I noticed already in Beta that having 4 front mounted cannons can be rapid fired infinitely without energy dropping at all. Try that with Beams... urks.

TL;DR version: Why do more than 2 beams suck so incredibly much energy. They are already the lowest dps weapons and I wonder how the later cruisers will be able to sustain their 4/4 gun slots if more than 4 beams already manage to suck weapon power down to zero in zero time. One wonders why not at least the huge cruisers are able to support their beam arrays with enough jouce.

There is no point in fitting more than two Dual cannoons or three heavy dual cannons due to the global cooldown.

Yes, but I agree with him that firing more than one should seriously eat into your weapons power setting. As it is, it's too easy for someone with canons to simply open up on another person before they can react. It needs to be more burst, and less sustained.

cannons have a ton of innate penalties, different to beams but still there.

Yes they can cause heavy sustained damage, however if the enemy uses stuff like evasive maneuvers there's a good chance they'll get out of the arc, meaning no damage.

Only certain amounts can be used, that means were heavily limited, unlike beams that can fit as many as they want for a huge burst damage move at the expense of their overall dps.

They can only be placed on cannons, the most fragile of the federation ships, so yes escorts with cannons can potentially do awesome damage, but against anything maneuverable or anything that can hit hard back that doesn't always happen.

One thing I am seeing as a regular tactic is people going from full impulse to 10k and,starting fighting immediatly... people just dont realise the massive drain on all systems, meaning weapons can stop firing ages before they do with a full lot of energy. A few seconds of full impulse can reduce all energy levels to 5

Off on a slight tangent I know, but makes a hell of a difference when using high enery weapons.

the reason they dont drain as much as banks and arrays is because you can only fire one at a time.

Yep, this whine (cannons do to much damage, dont drain power) keeps coming up. But the fact is that only *1* cannon is ever firing at a time (there is a slight overlap in the firing cycles). When you fire a cannon, every other cannon on the ship goes into 1 second cooldown. Dual cannons have a 2 second cooldown so you can only use two on a ship, heavy cannons have a 3 second cooldown so you can stick on 3.

The BO rapid fire I've never reallly gotten a handle on how exactly it works (other than being the "open a can of hurt" skill) with regard to multiple cannons firing.

This is also why escort captains need autofire, we HAVE to issue the fire command every second.

Beams suffer from energy drain to stop you beam boats from setting max weapon power and spaming them.
If there was no power drain on beams, cannons and conversly escorts would be pretty darn pointless.

The reason cannons suffer very little from power drain is beacause they are for escorts.
Escorts do one thing, and one thing only, BLOW STUFF UP
If they had the same power drain as beams they would be utterly usless because an escort only has a very short window of opertunity to deal his damage and then he has to either come about for another pass or run like buggery.

With a beam boat you couldnt care less where the target was, up, down, left, right, makes no differnce because you can always hit them.
With cannons you only have a very narrow 45 degree arc.

Anyways, you get the point I hope, because that was FAR too much typing :p

theoretically if you were to gob all your cannons at the same time you would experience the same drain as firing multiple beams.

Very true, and that is another reason we have that global in place to stop us from firing all cannons at the same time.
Not to mention that Rapid Fire would be INSANE if you could fire all cannons at once