Wiki / Ship sections / Railgun
Railgun
A railgun is a spinal gun: three cells of rails and capacitor bank with no traverse of its own. It does not aim. The ship aims, you commit the shot, and what leaves cuts a corridor through everything standing in that line.
It is the opposite weapon to a turret in every way that matters. A turret is a mount you assign and forget; a railgun is a shot you set up. It fires once every thirteen seconds or so, the trigger cannot call it back once it is pulled, and it shoves the ship that fired it.
| The railgun at a glance | |
|---|---|
| Commit | a 1.5 s charge; nothing but the weapons safety can stop it |
| Slug | 15,000 m/s, 18 km of reach, arrives in just over a second |
| Damage | 300 Pierce to every section in the corridor, flat, no falloff |
| Corridor | about three cells wide, priced from one 1800-point power budget |
| Cycle | one shell, a 12 s reload: a shot every 13.5 seconds |
| Recoil | 45 at the muzzle: a shove on the spine, a shove and a yaw off it |
The hull is the aim
A railgun fires down its own axis, so where it points is decided when you bolt it on, not when you shoot. Mounted on the spine it points where the nose points. Mounted on a flank it points wherever that flank faces, which is not where you are looking - and there is no HUD crosshair that will tell you otherwise, which is why the bore sight exists.
The part carries thirteen mounting sockets: the breech plate and three per flank. The muzzle face carries none. A railgun cannot traverse off its own line, so a socket in front of the bore would only ever be an invitation to bolt a plate into your own line of fire.
Committing the shot
Tapping the trigger starts a 1.5 second charge, and that is the whole of the decision. Letting go does nothing, holding does nothing, and the gun does not re-check the nose when the charge ends. The slug leaves down whatever line the hull is holding at the end of those seconds, so a target that slid off in the meantime is simply missed - and a target you led onto the line during the charge is hit.
There is exactly one way out, and it is not the trigger: dropping your weapons back to safe dumps the charge and keeps the shell. A railgun will not fire itself into a friendly you have just safed for.
Show explanation
The shell also carries your ship's motion with it, spin included: a railgun fired while the hull is rolling throws its slug slightly off the tangent as well as down the bore. At fifteen kilometers a second that is a small correction, but it is there, and it is one more reason to be flying straight when the charge ends.
The charge is loud and visible, to you and to anyone watching. A bolt walks the length of the bore, so how far it has travelled is how much charge is left to run: an enemy across the gap can read a railgun about to fire off its hull. The capacitor loop rises in pitch as it fills.
That tell is the balance of the weapon. A slug in flight is unanswerable - it crosses 18 km in just over a second - so the window in which it can be answered is the charge, by breaking the line before it ends.
The shot is readable after it leaves, too. The slug carries its own light with it and drags an ionized wake down the line it flew: a haze with filaments running through it, thinning from the muzzle end first, which stays visible for about half a second after the slug is gone. It is the one trace of a railgun anyone gets to read, and it points both ways - at what was fired at, and back at whoever fired. On the Low graphics preset neither is drawn: the wake is a particle effect and the slug's light is a transient light, and Low takes neither.
The bore sight
Because nothing else on the HUD says where a hull is pointing, the flight computer draws the line for you: a thin blue sight line out of the muzzle, ending exactly where the slug would end, with a ring on every section that shot would destroy.
The rings are the point. "Am I on it" is a question a target bracket already answers; the question a railgun actually poses is "does this angle gut it or clip a corner", and the sight answers that by walking the sections in the line through the same penetration math the round itself is resolved with. Aiming down a ship's long axis looks visibly different from catching its shoulder.
The line thickens as the charge runs, so the seconds you are committed to holding a heading are readable without looking away. The sight is up whenever your weapons are hot - raised, or holding a combat lock - and it stays up, dimmed, while the magazine is empty. Twelve seconds of reload is exactly when you want to be lining the next shot up.
What one shot takes out
The slug deals 300 Pierce damage to every section it takes, flat. It is not scaled by how fast the two ships are closing and it does not decay with depth, so the tenth section in the line takes exactly what the first did. Three hundred clears every hull block, controller, mount and torpedo bay in the catalog outright, so an aligned shot takes a corridor out of a ship rather than damaging one.
| what the corridor takes | health | sections in one shot |
|---|---|---|
| Light Hull Section | 60 | 90 |
| Basic Controller, Torpedo Bay | 100 | 54 |
| PDC Turret | 130 | 41 |
| Reinforced / Cargo / Tank Hull | 200 | 27 |
| Vector Thruster Section | 480 | 11 |
| Capital Thruster Section | 1250 | 4 |
The corridor is wider than the bore. The slug drags a 10 m sphere behind its tip, so it takes the sections immediately beside the ones it actually crossed as well - about three cells across. It only ever widens what the tip has already reached: a ship the slug merely passes near loses nothing, and nothing ahead of the tip is touched by the shot that is on its way. The sphere keeps going after the tip is out the far side, so the exit hole is as wide as the corridor.
