Beam lasers have a shorter optimal range than their hybrid railgun counterparts, but do, as a whole, more damage. Advanced coolant technologies allow beam lasers to keep firing for a long time without overheating. The heaviest lasers, battleship-class tachyon beam lasers, are regarded by many as brutally devastating sniper weapons (although their range is limited) and are often used in fleet sieges.

Pulse lasers have better range than blasters, hybrid weapon from the same class, but do considerably less damage. Anyway, pulse lasers are in favor among skilled pilots because they provide good damage/range ratio. By contrast with beam turrets, pulses fire rapidly several times in a cycle.

We'll be making some adjustments to the rifle ranges in the near future. We're currently testing the Rail Rifle and Combat Rifle internally (the two missing archetypes). Within the assault rifle class the four weapon types will break down as follows:

Assault Rifle (Hybrid - Plasma) - short range
Combat Rifle (Projectile - Autocannon) - short-mid range
Scrambler Rifle (Laser - Pulse) - mid range
Rail Rifle (Hybrid - Railgun) - long range

Keep in mind though that long range for an assault rifle is not equivalent to long range for a sniper rifle, so while they will adhere to existing category definitions don't expect massive differences in the distances between these weapons
A lot of the original assault rifle variants (Breach, Burst, Tactical) were created to fill the gaps these newer weapons will fill and so mightGÇÖve felt out of place (not to mention we just plain made mistakes with some of them). The scrambler rifleGÇÖs optimal range will be increased and weGÇÖll be releasing an iteration of the Tactical Assault Rifle with a smaller clip and much wider hip-fire spread making it less effective in CQC. If that change alone does not prove enough we will walk the damage of the TAR down slowly. No big, sweeping changes this time.

...and weGÇÖll be releasing an iteration of the Tactical Assault Rifle with a smaller clip and much wider hip-fire spread making it less effective in CQC. If that change alone does not prove enough we will walk the damage of the TAR down slowly. No big, sweeping changes this time.