3 suggestions for your perusal
-Burst mode: empties the particle accelerator over time rather than all at once (short burst of small damage packets, maybe count of shots tied to damage multiplier?)
-Short range CHARGED particle mode: does not nuetralize the particle shot as it leave the barrel (~shorter range, but has a very slim shotgun effect with much more EMP effect)
-Mute button. I love the mod and would use them even more if I could mute my charged accelerators... that hum gets old very fast.

I'm tossing that out as an additional possibility for the lag spikes being found. Also, reason why I introduced gargantuan reactors. Less buffs sending power, less lag spikes. one GCR will usually be less lag than 4 LCRs. This is mostly a 1-2 fps boost for a well layed out ship. If you have 80 PDs, that could be a 5-10 boost. Swapping out 2 PDs for 1 Beam PD when you have about 100 is closer to a 30 fps gain, at least on my computer

too many point defense units will cause horrible lag. Its why I made beam point defense units and placed them inside the mod.

@Nytemare3701 I'm not getting any FPS drops. Tested with this mod and Azic's Crewed Power Distribution on some of the larger built-in ships.
Can you provide a mod list and/or a save file? It could be some unexpected interaction between the mods.

I'll take a look at the performance issues. I'll also work on adding some underlying structure to the sprites.

This seems to be having some performance issues on the newer updates. Simply placing one on a larger ship tanks my FPS, and placing two is enough to go to slideshow mode. I removed almost all my mods to troubleshoot, and confirmed that it's the cannons. (For reference, the only items left on the ship were some shields, and Azic's distributed power reactors/engines to remove the need to pathfind power crews around.)

Not sure about updates, But is there any way to make it so it doesn't look like a piece of the ship is just floating? Like would it be possible to have an interior loop or something?

Not planning to add the ability for crew to cross, at least not in the base mod. This mod is designed around the idea of a pure-energy railgun, so I'm sticking to vanilla railgun balancing where I can.

can you add the ability for crew to cross to the other side so bigger set ups can be used

having a turret one like in your future plans would be epic

Thank you!

Currently it's a 2:1 ratio. 2 PAC accelerators is equivalent to 1 railgun accelerator. So in your example, a PAC with 8 total accelerators will perform roughly equivalent to a railgun with 4 accelerators.

How powerful is this, when compared to railguns? For example, let's say I have a railgun with 8 accelerators and a PAC with 2 accelerators per side (8 total. What will the ratio of total damage/penetration/fire rate between them?

Currently not planning to add more overpowered version of particle cannons. I prefer to stick close to vanilla balancing.

I liked this mod, but can you please add a version that would give several times more damage and penetration or rate of fire, so that the modification could compete with other modifications that add extremely powerful weapons, compared to the vanilla game?

Yeah

So that's why copying the working half into a new ship file and doing the symmetry mirror would not cause an issue?

Thanks for reporting. It was an issue with this mod - the code that tracks component coordinates had an incorrect sign in one of the rotation-flip combos, resulting in the controller thinking that there are more than one controller in the loop.
Should be fixed in mod v1.3.1. Apologies for the inconvenience!

I think I found the issue. Testing a fix now.

I don't quite understand how the arc should appear? I was able to make a contour, it seems to work, but the blue beam to shoot appears if I manually replenish supplies at the ship. I waited for a minute in 8x accelerated mode, and the blue beam still did not appear.

And I've tested with the hyper parts and can not recreate the non-firing. I think we will need that ship file

I've built a test ship with the normal parts and its firing.

First glance at the files, I'm not seeing why this and CP are not playing nice. My addy is the same on discord if you want to work together in figuring out what is going on here. I'm going to start up cosmoteer and build some test ships

Found it. Crewed Power Distribution causes the clockwise launcher not to receive power, even when the mod isn't actually being used, only enabled.

In the process of trying to get you a vanilla save of it, I found that it appears to be another mod interfering. I'll start adding them back one at a time until it breaks again.

That's weird. I haven't encountered issues with forming a clockwise loop.
If you have a ship save file, I can take a look and see where it's breaking.

For some reason, only counterclockwise loops will output to a launcher. On clockwise loops, the controller has the red box error, despite the loop charging fine. Weirdly, the launcher does not get the red box that it would if the controller was oriented wrong, it just doesn't get the blue glow from being part of the loop.

You have to set the Controller to continuous charging to enable the "Fire at Will" Funtion of the Launcher. This contradicts the Description of how the charging is supposed to work: The Controller start to charge at 2x the effective Range of the whole System and the Laucher fires when the Target is in Range and charging is complete. And there is no Toggle for overcharging with the Hyper-accelerators. It only works with doing it manually.

