I sometimes think I should post more on communities I would like to see more activity on. Im not the biggest build guy but I feel I build better than I play. My maine is a scitorp and I want to explain why I use destructible torps.
So a little background but if you looked at torp guides or reddit comments around destructible torps. Or convo in game. You will see in general they are not recommended. Now that is understandable because for general torp builds or for adding a torp to the front of a energy build. They will not work well. This is primarily because destructible torps fly on their own and home in on the target but do not have a speed to overtake most enemies. You will hear about them being destructible as an issue but they are not so easy to destroy, especially if you have some of the abilities that make them faster and tougher, and anything that destroys them will generally be damage that would otherwise go to you or your allies. So the destructible part is not so bad. You will also hear about how they have an advantage because normal torps can have their target destroyed after launch but before they hit. Wasting them. Whereas torgetable torps will find a new target. This is true but because of their slow homing it kinda does the same thing but on the backend. At the end of a thing or when you change maps any torps in flight will be lost.
Ok so maybe now you are thinking. So when are they good. Well you see targetable torps are some of the most damaging in game and they can hit targets that are stationary or slow. Now normally only a few type of targets like structures, some borg, and other giant slow moving ships. Its not the easiest argument but I can see an argument that there are enough of these to make them worth it right there but it is a tough position to defend. Such things are not uncommon and tend to be near the end of the combat when all the ones that could not catch the faster ships can retarget on them allowing for bunch of strong hits on the games big damage sponges.
There is another thing though. Gravity well. Gravity well makes all ships practically stationary and the torps have no problem hitting them. Even for non gravity well ships the fact gravity well is a common thing for your teammates to use that it would boost the use as mentioned above and there are a few other abilities that do something similar although none as strong as gravity well. So just do the existence of gravity well having a destructible on a ship is not totally crazy. Heck even without it the damage sponges. A ship that specializes in gravity wells though with traits that support it. Then destructible torps are from what I see. Best in slot.
Ok so im not a numbers guy on the level of odin knight. I mostly did my build from tooltip and feel from runs. I did however start parsing and actually it aligned pretty well with tooltips but did give me a bit better direction on edge cases and got me to think more about how things worked.
So first I want to go through the torps damage. Not in terms of damage per second but in terms of damage per salvo. I will explain later why big hits matter vs dps for torps and keep in mind this is unbuffed. As a sci torp I rather use sci and intel abilities (for spore infused anomalies) over tac. I should note I have looked at using torp enhancing boff abilities but until they allow you to choose what torp gets the buff its not advantageous in at least my torp build.
vadwar cluster tricobalt - this is the highest damage one hit torp. Like the other cluster it can't be enhanced and they should not be used together. There is a strange second type of global torp cooldown with clusters. I have heard its something about the same torps but I don't really get what that means but the two clusters when used in conjunction will force a higher global cooldown that can't be reduced. When used singly their cooldown reduces just fine. In addition they seem to not interfere with other torps firing so they can fire with almost no time between it and a normal torp. Also all cluster drop mines at their point of contact which I believe has to be enhanced with mine consoles if you want to. I don't. The damage on this torp can easily compare with the damage of the highest damage normal torps at level one at the least. This makes their high cooldown no worse than the boff ability cooldown when reduced. So im saying its like firing a high damage enhanced torp as far as its damage goes when it hits. Its theoretically great torp for flyover builds that look to charge enemies and blow their shields off and then have a rear torp that activates as soon as they pass.
breen transphasic cluster - most of what is written above applies to it. The main difference is it does less damage but more shield bleedthrough. Torp damage is greatly diminished by shields and most all torp builds have to look for a way to get rid of shields to be effective. Transphasics generally are for builds that don't want to get rid of the shields in some other manner (especially popular in ships that can fire torps while cloaked). The breens damage, depending how you look at it, is about 20% less than a vadwar or conversly it needs to do about 25% more damage to do as much as a vadwarr. Transhpasics do double the damage penetration of standard torps though. So against shileded targets the breen will do much more damage than the vadwar.
Bio neural warhead - this is the next most damaging torp but it is a special case. It actually moves slower than other destructible torps so is even harder to hit its target. This is kinda a good thing though as it fires an antiproton beam at random target within a massive 7 kilometers. To boot it will fire at targets as far as 15 kilometers away (it actually won't fire when withing 3 kilometers of a target I think). So if you have played the game you might realize something. Thats right this torp is kinda a hidden pet. I don't think it can compete with the unbuffed damaged of a hanger pet squadron but if you have a pet build its a nice addition. It still does more damage per salvo than any other torp other than the cluster ones and as I said I will get into why that is useful later. It should be noted its cooldown can't be reduced and given how high it is. It again is more akin to a hanger slot (although those cooldowns can be reduced)
Romulan hyper plasma - thats right. This gimmicky little rep torp does more damage than any other torp outside the BNW or cluster torps. There is a caveat though. If all three of its salvo torps hit and if the plasma burns for long enough. If the plasma burns for the whole 15 seconds its not even close. Now most players will laugh at this point at the thought of enemies lasting that long but again. Remember the damage sponges. Also it only takes 4 or 5 seconds to equal or exceed the highest damaging other torps and less if you are upping its damage enough. I think for mine its more like 2 or 3. There is another factor for this torp though. One that to me makes it the best torp for any player using more than one torp to slot. That is its effect on cooldown reduction. Its salvo of three torpedoes procs all torp cooldown three times. So it reduces the effect three fold over other torps. Its 8 second cooldown is only 5 with ceaseless momentum but its actually better to go rng with the projectile weapons officer doffs. puting the max 3 at purple level allows for 3 rolls of the die 3 times. so 9 times you get the roll to see if its 20% chance off reducing cooldown by 5 sec happens. If one triggers out of them its cooldown reduces to 3 seconds which your aweful unlucky if it does not happen and two triggers are very likely to happen bringing it down to global cooldown (there is a thing on firing animations such that you sorta need at least two torps to really hit global). The main reason to have ceaseless momentum is for the damage buff and to smooth out an unlucky string of rng at that point. Lastly a few abilities trigger on hit and this one again gives 3 for one on that.
