Weapons

Weapons are your main source of damage in Black Prophecy. There are a few types of weapons that determine what kind of damage you do against opponents such as energy weapons, explosive weapons, and projectile and are able to be equipped depending on what skills you put your points into. Each weapon type has an advantage and a counter. Weapons also have a weight and a slot requirement making your ship movement more difficult or easier and making it impossible to over equip your ship.

Projectile
Projectile weapons cause significant hull damage. They are considerably hindered by energy shields though, because it takes them longer to wear down the shield strength. Projectile weapons cause low-medium kinetic-damage damage which only directly damages the hull. They have low mass allowing you to sustain decent manoeuvrability while flying. Lastly, projectile weapons have low shield penetration depending on the enemy's shield.

Chain Gun
Chain Guns are a simple projectile weapon that continually fires at a medium rate. They are a medium range, low-medium damage output weapon.

Vulcan
The Vulcan has a very high firing rate but only fires small projectiles. They are a medium range, high damage output weapon.

Scattergun
A Scattergun fires a dense mass of bullets with extreme spread. This renders it rather useless for long-range combat, but it could decide a victory in a close-range dogfight.

Seeker Cannon
This cannon fires very large projectiles that can home in on their target to a certain degree. It's disadvantage is the medium damage, range and frequency.

Magnum Cannon
This cannon fires a large, slow projectile that deals a large amount of damage. It has a low firing rate, though.

Sniper Gun
The Sniper fires fast projectile that deals the largest amount of damage. However, it has the lowest firing rate.

Energy
Energy weapons are great at reducing enemy shields. However, they can only inflict moderate damage to a hostile ship's structural durability. Many energy weapons do medium-high energetic/heat damage, however energy weapons will do no damage to a ship's hull until the shield is completely out of energy. Energy weapons also have high mass, putting those with high energy weapon builds at a strong flight manoeuvrability disadvantage against low mass weapon builds.

Pulse Laser
The laser is one of the simpler types of energy weapons: It bundles light and "fires" at a fast rate but only causes a limited amount of damage.

Particle Beam
The beam is an extremely intense laser. It deals massive damage continuously.

Plasma Gun
This weapon fires charged plasma. Its rate of fire is medium. Its damage is noticeably higher than that of a laser, for example.

Plasma Flamethrower
A weapon similar to a flamethrower that fires massive amounts of plasma. While its range is rather limited, is can deal devastating damage in close-range dogfights.

Fusion Gun
Fires a ball of bundles energy. The weapon can be charged, increasing the fireball's size and power the longer it is charged. This makes it a very scalable weapon for different combat situations.

Lightning Gun
This weapon fires an impulse like lightning over a long distance, dealing large amounts of damage to shields only. making this the perfect shield breaker.

Rail Gun
An energy variation of the Sniper Gun - it has a lower damage output but a higher fire rate.

Explosive
Explosive weapons are slow and unwieldy. They generally do area damage. Their highly dynamic particle clouds penetrate the shield generator's energy fields unchecked. In return, they don't reduce shield strength. Explosives ignore shield entirely and do medium direct hull damage. Additional "ammunition" rockets are needed to power the Missile Launcher as seen below. This means explosives are overall heavy in mass and can cause great disadvantages in the battlefield.

Plague Rocket
The plague rocket pod sports many tubes filled with close to medium-range unguided rockets that can be fired at a high rate.

Scavenger Missile
The Scavenger is an unguided long-range missile with an impressive explosive power intended for attacking large, slow ships.

Carnivore Missile
The Carnivore is a fast and agile guided missile primarily used against fighters.

Cannibal Missile
The Cannibal is a guided missile that automatically releases close dozens of smaller unguided rockets near its target.

Grenade Launcher
The semi-automatic grenade launcher usually fires proximity-fused grenades with an effective explosion radius of 10 meters.

Flak Cannon
The flak cannon sprays shrapnel over a mid-range distance. Its explosion radius and firing frequency are impressive.

Difference between Mechanical(Projectile) and Energy
First difference is the damage-type. While mechanical weapons deal kinetic-damage energy weapons do energetic/heat-damage. Remember that resistance is divided into the three damage-types (kinetic/energetic/explosive).

The biggest difference is the fact that energy weapons do shield damage while mechanical do not. While mechanical weapons do hull damage at any time, energy weapons first have to reduce the shield energy to zero. Without lightning guns it'll take some time to get some of the higher shields down.

So why should one even use energy weapons you may ask... because they deal more damage than their mechanical counterparts. In teamplay this becomes even more important since the hull damage lost by using lightning guns will gain a lot more damage for everyone else on shield-users.

The thing about shield penetration is that it can be your friend or foe. The good part is that a shield won't stop you from doing damage. The bad part is, the higher the level of the shield the more damage is absorbed and there is absolutely no way for a mechanical user to get down the shield. In lower levels it's not that bad since shields have a density of about 10%, but around lvl 20 it’s already about 40%.