Thank you. I managed to get it to work. I think I had one of the settings wrong or something.

What's your launcher fire setting? And what's your controller charging mode? Those two together determine how the PAC behaves.
Note that if the launcher is set to "Fire At Target", PAC will only charge if you actually target a part.
And in manual control, you'll need to use the "Always Charge" mode on the controller.

Is there a way to get these to fire when they have a target? I have to set all of them to fire continuously every time I get in a fight, then I have to turn it off to keep them from firing indefinitely.

You should be able to change the PAC controller to "Always Charge" mode, so that it will be ready to fire when manually controlled.

Is this thing fireable in manual control mode? I cant seem to get it to work without whirring the chamber up constnatly

I like that it's not stronger than the vanilla railgun. It should be, since it only uses power, when vanilla also requires ammo infrastructure. Maybe it is too weak, I don't know yet, but the point still stands.

Yeah I know the particle accelerators from this mod is weaker than Railguns. This originally started more as a proof of concept mod. The balancing was done this way because I don't like the trend I see, that being mods have to be more powerful than vanilla options to gain any traction.
That said, I understand the circular PACs are in an awkward spot right now. I have some ideas I'm going to be experimenting with and see if they will work to make circular PACs feel more... different .

going to be very honest and give some constructive criticism.

i love the concept of using the real world idea of how particle accelerators work. However your mod has some serious mechanics issues that actually make it worse than vanilla.

i couldn't use more than 4 hyper accelerator pieces without creating a exhaustively micromanaged power supply system to keep the accelerators from losing power and exploding. once you hit around 8 the amount of resources, micromanagement and power generators, needed for the loop is completely absurd. Beyond that its pretty much impossible unless you have dedicated reactors for every tiny segment and you micromanage it harder than an entire battleship in the game.

This is a serious issue as you cant actually boost the actual shot past about 228% without using utterly ridiculous numbers of standard accelerators. And even reaching that is enormously difficult. A ship that large simply has no point in the game as its waaaaaaayyyyyyy to much work as the bigger a ship gets the harder it gets to make function properly plus the expense for the sole purpose of having this weapon is just pointless.

All in all there is literally no reason to use this mod as its actually a hefty downgrade from the vanilla railgun and PAC cannon. My advice is that with this mod the same percentage increase in power or close to needs to be reasonably achievable. It the moment simply getting close is not even possible and the increase possible takes an exhaustive amount of work. Therefore the mod is actually a very weak and inferior version of something in the game already that honestly has no purpose because whats already there outperforms it in every possible way. The shot types are simply not enough to justify using up so much space and so many resources for them when vanilla weapons can do the exact same job for FAR less resources and actually be more effective because they take up so much less in terms of materials, power, and space.

@tobkipk I'm not seeing any issues with pac range though. As far as I can tell they are firing as they should when the enemy is in range.
If it's still not working for you, send me a save so I can recreate the issue and investigate further.

Found and fixed an issue where if the pac bolt moves too fast, it would disappear early because of a bad interaction with tick rate in the game.

It should be firing within 600m range. I'll investigate.

So, my pac is at 1893% at for some reason its only firing with 300m range. maybe I did something wrong but shouldn it fire with max range now?

That's... weird. I haven't been getting crashes when I test this mod, so for now that sounds like a PC issue. Let me know if you are getting consistent crashes though.

first the screen froze for 2 min the rebooted itself

i was playing around with this and my pc rebooted

ooh this looks fun

Fixed crashes on cosmoteer 0.23. Mod should work now.

Hey sorry for the delay, I just got back from vacation and will work on making the mod compatible with 0.23 soon.

@Tirak2Narak weird, mounting accelerators should not decrease the range of the PAC, and I have not received any other reports of range unexpectedly decreasing. I'll poke around while I do the 0.23 compatibility update.
If the problem persists, send me a ship design showing this bug and I'll have a better chance figuring out what's wrong.

Will this mod be updated to accommodate the late June update that added crew construction? As it stands, like many mods, it just crashes the game when trying to use it now. One of the issues seems to be that several base-game assets were renamed, resulting in failed calls from mods.

Hello,

is it intended that a length of more than 30 accelerators leads to diminishing returns in the range? Or is there possibly a formula error here and amounts go negative?
Otherwise I would guess that it is due to another mod.
It is a bit surprising that with more game speed (already noticeable from x2) the range varies a lot from a larger amount of accelerators and at the same time more accelerators (30+) make the range decrease drastically (We are talking about practically smooching the enemy here).

Otherwise: Cool idea, I like it!