Rail Driver

"The Rail Driver is a relatively inexpensive Kinetic weapon with fairly long range. It accelerates projectiles with magnetic fields."

General
The Rail Driver is a primitive Kinetic ship weapon that is commonly seen in beginner-level combat.

It fires a small white shell at its target, leaving behind a short trail of blue. Upon impact, it makes a heavy metallic collision sound.

Advantages
Rail Drivers have the longest range out of all beginner weapons, allowing you to kite most other ships at that level. To do so, turn your ships such that the enemy is just within your firing arc, then strafe away from them.

In base attacks, the Rail Driver's long range combined with the range modifier of destroyers and battleships can be used to snipe outside the range of enemy defenses.

Disadvantages
Rail Drivers are very slow, allowing enemies to easily dodge them and enter your minimum range. Destroyers can somewhat overcome this with their innate predictive aiming ability.

Rail Drivers also have rather poor DPS, stay out of range of your enemies to achieve victory.

They are also succeeded by Gauss Drivers, which have more range and firepower.

Trivia

 * The Rail Driver was once called the Railgun.
 * You get one free Harrier Frigate equipped with Rail Driver I x2 at the beginning of the game as part of your first fleet.
 * NPC Longbow Destroyers were once equipped with this weapon instead of Gauss Drivers. The change was made early in closed beta.
 * It has a base counterpart hinted inside the game files in the form of sprite tables and icons. This was likely scrapped.