How about a beam that just drains out the target's battery and kills their engines for a while. That way, traders could fire the beam at pursuers to slow them down and pirates can shut down a trader and tell them to drop their cargo or die. Just a creativity demon I had. It drains a certain amount of energy per shot, but will drain about a 1/4 of a fast charge per hit. Give it a really fast velocity and it should work really well.

another emp post.
I'm a fan of the emp blast. This sounds way too powerful for rocket rammers.

I was thinking it should be a large port weapon to limit its use by rammers and fighters.

The only comment I have is that an EMP weapon bypasses hull, armor, and other such defences by the simple virtue that it doesn't effect them. This means that a heavy craft is more disadvantaged by the precence of an EMP weapon in the game than a lighter more manueverable craft is because it cannot rely on its hull to protect itself. I think this is bad and suggest that EMP damage should scale according to the hull of the target. The more hull the target has, the less power drain the target should experience. Something like the following formula should apply:

<total power drained> = <maximum drain of weapon> * floor(1, <balancing constant>/<hull of target>)

Where a good choice of a balancing constant is something like the average hull of the smallest class of ships in the game, or in the present case probably between 6000 and 8000. Assuming a choice of 6000 as or constant, and a weapon with a maximum drain of 60 per hit, a ship currently with 18000 h.p. would only lose 20 energy from its battery per hit.

The real question is what should happen when a battery is fully drained. In most space games the target becomes helpless, but in most space games most targets on which EMP type weapons are used are NPC's that don't 'care' if they are helpless, and I don't think this would work that well for a multiplayer game. The opposite take would be that nothing happens, meaning that fully draining a battery would be only a momentary inconvience soon to be fixed by the batteries recovery rate. A minimal take would be that excess power loss is converted to damage at a 1:1 rate. A somewhat less conservative take would convert excess power loss to damage at a more favorable rate, say 1:3, or make 'critical hits' - that is to say temporary loss of some functionality - be produced at a more favorable rate by EMP damage than they would be by normal damage - say 10x more likely or something (necessary because of the small scale of excess energy damage in any model we've discussed). By temporary loss of some functionality I mean just that. Complete helplessness would almost never result, but rather batteries would recover power at a slower rate for a few seconds, or engines would produce less thrust for a few seconds, or one weapon would become non-functional for a few seconds.

Also ideally, their should be gizmo's that can be installed to specifically protect against EMP damage so that someone who really hates EMP can render it virtually harmless (at the cost of not having as many defences against more ordinary weapons). For example, a 'surge protector' that makes critical hits by EMP weapons much less likely or 'hardened electronics' that effectively double the ship's hull (see above formula) with respect to EMP weapons.

With such protections against thier abuse in place this opens the door for a wide range of EMP weapons to be developed without fear of imbalancing the game - direct fire, mines, rockets, weapons doing both normal and EMP damage, etc.

20 energy?!!?!?!?! That's <1/2 a second to recharge! This weapon is completely useless if it takes more than half a minute to discharge a heavy battery, and I think (didn't do it out) that this weapon requires ~1 min 20 seconds to discharge a heavy battery...

I said nothing about the cycle rate of the weapon, nor how it is mounted, nor how much energy it used. For all you know, it fires 10 times per second, for a total drain on an undamaged 18,000 hull point target of 200 energy/second, or on a 6,000 hull point target of 600 energy/second. Imagining a reasonable worst (or best) case, the weapon is quad mounted on a Hornet which gains surprise (the Hornet is a pirate) and fires at an undamaged Centurian with a fast charge battery. The Centurian loses 222 power per .1 second (a single burst), or 2220 power per full second. Fast Charge only has 250 power and a recovery of 5 per .1 second, so the second full burst puts the Centurian in a deficit of -189 power - meaning the centurian cannot fire back or turbo and by some of the above algorithms takes 567 damage and must suffer criticals as if it had taken 5670 damage. Since the Centurian is now powerless (no turbo), it is highly likely to remain in the Hornet's gun sights until the Hornet has discharged its full battery onto it.

The same hornet will have a harder time achieving such a brutal first strike versus a Prom with a heavy battery, true, but that would also be true of any other weapon we could name as well and the Prom is a much easier target and much more likely to be hit by several successive quad bursts. Even so, the weapon is not useless. A quad burst drains 80 battery power, and a full second strafe drains 800.

Therefore, the possibility of an 'EMP ram' exists even with a weapon as 'weak' as the one I suggest which is one reason I did not specify exactly what the cycle rate, velocity, and so forth should be. It would be necessary to do quite a bit of thinking about a weapon with as exotic of an effect as 'drains battery' before I'd even have a clue where to start looking for balance.

I don't think I would be amiss however in suggesting that I've done quite a bit more thinking about the subject than you have, so cut me some slack and reduce the number of exclamation marks in your reflexive responces.

i agree to a certain extent that a fat ass ship should take longer to discharge than a skinny ship. But it shouldn't take too much longer, like 25-50% longer

"i agree to a certain extent that a fat ass ship should take longer to discharge than a skinny ship. But it shouldn't take too much longer, like 25-50% longer"

You may be right, in that more hull isn't the only advantage of a large ship - in theory they have more firepower too. But, there are some mitigating factors. All things being equal, a given large ship has less power to spend per weapon than a less massive ship in the same class (same number of batteries), so any power loss effects its firepower disproportionately. Also, I feel a heavy has more need to rely on its turbo to manuever than a light. A light just might dodge out of the way of incoming fire anyway. A heavy is going to be harder pressed to do that.

So I don't know. It's definately something that would need play testing.

One problem with making energy drain not directly proportionate to hull is pure implementation. The curve may or may not be nicer, but it might become a computationally expensive extra step if you have to change the formula to something like:

<total power drained> = <maximum drain of weapon> * sqrt(floor(1, <balancing constant>/<hull of target>))

two words: tractor beam.

A tractor beam would only work if you're using a capital ship though. Unless you want to hijacks something. Put a tractor on a bus and hijack a valk (assuming you can hold it. It would be cool, but I don't think it will add much to gameplay. It would be really obnoxious to most.
I also agree that more hull should = longer time to discharge. Just say that a thicker hull dampens the ion cannon's effects. Since most ships with lots of weapons use the heavy battery (which I feel needs to recharge faster BTW), it would take much longer to discharge and thus, the ship will be better able to shoot back. It would take a while to find the perfect equilibrium to balance the cannon, but I think once it's done it can open up a lot of new possibilites. Small ships can better fend of attacking ones since they can just lay down a spray of ions to slow them down. Attackers can shut you down before they pick you off (ion+dual-rail once it's unnerfed would be popular I'll bet) and once the economy is revised and it becomes harder to just buy a new ship, it will help to have means of non-lethal combat at our disposal.

a little unrelated, but, I think we should get the good old ions back. They ruled, and still do.
/me curses at the st00pid bots who have unfar advantages...