Your opinion about Mesons

Player Questions
1

In short:

Current Mesons seem to me to be like the worst weapon compared to everything else.

In long:

In my current doctrine, I use Particle Beams and Mesons Cannons. I’ve been trying to figure out what Mesons would be better at than other weapons, and so far I haven’t found an answer.

(Spoiler: Raiders)

In my battles with the Raiders, I used 9 T4 20cm (20% AR) Mesons with a 10-second reload time on a 37kt cruiser. Enemy had only 2 layers of armor. Weapon range was 250k km, DFC range 320k, the difference in speed was ~2k km/s in favor of the Raider.

Maybe I was too unlucky, but the number of hits on the internal systems did not exceed about 60% of all hits. On average, these are 2-5 hits on internal systems. Sometimes my ship was so unlucky that the enemy approached almost point-blank (~50k km), and only then did the engines get damaged.

What I’m saying is… Mesons do very little damage on their own, and unless you’ve researched a bunch of technology and if you’re very unlucky, even paper will stop half of your projectiles.

At the same time, Mesons are very poorly combined with other weapons. The rest of the weapons either cannot help them in destroying the enemy (against shields), or they work much better than them (against armor and HTK). By comparison, HPM works well with Plasma and Railguns, as they can quickly strip a ship of its shields - and the enemy will immediately be blinded.

I know that Mesons are not designed to destroy a ship on their own, just like HPM, but HPM has a much more tangible effect. If you hit with 5 T1 Mesons once, the enemy won’t even feel it. If you hit with 5 T1 HPM once, the enemy will not be able to shoot. As support tool, HPM feel much more useful than Mesons.

If we talk about shields, they only really become a problem when you’re fighting 120kt ships or 70kt stations. But the problem for Mesons is that such opponents almost never have 1-layer armor, and they have hundreds of HTK. 1 damage shots on such ships look a little hopeless.

Meson shots ignore shields, and they are probably the only real reason to install armor instead of additional shields. However, if the ship has a good repair capability, the only threat from the Mesons would be an accidental reactor/engine/magazine explosion.

In general, I don’t like Mesons. They are not reliable - they can weaken or destroy an opponent with the first shot, or they may not cause significant damage to him during the entire battle. Instead of using some kind of high-caliber laser with rapid-fire plasma, you need to hope that your shots will go through the armor and break some important component. There is a possibility of instakilling an entire dreadnought by simply hitting the reactor, but this possibility is negligible. I think they were a much more significant threat back in the days when the Mesons ignored armor.

However, I would be interested in how my ships would perform against the Mesons.

I don’t want to say that it’s a terrible weapon and needs to be rebalanced, rather I want to understand what I’m doing wrong.

2 Likes
2

My inclination was to say that mesons could make for reasonable anti-fighter weapons, given that fighters run with little defense (no shields, little armor) and little redundancy, but in doing the math it looks like if you have a fighter with just enough armor for some low-caliber laser to not penetrate in a single shot, an equivalent meson caliber isn’t going to penetrate the armor in as many shots as it will take the laser.

Let’s say you have a fighter with 4 layers of armor. If you’re comparing a 10cm laser versus a 10cm meson, the meson will take on average 8 shots to penetrate those four layers once. Meanwhile, assuming 8 columns of armor for the largest possible fighter, your laser will take at most 9 shots to penetrate, at which point every subsequent shot would also penetrate.

Lasers, unlike mesons, improve their odds of success significantly with every successful hit that fails to penetrate. A meson will only ever remove a single square of armor; a laser will remove 3. As things scale up, this becomes much more heavily weighted in favor of the laser, as it has a damage profile that allows for penetration even in the face of additional layers in a way that a meson is more swiftly countered. This sort of “the meson’s average chance is the laser’s maximum number of failures before it will always succeed” is maintained throughout the lower calibers, in my quick estimations. That doesn’t even account for shock damage, which only benefits the lasers more. Lasers also do more actual internal damage once they do start penetrating relative to mesons, which only ever do a single point of damage.

I guess there’s marginal utility if a fighter is running shields, but given the sizes involved those shields would be contributing next to nothing and if your fire rate is anything decent your lasers would even at a middling damage output render those shields moot. 200 tons (!) of shields at theta tech gets you a measly 10 damage worth of protection. That lets you take 2 laser hits at 10cm. Assuming reasonable ratios of shots fired versus shots hit, those two extra shots do not matter in the long run for how quickly a fighter would die to sustained laser fire. Shields on fighters would not justify mesons.

The only thing mesons are good for is putting pressure on doctrine to always have to include some amount of armor. That’s it.

2 Likes
3

Mesons used to be far more powerful in early versions (bypassing all shields and armour) and were massively reduced in effectiveness. They are improved in v3.0 by moving the armour penetration into the calibre tech (and removing the existing tech line) and increasing armour penetration overall.

2 Likes
4

I still hold that the better option would’ve been to give bigger mesons more “damage”. All the current change did was nerf Mesons into oblivion. May as well remove them or make them STO exclusive at this point.

5

This has already been done in v2.7. :slightly_smiling_face:

Increasing the damage of the Mesons actually sounds like a pretty good idea. A large-caliber Meson will not only have a higher chance of penetrating armor, but also a higher chance of destroying some important components.

What do you think about it?

1 Like
6

Yeah I think the big issue is no matter how well they bypass passive protections, high HTK components will always be very resistant to mesons due to the way damage probability works with internal damage.

