Weapons

"There are 4 basic types of Direct Fire Weapons, 2 types of Indirect Fire weapons and Special Weapons."

1. Direct Fire Weapons
2. Indirect Fire Weapons
3. Special Weapons

1.
Direct fire weapons do damage by shooting directly at a target. These include:

Beam Weapons (Lasers, Phasers, etc). These are Long Range weapons. They do not usually do the most damage of the various weapon types, but have a high rate of fire. Beam weapons can have the Mods: Auto Fire (Fires multiple shots per cycle instead of just one, each subsequent shot having a reduced accuracy), Armor Piercing (reduces the effective coverage of armor), Increased Range (Increases maximum range by 25%), No Range Dissipation (Damage potential is not reduced by Range)

Partical Weapons (Neutron Blasters, The Death Ray, Ion Cannons, etc). These weapons are also long range weapons. In general, they will not do as much gross physical damage as a beam weapon, but they have additional properties that make them desirable, such as the Death Ray killing Marines or the Ion Cannon's ability to disrupt engines. Mods for Partical Weapons include Continuous (Increase in basic accuracy) and Shield Piercing (Partially or completely ignore shield effects)

Mass Drivers (Mass Drivers, Guass Cannons, Disruptors, etc) Mass weapons are short range weapons with a fixed damage. If a target is struck, the damage is always the same. Mass weapons have lower basic accuracy and range is dramatically lower than other weapons, being about 1/3rd that of an equivalent technology Beam weapon. Modifiers available for Mass Weapons include: Auto Fire (Fire multiple shots each with a lower accuracy), Armor Piercing (reduces the effective armor coverage) and High Explosive (increases the damage to Internal Systems)

Plasma Weapons (Fusion Beam, Plasma Cannon, Mauler, etc) These weapons are highly accurate and do the most damage of any equivalent tech direct fire weapon. However, the damage fall off for range is tremendous, so these weapons are really only truly effective at very close ranges. Modifiers available for Plasma weapons include: Continuous (Increase in basic accuracy), Enveloping (Damages all shield facings at once), Imploding (Damage is always applied to the weakest shield facing)

2.
Indirect Fire weapons include:

Missiles. Warhead Mods include: Area of Effect (May hit multiple targets in a given area), Armor Piercing (reduces the effective coverage of armor), MIRV (Warhead breaks into multiple warheads, each doing the same damage as the base Warhead type, Dirty (increased Crew deaths) or EMP (Lower overall damage that cannot do Hull damage, but ignores Armor completely.) Chassis Mods include shields, armor, cloaking devices, ECCM, Scanners or a kitchen sink if you really want. Warheads may be placed in 5 different sizes of chassis (which in turn effects how much damage potential the warhead has) and the Warhead (and it's Mods) plus the Chassis (and it's Mods) determine the missiles final size. You then put a rack of said missiles into a ship.

Fighters: Fighters are miniature ships and can have virtually any system a ship may have. They are completely customizable. Fighter Bays, however, I would like to have a few options. Currently, the ideas for this are limited to Fast Turnaround (Fighters require less time to rearm) and Transporter Tubes (Allows launching of fighters without breaking Cloaking -- Fighters may not rearm unless the Carrier is decloaked, though)

3.
Special Weapons include all the other weapons that do not fall into the above categories.

Examples from MOO2 include Tractor Beams, The Gyro-Destabilizer, the Black Hole Generator, and the Lightning Field Generator. Special weapons do not have Mods. Special weapons do not have variable mounts. Some Special weapons are limited to one per ship, while others may be placed in multiples.