contact.

Damage and range

Standard phaser damage depends on distance, spread, current charge, phaser mark, and target durability. Its nominal reach is 20,000 plus 4,000 distance units per phaser mark: 24,000 for Mark-1 and 96,000 for Mark-19. This is a mathematical cutoff, not a promise of a damaging hit at the edge. Before phaser-mark and target-durability modifiers, the core calculation is:

reach = 20000 + (phaser mark * 4000)
damage = PDAMMAX
       * (current charge / 100)
       * (1 - distance / reach) ^ PFIRDST
       * (1 - spread / 11) ^ 2

With the default PFIRDST of 5, damage at half the nominal reach retains only 1/32 of its point-blank distance component. For example, a fully charged ge-next Mark-5 phaser has a 40,000-unit nominal reach. Against an unshielded, unarmored DAMF-100 target, a spread-0 hit at 20,000 units calculates 3.75 points of damage before the final whole-point hull result. Spread 5 cuts that same calculation to about 1.12 points. At longer distances the fifth-power falloff becomes even steeper.

After the core calculation, ge-next increases force by (mark + 1) / 2. Classic instead multiplies its already-truncated core damage by (mark + 1) / 2.5. The different default PDAMMAX values (40 in ge-next, 50 in classic) offset this multiplier difference before truncation and target protection; they do not make the final results identical. In ge-next, target DAMF then scales the result: a DAMF of 200 halves it relative to DAMF 100, while Armor plating reduces it further. Raised shields take the impact instead of leaving it as ordinary hull damage. The point-blank value and nominal reach alone therefore cannot predict what a particular target will suffer.

Classic GE truncates the intermediate distance-and-focus result to an unsigned integer before applying later phaser and target modifiers. Small positive values become zero early, making the useful range end well inside the nominal cutoff and creating stair-stepped damage. It also derives phaser resistance from a class's maximum cargo capacity rather than DAMF. ge-next preserves fractional precision through the calculation and uses DAMF for this weapon, as it does for other ordinary weapons. Its default PDAMMAX changed from 50 to 40 as part of the rebalance; that is not a simple 20% reduction in final damage, because the phaser-mark multiplier was also revised.

Classic GE (gray) truncates intermediate damage, producing plateaus and an early drop to zero. ge-next (teal) preserves a smooth fractional result. Both curves use a fully charged Mark-10 phaser, spread 0, and each version's default damage settings. Values are before target protection; the dashed portion is a positive ge-next contact below one damage point.

Classic enters the standard hit path only when the final integer damage is at least one, although its formatter describes a one-point result as "no" damage. ge-next distinguishes an exact-zero miss from a positive sub-point contact and calls a one-point result "negligible." A sub-point contact adds no hull damage and does not replace existing kill credit. The detailed message behavior is covered under Phaser command; see also Classic bug: Phaser durability uses cargo capacity.

Defenses and special targets

Raised shields do not prevent an accepted shot from being fired. A player's raised shields are lowered during the firing sequence and not raised afterward. A cloaked firing ship cannot use its phasers. In ge-next, a ship already at or beyond the destruction threshold cannot fire during the brief interval before its destruction is processed.

A raised shield completely deflects a standard phaser hit: none of that hit's calculated damage passes through to the hull, even if the impact depletes or damages the shield. This differs from shielded hits by mines, ion cannons, and self-destruct blasts, which can still cause some hull damage. Torpedoes and missiles can also be fully deflected; see Shields for how different impacts affect shield charge.

The defender's "magnitude" readout is the incoming phaser's calculated strength after range, spread, charge, phaser mark, and target-durability modifiers, but before shield absorption. Classic GE truncates the result to an integer and enters the shield-hit path only if that integer is at least 1; a weaker result produces no hit or magnitude message. ge-next instead recognizes any positive contact: a result below 1 appears as <1, although it causes no integer shield-charge loss. For results of 1 or more, the displayed magnitude is the whole-number portion of the calculated strength. The number is not hull damage or the number of shield units lost. Shields explains how the defender's shield Mark converts that strength into charge loss, with a worked example and the damaged-state transition.

The PHATOWRP setting controls the minimum phaser mark that can hit a ship in hyperspace with the standard phaser path. A qualifying hit on a hyperspace target suffers a further 50% damage reduction. Classic's configuration text documents Mark-3, but its distributed default was Mark-5; ge-next 0.01 changed the configured default to Mark-3. This is separate from firing hyper-phasers while the attacker is at warp.

A protected neutral-zone target cannot be damaged by ordinary phaser fire from outside the zone; ge-next also notifies the firing ship if a ship that otherwise would have been in the phaser's path was protected by the neutral zone. ge-next also applies teammate, distress, and NPC-faction protections in the applicable cases; a deliberate lock can override some of these protections. Nebulas and cloaking can change what hit messages reveal about a ship without changing the underlying damage calculation. See Phaser command for command ordering and shield behavior, and Combat for broader combat rules.

SYS-assigned phaser Marks

The normal purchase limit is Mark-19. In classic GE, SYS PHASERTYPE 20 can assign an otherwise unavailable Mark-20 phaser. For a target that passes the normal firing-arc and protection checks, both standard and hyper-phaser paths replace their calculated hit value with 101. An unshielded ship therefore takes 101 hull-damage points from such a hit, regardless of the ordinary damage falloff; a raised shield deflects a standard phaser hit instead. Mark-20 is not a way to bypass the neutral zone or other target protections.

ge-next removed that fixed-101 special case, not the ability to assign Mark-20 through SYS: its phaser uses the regular calculation. SYS PHASERTYPE also accepts Marks above 20 in classic, and above 19 in ge-next. Those values follow the regular calculations rather than the classic Mark-20 override, but are outside normal equipment limits and have not been fully tested for overflow or other edge cases. See SYS-assigned shields for the defensive counterpart.