Surge Beam

"An Energy (Alien) based beam that increases the damage the longer it remains locked on to a target."

Stats
Note 1: Xeno Surge Beam is only available to Altairian ships.

Note 2: Fragment crafting yields a Credit that can be instantly equipped.

General
The Surge Beam is an Altairian Beam Weapon, designed with an Overcharge effect that increases the DPS of the Beam the longer it remains locked on to its target.

It fires a orange-yellow beam with a relatively long duration, similar to the Archer Beam.

The Heavy Surge Beam is a more powerful version, with increased DPS and Mass.

The Xeno Surge Beam is a even more powerful version, with a built in range increase as well as the ability to deal Alien Damage, taking on a green coloration.

Advantages
The Main advantage of the Surge Beam is its overcharge effect. As its DPS increases the longer it remains locked on to its target, this means that focusing fire on a single target will boost the power of this weapon tenfold.

The Surge Beam, being a Beam weapon, is also unblockable and undodgeable, and thus is 100% likely to hit its target as well.

Disadvantages
The Surge Beam is still a beam weapon, and is thus highly susceptible to Squadrons. Its best to equip a single Seeker Missile or Creeper Torpedo in order to ward off squadrons and prevent them from causing too much damage to Cutters.

The Xeno Surge Beam does Alien DPS, and thus has its effectiveness cut in half when fighting Xeno Division Hulls and beyond.

The Surge Beam's range is extremely short, at only 2,000m. This makes this weapon easy to outrange, and thus possible to destroy ships equipped with this weapon before they even get a chance to fire. The Xeno Surge Beam also does not have any range boosting specials, and thus suffers from a larger range penalty than the previous versions.

Trivia

 * The Surge Beam was the first weapon to feature an overcharge effect that increased its DPS.
 * The Surge Beam was originally thought to induce stasis. This was later proven to be false in the release notes.
 * The Surge Beam's colour is initially a dark orange, but it begins to glows brighter and brighter and become a bright yellow as the overcharge takes effect.
 * The update of early August 2018 removed time and resource costs of Surge Beam fragment crafting.
 * The Blueprint for the Xeno Surge Beam was only released once(as of 30 November 2018).
 * The Xeno variant of this weapon is no longer available to Umbra hulls after the late April 2019 update to facilitate the rock-paper-scissors system between T7 factions. Existing items will be replaced by Blight Havoc Cannon in the May 2019 update.