The effective damage listed is equal to the damage times the fire rate.
Conventional lasers 
Edit
There are 4 types of conventional lasers:
- Mining (10 and 30MW)
- Impulse (1 and 5 MW)
- Particle (1, 4, 20, 100, 140MW, and their light-weight equivalents)
- Gatling (4, 6, 10MW and their LW equivalents)
The mining lasers are special; you can use them to mine ore from asteroid fields.
Mining and Impulse lasers fire once per round. Particles fire twice, and Gatlings fire 3 times.
140MW Particles, and all the Gatlings are only allowed to be used by Empire pilots of a certain rank.
The light-weight (LW) equivalents of some of the lasers just have a lower mass, so they occupy less of the ship, leaving more room for cargo. They are much more expensive than their heavier equivalents, though.
