Ion cannons
Ion cannons are heavy planetary defenses that fire on ships hostile to their planet. They are inventory items rather than weapons mounted on the orbiting ship. In the distributed classic GE configuration, one weighs 250 tons, has a base price of 33 credits, and takes considerable colonial labor to produce. Sysops can change these values.
Arming a planet
A colony must have at least one ion cannon in its inventory to fire. Cannons can be produced by the colony, bought as cargo, and transferred down while orbiting an eligible planet. Only one cannon is active at a time: storing more does not multiply the damage or firing rate. Spare cannons keep the planet armed if some of its stock is destroyed during an attack. See Planetary production and Attacking planets for the broader defense and supply rules.
Because of their weight, moving several cannons can consume much of a smaller ship's cargo capacity. A ship carrying ion cannons cannot fire them itself; it must deposit them on a planet.
Hostile ships and firing
Using ATTACK against a planet marks the attacking ship hostile to that planet. While the flag remains set and the planet has an ion cannon, the cannon can strike that ship on each of its ship-state updates, roughly every six seconds. The shot does not travel like a torpedo and does not consume a cannon from planetary stock. The check is made for each hostile ship independently; one cannon in stock does not limit the planet to one target per update cycle.
The sysop-configured IDAMMAX controls damage, with a distributed default of 50. Against a ship with raised shields, each burst adds a small amount of hull damage, up to 15% of IDAMMAX, and also strikes the shields. Without raised shields, the burst adds between 50% and 100% of IDAMMAX as direct hull damage. The exact result varies randomly. Cannon damage has no player attacker to credit; in ge-next 0.3 it can also trigger the normal random damage routine, affecting ship systems or cargo.
Engagement range
The intended way to escape an attacked planet's ion fire is to move more than 1,000 displayed distance units from that planet. Classic GE tests the wrong entry in the local planet table when deciding whether to clear hostility. Depending on the other planet's position, cannon fire can stop soon after the attacker leaves orbit or continue throughout the sector. ge-next 0.2.6 corrected the lookup so the range is measured from the planet actually attacked. See Classic bug: Planetary ion cannon off-by-one for the mechanism and examples.
See also
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