Weapons that use energy are confusing, can anyone help?

[lyravega]

Here is what I figured out so far:

 

• There are two types of energy weapons; those that have "coolingType == 1" (projectiles) and "coolingType == 2" (beams)
  
• Projectiles drain the battery; stored energy. It has no effect on your generator, and that's why it doesn't show up in the power usage panel
  
• Beams put a strain on the generator; it has a power requirement. While it does not drain the battery directly, the strain on the generator will reach a level where it'll start draining the battery over long periods of firing
  

 

Now, so far good. I spend a little bit of time to verify the findings above, and make sure it is not just on the UI (made a ship with little power generation to test projectiles, made a ship with little energy storage to test beams, etc...). But this is where things get wonky.

 

I have 2 beam turrets, one has a reported power usage 1222/s and the other one has a reported power usage of 1582/s. When I start shooting these beams, power requirement values are entirely different. The former starts from 0.14GW and the latter starts from 0.34GW. I've tried to reach these values, and I did (by probably some coincidence), but this left me puzzling, needless to say.

 

The way I reached these numbers is by using the shotsPerSecond on baseEnergyPerSecond or by using heatPerShot directly, but the former is less problematic since some other files (turretfactory.lua) alters this baseEnergyPerSecond value.

 

The turret with 1222/s cost has a shotsPerSecond value of 10, while the other one with 1582/s cost has a shotsPerSecond value of 5. If you divide the baseEnergyPerSecond to shotsPerSecond, and add energyIncreasePerSecond on top of those, you get 144 (0.14GW) for the first one, which is good. But for the other one, you get 361 (not 0.34GW) so it is still a bit off.

 

Then I pulled a magical number off my ass and this is where it gets coincidental. A "tickrate"; tickrate = shotsPerSecond / 10, and this is multiplied by energyIncreasePerSecond. So the end result now becomes 144 & 339 (0.14GW & 0.34GW). So all is fine for these two weapons, but when I test this on a beam with shotsPerSecond = 20, it goes off again.

 

I'm not even going into the projectile weapons because I'll be going blind for that one. But yeah anyway, can anyone explain what is what for these weapons?