overcharge-round

Rail Capacitor

What it is

A weapon-category artifact that runs on a repeating timer. Every interval, one randomly chosen weapon on the ship is empowered so that its next shot deals a damage multiplier instead of normal damage. Only a single shot is empowered per proc — once that shot is fired, the weapon returns to baseline damage until the next proc. Higher tiers shorten the interval between procs and raise the damage multiplier applied to the empowered shot.

Identity

Field	Value
Display name	Rail Capacitor
Category	weapon
Icon	⚡
Primary color	ffcc00
Secondary color	cc8800
Bright/highlight color	ffee66
Damage tag	none (type-agnostic)

Per-tier values

The artifact has four authored tiers, indexed uncommon → rare → epic → legendary. A fifth common tier is prepended at runtime and shares the uncommon values row; the common-vs-uncommon difference comes from the artifact-wide flat passive bonus, not from this table.

Rarity	Interval between procs (s)	Damage multiplier on empowered shot (×)	Empowered shots per proc
Common	8	5.0	1
Uncommon	8	5.0	1
Rare	6	6.0	1
Epic	5	8.0	1
Legendary	3	12.0	1

Effect

Trigger: repeating timer set to the tiered interval. The first proc fires when the timer first elapses after the artifact is granted; subsequent procs fire every interval thereafter for the rest of the run.

A banner shows on proc. No conditions gate the trigger — every interval tick fires it.

Actions, in order:

Step	Action	Effect
1	Empower a random weapon	Picks one of the ship’s currently equipped weapons uniformly at random and tags it so its next shot deals the tiered damage multiplier instead of normal damage. The tag also records that exactly one shot is empowered.
2	Flash artifact icon	Flashes the artifact’s HUD icon to signal the proc.

The empowered weapon is selected at proc time, not at run start, so each proc can land on a different weapon. If the ship has no equipped weapons at the moment of the proc, the empower step does nothing for that interval; the timer continues and tries again at the next interval.

Stacking rules

Rule	Behavior
Empowered shots per proc	Exactly 1 — the empowerment is consumed by the first shot the chosen weapon fires after the proc.
Stale empowerment between procs	If the chosen weapon does not fire before the next proc, the existing empowerment tag is overwritten by whatever the next proc picks. The new proc’s multiplier and shot count fully replace the previous values rather than adding to them.
Multiple weapons	Only one weapon is empowered per proc. The other weapons fire at normal damage during the same proc cycle.
Cross-artifact stacking	The empowerment is stored as a per-weapon tag, so other artifacts that also empower a weapon’s next shot will overwrite this artifact’s empowerment if they land on the same weapon between Rail Capacitor’s proc and the weapon’s next shot.
Same artifact, multiple copies	Each copy of the artifact runs its own independent timer with its own interval and multiplier. If two copies proc on the same weapon back-to-back, only the most recent proc’s tag is active on that weapon’s next shot.

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Summary: Rail Capacitor is a timer-triggered weapon-empower artifact. On an 8 → 3 second interval (by tier), it picks one random equipped weapon and tags its next shot to deal a 5× → 12× damage multiplier. Exactly one shot per proc is empowered; if the weapon doesn’t fire before the next proc, the tag is overwritten rather than queued. Common tier reuses the uncommon values row per the shared-tier convention.

EXTRACT-CANDIDATE flags:

• The “4 authored tiers + 1 runtime-prepended common tier sharing the uncommon values row, with the common-vs-uncommon difference coming from an artifact-wide flat passive bonus” rule is shared across every artifact and belongs on the artifacts roll-up page.
• The FLAT_BONUS_PCT_BY_TIER ramp (10 → 50 across common → legendary) referenced in _types.ts is engine-wide and belongs on the artifacts overview / authoring guide.
• The empower_weapon action with target: 'random' | 'slot_0' | 'all' selection modes and the per-weapon _empowerMult / _empowerShots tag mechanism is a generic effect-engine concept; canonical definition belongs on a combat or effect-engine page.
• The overwrite-on-re-empower semantics (a fresh tag fully replaces a stale one, rather than stacking or queueing) is a shared property of the empower_weapon action and belongs on the same canonical page as the action itself.
• The trigger: { type: 'timer', timerRepeat: true } mechanism and the $paramName placeholder substitution for per-tier values are shared primitives used by many artifacts — canonical reference belongs on the artifact authoring guide.
• The flash_artifact action type is shared across many artifacts — canonical reference belongs on the artifact authoring guide.
• The color-palette schema (primary / secondary / bright) is shared across all artifacts and belongs on the roll-up, with per-entity pages only listing the values.
• The showBanner: true / banner-on-proc behavior is shared across many artifacts and belongs on the artifacts roll-up.