Indeed. You know how Federation worlds use Enormous Blaster Turrets and Auroran worlds use the 400mm railgun turret. Well, I'm trying to make a station with a beam weapon instead. Something isn't quite right. It'll fire alright (I was actually afraid it might crash the game or something), but the range is about 1 pixel, so that it only hurts if you fly right over the spob. Also, it flickers graphics. One time it was going from a Hellhound missile to a railgun shot and back again, most odd. Dunno where it was getting that from.

Just curious if there's some way to make it work, or if I'm wasting my time.

Oh, and hi all you who remember me.

While I suppose a workaround might be possible, it hasn't ever been supported. As the Nova Bible says:

QUOTE

Stellars can have a single projectile or missile type weapon, with unlimited ammunition (don't put the ID of a beam or PD weapon here or bad things will happen).

A workaround is certainly possible, but this one's resource-intensive. It only uses one mïsn resource and one shïp resource, but it also uses up one precious active mission (out of a max of 16 concurrent missions).

Make a ship that is invisible (just make the sprite a single black pixel; I've done this and it seems to work fine) and untargetable, give it the beam weapon you want. Then make an invisible mission that the player has at the appropriate time (whenever the stellar is alive and visible) that places said ship in the proper system at the proper nav default to make it appear over said planet (so nav default 1 if it's the first stellar in the system, 2 if it's second, etc.). If the planet can be destroyed, set its OnDestroy/OnDominate bit to abort the mission that spawns the ship and OnRelease/OnRegenerate to start it again.

Limitations: You won't get the typical spöb behavior in that if a player manages to get landing clearance (either by bribe or mission), the planet will still shoot at them. Also, like I said, a player can only have 16 missions active at once, so even one permanent hidden mission can be a major restriction.

I'll keep mulling over other possible workarounds, but given that there's really no way to "trick" Nova into using beams (e.g. by submunitions), I'm not seeing anything else at the moment.

Or use a sprite weapon that looks like a beam weapon...

I considered that too, but I believe that general consensus on that matter is that it looks… well, silly. IIRC, Qaanol or some other Nova demi-god tried it out and got nothing but unsatisfactory results.