A collection of smaller lasers mounted together on a rotating pod, with a built-in capacitor allowing extremely high burst damage vs fighters and missiles.
The Paladin is a military grade PD system that is usually only deployed on capital ships due to its high production and flux costs. Can detect and destroy incoming strike weapons and enemy fighters that have penetrated the capital ship's defensive escort screen.
A combination of an autonomous AI core for targeting and five separate carbon dioxide lasers make this weapon exceptionally effective in point defense. A dedicated rotator power supply makes target tracking almost instantaneous. The prohibitive energy requirement usually means that the weapon is only activated for seconds at a time, but that is usually enough to deal with any PD threat.
–In-Game Description
Strategies and Synergies[]
New quirk: Creates explosions on impact - 100 points of fragmentation damage (0.9.5a). The implications of this are that missile waves stand no chance against a single Paladin PD system, and fighter attack waves even with flares are also equally terrified by this horrifying point defense weapon.
It can shoot over friendly ships to intercept targets. A large amount of these on various vessels hard counters any fighter or missile-based composition. In addition to being highly effective against missiles and most fighters, its high DPS and middling range let it function quite well as an offensive weapon, especially against raw hull in which it deals hilarious amounts of finisher damage. It requires dedicated kinetic and high explosive blending (in 1:1, or armor-stripper missiles) to be effective at that role, however. HACs/Arbalests in addition to Mortars are never a bad choice.
Like other short-burst, beam lasers, it has above average armor piercing qualities. Paired with its fragmentation damage on impact, Paladins can quickly destroy most lighter ships.
