Energy Weapons

Comparison

Energy Weapons Chart

Name	Price	Power	Range	Output	Wavelength	Estimated Average Power	Estimated DPS (MJ/s)	Other
Microwave	70	50	600	45	1000	50	45	Thermal and EMP damage
CL-150	150	150	8000	125	490	150	125	Thermal
Point Defense Microwave	180	50	600	45	1000	50	45	Self targeting, Thermal/EMP
CL-200AP	220	220	8000	200	650	154	80	Gimbal(36d), 4 shots per second, Thermal/Kinetic
CL-600P	3200	660	8000	600	540	396	120	2 shots per second, Thermal/Kinetic

The microwave emitter can sort of break rocks, and is excellent for disrupting other ships while you fill them full of holes with your railgun. The CL-150 is the most weapony of these guns, but its about half the damage of the starting mass driver. The mining lasers ARE, however, very good at shooting rocks. i'd choose the CL-200AP for rock shooting purposes due to the gimbal.

Microwaves

• Deliver a wide beam of 1cm-wavelength (microwave) radiation.
• Deal a mix of EMP damage and thermal (that is, energy) damage.
• The "water resonance" tuning affects the damage mix - higher water resonance means more thermal and less EMP. Thermal damage is good for melting asteroids, whereas EMP damage is useless for them. EMP damage can disable enemy ships, unless they have EMP shielding.
• Tuning the power increases the beam spread. Specifically, it gets linearly wider with increasing power. As a result, the math works out in such a way that increasing power will only increase the actual DPS when the entire cone intersects with the enemy - otherwise it will decrease DPS. So for all but the shortest-distance combat engagements, uptuning microwave power is of questionable use. For asteroid mining, however, it's generally fine.

Lasers

• There are two kinds of lasers - continuous-wave and pulse. The former deal pure thermal damage, the latter deal a mix of thermal and kinetic (the latter due to ablation from high-energy pulses).
• For pulse lasers, uptuning pulse frequency makes each pulse higher-energy, and therefore produce more ablation - but that means delivering less heat. Mechanically, this changes the damage mix - higher frequency means more thermal, lower frequency means more kinetic. Both of the currently existing pulse lasers have a 50kinetic/50thermal mix by default, and tunable from 100/0 to 25/75.
• For mining, the time-to-asteroid-destruction doesn't depend on the damage mix. However, thermal damage is preferable because it delivers less momentum, resulting in less scattering of the chunks.
• For combat, both thermal and kinetic damage are useful in different ways.
• Uptuning power straightforwardly increases output power and hence DPS, at the cost of uptuned lasers experiencing wear during usage (since 0.615.1). For this reason, CL-600P is notable in that it's very powerful even without uptuning, and that way one doesn't need to worry about wear.