Patch basis: 9.0, including the June 2026 weapon rebalance. Written 2026-08-16. Every number in this post that describes a specific weapon comes from your install, not from us — see where the numbers come from for why that is the whole point.
Somebody asked the subreddit on 2 August 2026 what the best site is these days to check 9.0 weapon statistics. That question is the interesting artifact, not the answer. It means the external stat sites people used for years are behind the rebalance, and the players know it.
Copying those stale tables into a new page would just add a sixth stale table. So this page is built the other way round: the raw numbers come out of the in-game Encyclopedia, which is correct for whatever build you are running, and what we supply is the arithmetic nobody does for you.
X4 9.0 weapon time to kill, at a glance
| Situation | Estimated time to kill | What to do about it |
|---|---|---|
| Brawling range, stock uptime, default M-class shield | 2m 37s | This is the baseline case the calculator below defaults to — change one input at a time from here. |
| Full battery focused close, high uptime | 31.7 s | Closing range and holding uptime cuts time to kill far more than any single weapon upgrade does. |
| Sniping a fast interceptor at long range | never (shield regen wins) | At this range and target speed the hit-rate penalty erases your DPS — the fight never ends until you close the distance. |
These are outputs of this site's hit-fraction and time-to-kill model, not values extracted from the game files — the DPS and shield inputs above are illustrative, not your Encyclopedia numbers. Use the calculator below with your own read-outs.
Why the listed DPS is not the number you want
The Encyclopedia entry gives you shield DPS and hull DPS per gun. Three things happen between that figure and the wreck you were hoping for:
- Heat. A weapon that overheats and cools delivers a fraction of its listed damage over a long engagement. At 40% firing uptime, a 1,000 DPS gun is a 400 DPS gun.
- Flight time. Damage you do not land does not exist. Against a target crossing your firing line, projectile speed is worth more than damage per shot, and past a certain closing speed the fast weak gun beats the slow strong one outright.
- Shield regeneration. Shields are not a health bar you chew through. They refill. If your delivered shield DPS is below the target’s regeneration, your time to kill is not long — it is infinite, and you will sit there burning through the fight convinced the numbers are wrong.
That last one is the reason two ships with near-identical paper DPS produce completely different fights, and it is invisible on every comparison table that lists weapons in isolation.
Work out your own time to kill
Open the Encyclopedia, find the weapon, and type its two DPS values in. Then describe the fight you are actually in: how many guns bear on the target, how much of the time you are firing, how fast your projectiles are, and what you are shooting at.
Weapon time-to-kill, with heat uptime and shield regen
- Time to kill
- 2m 37s 44.3 s stripping shields · 1m 53s on hull
- Delivered DPS after uptime and estimated hits
- 747 shield / 373 hull hit fraction 44% (estimated) · regen eats 250 shield DPS
- Where the fight is actually spent
- 28% of it on the shield guns needed just to out-damage regen: 3
This loadout never breaks the shield: regen replaces it faster than you remove it.
Enter the shield/hull DPS numbers from your own in-game Encyclopedia — that is the only source guaranteed to match the patch you are running. Hit fraction is our estimate, not a game value.
The URL updates as you type, so a loadout comparison can be pasted into a thread and it opens with your numbers filled in. Run the same target twice with two different weapons and the comparison is done properly — same fight, same range, same uptime.
Picking before you have the numbers
If you are still at the “which of these do I even buy” stage, the choice narrows fast once you name the target.
The branch that trips people up
The same weapon is the right and the wrong answer depending on one variable, and the rows below genuinely contradict each other on purpose. Read the row that matches your target.
| Your situation | Prioritise projectile speed | Prioritise raw shield DPS |
|---|---|---|
| Target is a fighter crossing at high speed | Yes — take the weaker, faster gun | No — the stronger gun misses and delivers nothing |
| Target is a capital sitting in your firing line | No — flight time barely matters at this closing speed | Yes — you are in a race against regeneration |
| Target is a station module | Neither: hull DPS and range decide it | Neither: modules have no regen to beat |
| You are heat-limited and cannot hold the trigger | Speed keeps its value at low uptime | Listed DPS collapses with uptime — recheck the sum |
If you take only one thing: against fighters, more damage is often a downgrade; against capitals, more speed is often a downgrade. Any list that ranks weapons in one column is answering a question you did not ask.
What to do with the answer
- If the calculator says never, do not buy more of the same gun until you have checked the “guns needed to out-damage regen” line. It is usually a mount-count problem, not a weapon problem.
- If the shield share of your time to kill is above roughly three quarters, your fight is a shield fight, and hull DPS on that loadout is close to decorative.
- If your uptime is under half, the ranking you built from listed DPS is wrong for you specifically, and re-running the sum at your real uptime usually reorders the top three.
Where the numbers come from
- Weapon and target values: your own in-game Encyclopedia, entered by you. That is the only source guaranteed to match your patch, which is exactly the failure the 2 August thread was complaining about.
- The model: ours. Uptime, regeneration and flight time are combined by the formulas described above.
- Hit fraction is an estimate, not a game value. It is a simplified lead-shot model based on how far the target drifts during projectile flight. Treat it as a comparison dial between two weapons, not as a measured accuracy number — and it stays labelled as an estimate wherever it reappears.
- We deliberately name no specific weapons. After the rebalance we cannot verify which name carries which numbers, and a wrong name is worse than none.
Updated when the next X4 patch changes weapon behaviour in a way that breaks the model above.
Sources
- X4: Foundations 9.00 “Empire Update” Public Beta announcement — Steam News — confirms the 9.0 “Empire Update” as the update carrying the weapon and combat rebalance this page assumes.
- X4 Foundations Public Beta - Version: 9.00 Release notes — official Egosoft beta notes describing the rebalancing of weapons, turrets and shields, and turret accuracy changes, that make stale third-party stat tables unreliable.
- “Extreme Disappointment with the Weapon Balance in 9.0 Beta” — X4: Foundations General Discussions — friction evidence that the rebalance materially reshuffled weapon rankings, supporting the page’s refusal to name specific weapons.