I’d also like something similar with Microwaves against shields. Doing double damage against them doesn’t mean much since 1x2=2 anyways.

7

It’s been a bit since I’ve used mesons but I think a issue with them is they can be extremely effective against small low HTK ships and basically useless against large high HTK ships. I would be worried that if the damage went up too much that they may be a bit too good at swatting low HTK ships. Not sure how/if that could be addressed.

8

Make them do the damage in 1 point clusters. So then, bigger blobs have more chances to get through and do damage, but each time a meson shot is absorbed, the potential internal damage is reduced by one.

So a 10 damage meson gets 10 rolls against the enemy armor. If it fails five of them, it rolls 5 times for component damage and does 1 point to each thing it hits.

EDIT: This would also work better if Meson Pen Chance was decoupled from caliber, but it still works fine regardless.

9

I think that Mesons have redundancy with HPM. The most vulnerable internal components of any ship are its sensors and fire control (only reactors are more vulnerable, but some ships may not have reactors). Damage to the sensors and fire control will immediately cripple a ship’s effectivness.

HPM already bypass some defenses and target sensors. Mesons fill a similar niche but the fact that mesons can hit anything and do not only target sensors is actually a downside of mesons compared to HPM.

The case I can make for mesons however, is that if you use a fast hit and run ship, with low DPS, and the enemy ship has shields, then mesons will allow you to eventually kite them to death. This makes mesons more versatile in this role than other weapons.

10

That explains why I was struggling to find the changes post :slight_smile:

11

Maybe mesons could be made to ignore component HTK?

This would alleviate the chance of becoming too powerful against small ships as those usually have small, low htk components anyway, but would significantly boost effectiveness against larger ships, with a chance to instantly disable an engine, reactor, or magazine

12

Give Mesons turret capability and they are fine.

13

Mesons have turret capability …

1 Like
14

Each such component has a chance to explode and lead to a chain reaction, instantly destroying the ship. That is, you may need only 1 lucky Meson shot to destroy a 200kt dreadnought.

This probability still exists, but it is significantly lower due to the mechanics of HTK.

It can also easily become unbalanced, since the components can have 20 HTK (large engines, for example) and withstand Railgun volleys, but fall before a single Meson projectile.

1 Like
15

Was the removal of missile armour just a straight nerf to mesons? Is there even a niche reason to use them as PD any more?

16

I suppose this is an unpopular opinion but I think linking meson penetration to the weapon size is actually a downgrade. It does make the total RP investment in the Meson tech lines lower, which is good, in theory.
But, who is using larger-caliber mesons? Before I could have a 3 HS, 1-damage weapon with penetration that improves with technology. Now I have a 1-damage weapon with penetration that improves with size (which requires technology). So I’m still investing RP but now I get worse performance for a given HS and RP investment compared to previous versions.
Admittedly I never used mesons as a primary weapon but as a secondary I could put one minimum-size meson on each vessel with a single-weapon FC and have the fleet hope for a lucky reactor shot on one vessel while they put holes in the rest of the enemy ships the old fashioned way. I never researched the caliber techs, just penetration and range, because 1 damage is 1 damage.
Compared to HPM, the other 1-damage gimmick weapon, the meson gimmick just isn’t very strong and linking it to weapon size makes it even weaker. If mesons got more damage at higher calibers it might be worth it, especially if penetration went back to being its own tech line.

2 Likes
17

This was an intentional change, because before there was no reason to develop the caliber tech beyond the first few levels, since it only affected range but made your weapons larger whereas the focusing tech made your weapons larger but did not increase size.

It is possible that mesons might still need some buffs, but I haven’t seen anyone yet do significant playtesting to find out if they are any good or not.

18

Which was, IMO, the worst way to make the caliber tech “useful”. Every gun type in the game’s caliber tech gives range and damage in exchange for being heavier and requiring more power.

Except for Gauss, HPM, and Mesons.

For gauss, the exception makes sense. Since Gauss has no caliber tech to begin with.

For HPM and Mesons, this makes zero sense. Furthermore it means anything beyond FCS range cap is actually just worse, and as capacitor tech increases, eventually anything beyond 30cm is also just worse. No upsides whatsoever, none.

Now, an argument could be made that they make excellent STO guns, sure, but that’s a rather weak argument IMO. And IIRC, one the of the big “things” for C# was removing edge cases and special rules.

Now mesons are even MORE special rules, and trying to hold them up as “But they’re good STOs” makes them a form of edge case to boot.

Finally, as stated above, 1 damage is 1 damage. I stand by my assertion that the better option was to have the pen tech remain unlinked to caliber and just give the bigger guns more damage in the form of 1 point damage clusters with individual pen chance and HTK table rolls.

Hell, HPMs could use some damage buffs for the caliber tech. Why is a gun four times the size and god only knows how much more power hungry still doing the same damage / havoc at 10,000km as a gun a quarter of it’s size and a fraction of it’s power rating?

Makes no sense. Not even “fiction” sense.

19

This. 100% this. It’s just not worth it anymore. And I would even use Mesons as primaries on some ships. They’re just sad at this point.

20

Large-caliber HPM and Mesons are used for long-range shooting, and they are slightly cheaper than similar weapons of a smaller caliber, but greater focusing technology. As far as I remember.

I would really hate to fight against improved HPMs (unless the caliber means increased shield damage - but even so, it can be a very unpleasant opponent), but Mesons really need some improvement.

And in my opinion, it’s better to increase the damage of a single projectile than to turn a Meson into a Gauss.