Ion Beam Prism

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Redirects the angles of incoming ion beams, aiming them at enemy ships or other Ion Beam Prisms.

The Ion Beam Prism is a part that can be placed on ships and stations. It is used in combination with IonIcon.pngIon Beam EmitterIon Beam Emitters in order to redirect and amplify the output beam. Multiple Ion Beam Emitters can be aimed into a single prism in order to combine their damage, and prisms can even be aimed at each other for the same purpose. However, it is important to note that there is a damage falloff for each consecutive beam. Also note that the prism resets the ion's range but not the damage, meaning that all merged beams deal less damage than calculated due to merge distance.

An incredibly intricate Ion Beam Prism example using several dozen prisms converging into a single beam.
A more intricate example of Ion Beam Prism usage, as seen on the Cabal of Sol's Apotheosis.

Basic Strategy

You should try to follow a 2:1 ratio when combining Ion Beams. Beams of differing strength should not be combined as it will (always?) lead to the more powerful beam being the "2nd" beam and being reduced by 25% (more beams will never make it deal less damage than fewer beams). Having more damage than the target hp isn't optimal because the extra damage will be wasted.

All in all this means you shouldn't systematically focus all of your beams into a single output. you shouldn't always combine all your beams into a single output.

Beam strength

The beam strength is an important metric when constructing an Ion Beam setup. The beam strengths in this page are in percentages where 100% is the damage of one Ion Beam Emitter.

Formula for total damage when combining n beams using one prism:

Note, when n -> ∞ meaning when the number of combined beams of same strength approaches infinity, the strength output approaches 4x the input of a single input beam.

Beam strength for a binary tree with n nodes or layers:



This just basically means that when you have 2^n beams connected in the optimal 2:1 configuration, that will be the damage output. Usually it is best to have as many output beams as possible since it preserves damage but it also lessens the ability to focus the damage.

Damage with different combining ratios
n of beams 2:1 4:1
2 175% n/a
4 306.25% 273.44%
16 937.89% 747.68%
Damage comparison between 2:1 (left) and 4:1 (right) beam combining with 16 beams

Trivia

  • Ion Beam Prisms have the highest penetration resistance of any part in the game - greater than even a Large Shield Generator. The resistance is great enough to stop a shot from a Railgun as large as the entire building grid.