temporal disruption device - This can out dps a rom hyper plas if its plasma burn procs don't for for enough seconds. For normal torps one of the heaviest hitters, a highly exotic damage buffed particle emmisions plasma torpedo, will only out damage it by a bit. It has a pretty low cooldown for what it is and its cooldown can be reduced.
As far as I can tell any other destructible torps that are not from a buff are just not in a league to use but all that is really left is basic tricobalts and basic torps of all flavors tend to not perform as well.
Ok so now I will explain why damge per salvo is important when damage per second is what one generally ultimately wants. This is because to increase damage per second for torpedos you are lookint to reduce their cooldowns. I mentioned them in talking about the romulan hyper plas but any torp build generally wants to get down to the standard global cooldown which is ??? honestly I see all sorts of things and its hard to tell during combat. especially since torp firings is goofy and may not even work right on autofire. certainly the gui shows all sorts of delays and misfires. I believe technically its 1.5 and 1 if you have the console that reduces it but I have heard its actually 2.5 and 2 because of animations but I have also heard the animations are not an issue if you have more than one torp. I think the 1.5 and 1 seems right for my multitorp build. I do have the reduction console so it should be 1sec and I will base my further discussion assume cooldowns on torps can go down to 1 second. Ok so here is the thing about cooldowns and cooldown reduction. a torp that does not do enough damage may not be useful as only a cooldown reduction tool. So lets take the case of 4 8 second torps with ceaseless momentum. ceaseless momentum reduces cooldown by 1 second for every torp fired. So the first torp fires and its cooldown immediately goes down to 7 seconds. with a 1 second passes for the global cooldown and then the scond torp fires reducing remaining time on the first torp to 5 seconds (2 reductions and one passing second) and the second goes to 7. on the third the first is now 3, the second is 5 and the third is 7. the forth fires making the first 1, second 3, third 5, and fourth 7. Another second passes and it starts all over. great. here is the thing. Lets take a hypothetical massive difference in damage. the first does 50k, the second 25k, the third 10k, and the forth 1k. ok so you get 86k damage in 4 seconds. but if you replaced the 1k torp with one that does 100k damage and has a cooldown that could only be reduced to 15 seconds. well then you would get 85k every 6 seconds mostly but every three rounds you would get 100k damage. split among the rounds adds 33k damage bout. so its 118k damage over 6 seconds vs 86k damage in 4 seconds. Which is actually still better being 138k per 6 seconds. Now though what happens if instead of losing that one torp you just add on a big hitting torp that will only come into play when it can but won't actually lose you any cooldown reduction. This is exactly what I have. With 3 purple torp officer doffs and ceaseless momentum I have the 8 second pep and 8 second rom hyper plas going pretty much going minimum cooldown outside of some very unlucky rng. I still have two more fron weapon slots. I have the vadwar which does about 3x the damage of the hyperplas even if the plasma goes the full 15 seconds. Its cooldown is 45 seconds but with all the cooldown reduction of the other two it easily goes down to 15 and often lower. If it fires it just takes up the 1 second of another torp firing but at 3x the power and the others will continue to fire merrily while it goes on its long cooldown. I still have another slot though so I put in the BNW which does 2x the other torps but while its ungodly 1min cooldown can't be reduced it does not matter. Because its just using up the one second global torp firing slot and it will do 2x the damage. I should mention again im not a math guy and these percentages and multipliers are super loose but I stand by them as being close enough for a general explanation. In the end when only considering torps you essentially want to get a lineup of torps that will get you to global cooldown with a line of high damaging torps that are hopefully close in damage (I mentioned the system being a bit funky with semingly torp misfiring and if torp damage varies on the cooldown set you might get the misfire on a high damage torp as it preferences your lower damage one). Once you have that though. If you have open slots left it makes a lot of sense to put in a high damage torp and get some gravy. In my case I have the torps setup to autofire vadwarr, then BNW, then PEP, then rom hyper plas. Now one thing about the wierd misfire thing is im not sure it matters on which goes first between the hyperplas and PEP. kinda 6 of one half dozen of the other. If the torps always fired perfectly I would likely put the hyperplas first mainly due to the comment I made about on hit effects along with wanting to spark cooldown on the vadwar as often as possible. Also the BNW will fire before the vadwar at the start at 15km but by the time you get to 10 the one second will have passed at the vadwar will fire right away (honestly may not even matter because of the wierd clusters seem to ignore other torps cooldown thing). Thats it. I wonder if anyone in the fediverse will see this.