How much it takes is one budget: 1800 power, spent in the toughest each taken section could ever be, and a slug this fast always spends at the cheapest rate the rule allows. Width and depth come out of the same number, and nothing else bounds either. Measured on the range the game tests the gun with, that is what the width is worth:
| the same shot into | needle (no rake) | shipped corridor | a 40 m sphere |
|---|---|---|---|
| a hull line, 3 x 1 x 4 cells | 4 cells, 800 hp | 12 cells, 2400 hp | - |
| a wall, 5 x 5 x 4 cells | 4 cells, 800 hp | 28 cells as 9 / 9 / 9 / 1 | 28 cells as 25 / 3 / 0 / 0 |
| per 13.5 s cycle, hull line | 59 hp/s | 178 hp/s | - |
Show explanation
Twenty-seven reinforced hull blocks is past the depth of anything that flies, which is exactly why the shot is wide: nothing in the game is thick enough to spend a slug's budget in one column, so the surplus goes sideways instead of out the far side. Against a four-cell hull line the corridor removes three times what the bare needle did. Depth is not what this weapon costs you - the commit, the recoil and the reload are.
Wider is not more. Against a wall dense enough to bind the budget, a sphere four times the shipped radius removes exactly the same total, because both spend the same 1800 - it just spends it across the entry face and stops one layer in, where the shipped corridor bores three cells wide through all four layers and out the back. The radius chooses the shape of the hole; the power decides how much of it you get.
The two large drives are the one place a slug does not simply delete what it touches: 300 does not clear 480 or 1250, so a railgun cripples a capital drive over several passes instead of taking it off.
Reach is 18 km, which outranges every mount on the ship carrying it. That is what makes lining up worth doing - the combat page's engagement ladder puts the three weapons on one range axis.
The recoil
The shot lands an impulse backwards along the bore, applied at the muzzle rather than at the ship's balance point. On a spinal mount that is a straight shove. Off-axis it is a shove and a yaw, every single time, and the further out you hung the gun the harder it kicks the nose around.
That is the price of a wing mount, and it is deliberate: the recoil arrives at the end of the shot, so the ship you have to re-aim is a ship that has just been spun. The railgun is also three cells long and carries 180 health, so it is a large and obvious thing to be carrying: it takes as much room on the hull as three plates, and it is that size to anything shooting back.
The tempo
One shell, ever. The magazine holds a single round and takes twelve quiet seconds to return it, so a railgun fires roughly every thirteen and a half seconds counting the charge. There is no way to queue a second shot; a railgun that could would just be a turret with a slow fire rate.
The section's ammo gauge is the countdown, and the bore sight stays up dimmed through it. In practice the reload is the aiming phase: you spend it getting the hull onto the line you want, and the shell arrives about when you are ready to use it.
Facing one
An enemy railgun does not stalk you. A raider carrying one commits when its orbit happens to sweep the bore across something it is already fighting, well within the slug's reach, and it spaces its shots further apart than the gun itself needs. So it lands the occasional slug and never sets one up.
What it will NOT do is spend the shell on a line that cannot land. The commit wants the bore inside the target's own width at the range it is at - eleven degrees on the development carrier fixture a kilometer out, under three on the development skiff fixture at the same range, and tighter still as the gap opens. Fly a small hull and a raider's lance mostly stays quiet; fly something big and slow and it will take the shot from further off than feels fair.
Your warning is the same one you give: the charge. A ship whose nose swings dead onto you and then holds still is a ship that has committed, and the second and a half before the shot is the only part of it you can do anything about.
Variants
| Variant | Damage | Type | Depth | Corridor | Charge | Magazine | Recharge | Muzzle | Reach | Health | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| captureassets/catalog-railgun-lance-section.png | Railgun Lancerailgun_lance_section | 300 | Pierce | 1800 power | 10 m rake | 1.5 s | 1 | 1 / 12 s | 15,000 m/s | 18 km | 180 |
Reach is derived, not authored: 15,000 m/s times the 1.2 s slug lifetime. It is nominal travel, not a guaranteed hit range. Every other column is the configured base prototype; a mod can author its own.
One railgun ships. It is the one you bolt on yourself in the ship editor; no hull in the base fleet carries it. See Ship sections for mods for the numbers a mod can change, the rake radius among them.