I've found them to be unnecessary so far...but I haven't traveled very far yet. The Phase Beam with upgrades has been doing the job. Do you think I'll need them later on?

Yep, I also use the mining laser. Got a multi tool with 24 slots, installed all upgrades for the mining laser (including combat) and the grenade launcher with about half the upgrades. That's when my slots were full, so I didn't even have space for the photon/plasma cannon anymore.

But fully upgraded, the mining laser takes out a walker sentinel in about 5 seconds, so it's good enough. :)

One question btw: For everything I've got, I only found 3 upgrades (Sigma, Tau and Theta). Only for the mining laser combat upgrade, I found a fourth level upgrade, which is called Omega.

Has anyone found more Omega upgrades (most importantly, is there one for the ship's hyper drive? I must have collected hundreds of blueprints by now without coming across anything new in hours, so I wonder if this is a one time thing.

Sorry, I meant Photon Canons vs Phase Beam on the ship. I'll edit my original post.

Oh, I see, I thought of the multi tool because you mentioned mining. As for the ship, I usually use the photon cannon. The beam is very convenient if you are answering distress calls and you want to make sure that you hit the enemy ship and not the freighter behind it. Other than that, I like the photon cannon (I actually like the fact that you have to lead target enemies). Besides, it's pre-installed on all ships, so it's not optional anyway and it doesn't need to be charged.

Matter of taste I guess.

BTW, if anyone knows the answer to my question about Omega upgrades from above, would till be interested.

I use photon cannons since they don't need to be 'reloaded.' After upgrades, they pack a wallop too. Personal choice, ultimately. Someday i might opt for the beams.

Photon Canons, never use the beams. Same reason they don't have to be reloaded.

Photon Cannons, infinite ammo

I really like the beams. They`re like `take that sustained light of death, pirate!` And they don`t last long. Far better tracking too. Once on target they make those pirates pay. They never survive a second pass.

They do have a small recharge time though, but I might just need to upgrade.

I never use the beam, as I find a photon cannon with even a couple of upgrades can burn through any attacker in a single pass. Plus - of course - the no reloading issue.

Photons mostly.

I heard that Omegas tend to be on extreme planets? not sure.

I prefer the photon cannons over the beams for the same reason -- no reloading. Curiously it keeps telling you they need to be reloaded. One of the feature-bugs that make this game special ( semi-joking ). There is no way to reload the photon cannon. They pack more of a wallop on my current ship than the beams. I have the cannons a bit more upgraded however which explains things. They also have a lot more range.

I use the beams too :) Had a flitter-type ship with only the beams eventually. And a lot of chained beam upgrades. Till the point where it took a good 7-8 seconds to overheat, and less than a second to burn a hole in the pirate ships. It's probably not more powerful than a fully upgraded photon cannon, and the range is maybe a bit shorter. But it's still a faster shot than the photon cannons, thanks to the inconsistent lock-on thing.

Specially if you get the pulse-engine upgrades, since then you can turn the ship and fire earlier. Or pursue and fire at the ship while it's turning around and so on. So you can zap the ship before it can fire at you. And then dodge incoming fire. Unlike with the photon-cannons, where you will miss until the other ship is turning against you. And you will always trade fire no matter how weak the other ship is, etc. Don't think anyone has found more than the two multitool omega upgrades after all. So probably no omega warp drive, unfortunately. :(

I hate to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but with the loss of portals and even better Omega drives (which I`ve never seen either), I could swear they were doing their level best on slowing down the Player from getting too far too fast in the game.

I wonder why?

Who knows at this point. Sort of hate to be rasping on this, but other games I've played before and after streamlining by Sony (to not be guessing completely, and so on) sometimes had level progress slowed. Or you would get more ranks and bling (see: duty calls parody). After for example the gameplay was made a bit easier, and progress usually would go forward very quickly for all players. So they'd compensate for that.. pretty straight forward, once you start sawing on one of the table legs.

Was a very simple thing specifically. In the first version leveling up was a sort of extended tutorial, just intended to make sure that you almost wouldn't gain ranks until you figured out how to play. And then once you did that, you would gain some new unlock, and be able to continue with that. And do the same thing for other classes, and so on.

So the ranking wasn't the point, it was just a way to stop you from randomly getting more unlocks after shooting the same weapon over and over again. And rewarding you with more advanced playing options for the class you really liked. Outside of that there'd be ranking and so on on multiplayer, but not a rank increase. So you would basically max out the rank fairly quickly. But in return all those ranks you would get would be meaningful. And the highest rank soliders would likely know what they were doing, and a team could predict a little bit how the other players would play based on rank.

This was a huge problem for a few people. So the unlock system was "revamped" to be more pointless like in Call of Duty. And a long range of pointless star unlocks were added. To I suppose compensate for how they'd made the actual gameplay completely pointless and boring in the earlier pass, when a system the dev had been testing internally was scrapped because it .. wasn't "1 to 1". It probably means something, but I'm not really sure what. It wasn't snappy enough. Things like that.

So that would of course fit with making the grind in NMS a little bit longer, adding more ranks (every four seconds at the beginning). And that this becomes necessary after resources have been made more plentiful, you meet aliens on every corner, get a blueprint every time you check your email, and things like that.

In the same way, if it's really easy to build everything because of the amount of resources, that you don't have to hitchhike through the galactic reperbahn, or something like that, then the difficulty isn't finding the resources you need. Before celebrating your luck, putting the omnium into the reactor, and being on your way. But instead the challenge has to be collecting large enough piles of stuff. You need to add an appropriate challenge to it. So that's the only thing left, once everything in the actual game is available to you by raching your hand outside the ship's canopy.

And if it turns out that they at some point removed punishment conditions and possible "get stranded until you repair your ship again or find a new one", along with making the planets in general more friendly, and closer to each other, to make sure no planning or any sort of anything would be required. Then it would make sense that you would have to adjust how fast you "progress" through the galaxy.

Because if you follow the red line, the game would be over in a couple of days. So tweaking that way would make a lot of sense. .. or, it'd be logical, at least. Once you've started sawing on one table-leg, like mentioned.

But hey - the overprivileged and stunted children of the Sony execs need a job too, don't they?

(..very sorry. I'll be limiting the number of Sony rants to maximum one per week from now on).

Another reason I'm partial to using the photon cannons, is being a veteran of Freespace 1 and 2, and Tachyon: The Fringe, I'm really used to using the "Leading Target" indicator