Ion Recharger

"The Ion Recharger allows Energy weapons to deal more damage to shields, at the cost of reduced damage to armor."

General
The Ion Recharger is the base counterpart of the Ion Modulator.

Advantages
Ion Rechargers vastly improve the effectiveness of your weapons against shields, preventing enemies from recharging their shields in combat.

Like the ship version, Ion Rechargers are most efficient at level I.

Disadvantages
Ion Rechargers, like Focused Apertures, take up a lot of mass - almost equal to the percentage increase in shield damage. Therefore, they are only marginally useful even against heavily-shielded targets.

To make things worse, most base attackers have massive armor designed to soak up damage with minimal repair time and XP. This means that Ion Rechargers can actually harm your damage output due to their penalty to health damage.

Trivia

 * Ion Recharger had its health damage stat changed from -13% to -12% at some point in time.
 * The equipping time of all old blueprint items for bases was reduced by half during the May 2020 update.