The shooting of the beam and accompanying sound are a bit off. The beam shoots out a bit before the firing sound is played (less than a second but still noticeable). But considering that the Fenris video has a bigger delay than the Aeolus one I guess it happened during the screencapture (or was tweaked in the meantime).
It wasn't actually tweaked since the Fenris video. The sound isn't exactly final - I hacked it together quite quickly to have something to use with the beam effect I was writing. I ran into a few problems showing the charging of the beam cannon, because Nexus' weapons usually don't allow for that and always fire immediately. I had to code around that and needed a proper sound effect to go along with it. So it's not final, it will be tweaked before an eventual alpha/beta release.
I am a bit surprised though that you made the AAA beams able to fire at capships rather than use them as anti-fighter defense.
Just for testing purposes. I don't have any fighters in the game yet and setting up an enemy AI launching fighters just so I can test the visual effects would have meant more work anyway. Both flaks and anti-fighter beams will be classified as anti-fighter weapons (since weapons in Nexus can't fight both fighters AND capitals, unlike Freespace). I may switch out a flak turret for some anti-capital weaponry later on, depending on how balancing goes... but I will preserve it's anti-fighter role, of course.
]And now for something else: How do you plan to handle subsystem targeting? In Nexus the beams (or laser) are for destroying subsystems. Are you going to switch blob turrets and beams out so that beams deal damage and blobs target subsystems (probably doing both hull and system damage)?
I always had the impression, those beams were the actual heavy-hitters, but considering my last playthrough was a few years ago I may be off there. Will have to check the tables to be sure, of course.
For now I don't have a definitive balancing plan. First I want some actual ships and weapons in the game before really caring about damage types and balancing. Right now I'm just sticking to the FS2 damage values and will be seeing how that works out at the end. I most definitely have to increase firing ranges, though, or else those ships may have trouble properly steering in close proximity to each other... especially big ones such as the Orion or Colossus.
/edit:Doh! Seems I misread that last bit of yours. Yeah, beams in Nexus are usually meant for surgical destruction of devices. Not in Freespace, however, and I'm trying to follow Freespace's rules. I still have to playtest, if weapons can damage both the hull and devices as they do in Freespace - if that's possible in Nexus, then I'll go that route, probably creating a few weapons which excel at device destruction along the way to keep things interesting.