Boson Lance
Type	Main Gun
Available From	ZYA CUB
Fitted To	Small and Medium Ships
Role	Sniper
Required License	Military License (+10)

In-game Description

The Split Boson Lance fires a single high speed projectile at medium range. To deliver its full damage potential, pilots are required to charge the weapon for a brief moment. The initial rapid heat generation nearly overheats the weapon, but it starts cooling down even if the pilot holds the shot instead of triggering it. This allows pilots to release a preloaded shot from the cooled-down weapon, enabling pilots to shoot twice. Attempting to shoot when the allowed heat generation would be exceeded, will trigger the safety mechanism, resulting in the Boson Lance overheating without firing. As an additional limitation, the weapon is static and requires pilots to turn their ship to aim, forgoing the automatic target tracking that is available on other weapons. The Boson Lance sees most use in fighting medium-sized ships, and when destroying the surface elements of capital ships.

The Boson Lance was invented relatively recently, by the Split brothers Ko t'Pa and Fyi t'Pa. With the reconnection of the Zyarth Patriarchy to the Commonwealth, the Patriarchy acquired its blueprint and refined it for mass production.

The most notable feature of the Mk2 variant is that it doubles the damage output.

Tactical Overview

The Boson Lance is the Split version of the Mass Driver and could be considered a sidegrade.

It offers a slightly increased damage output at the cost of reduced range. Otherwise, the two weapons are pretty much identical.

As with the Mass Driver, this is a highly impractical and overpriced weapon and shares all the downsides.

The Boson Lance has no tracking and is fixed in place, making it very hard to hit small and moving targets. Focusing all guns on a single point is also impossible.

The DPS is still lacking, and capital ships aren't viable targets.
Also note that because of how the heat mechanic works, the Boson Lance's cooldown time gets multiplied for each gun you use. Using 2x Boson Lance Mk2 increases the cooldown time to 29 seconds. 3x to 43 seconds, and so on.

Making this weapon work is very difficult, and the result is generally disappointing. There are much better choices out there, and all of them will outperform the Boson Lance in damage output, cost-effectiveness, and practicality.

Trivia:
The ability to hold a shot and let the weapon cool down, as described in-game, has been removed in update 6.20. The Boson Lance will no longer cool down while holding a shot ready to fire.
This applies to the Mass Driver as well.

Specifications

Construction Cost

Universal Build Method