I finally did what I've been threatening to do, and wrote up a PHP script to statistically analyze every weapon in Car Wars:

Aaron G. Wells - Car Wars Fifth Edition Weapons Analysis Table
http://www.seanet.com/~owenmp/wells/carwars5e-weapons-table.html

This was made simple by the fact that I only analyzed the weapons in Car Wars Fifth Edition, and there are only 16 non-dropped weapons in Car Wars Fifth Edition so far. In order to gauge the effectiveness of the weapons in various situations, I would determine their mean average damage over a range of to-hit modifiers. I used a "/" to indicate the possibility of firing multiple rockets with the Variable-Fire Rocket Pod (VFRP), or hitting two sides of the target with the Sonic Cannon.

At first I had thought of calculating the total amount of damage that each weapon will deal on average, including the amount of ammo it has. In the end, I decided that calculation was unnecessary. Most of the weapons are either one-shot or they've got enough ammo that you're probably not going to run out before the end of the duel (which is today, 10 shots). More importantly, it would be impossible to figure out the average total damage of a weapon because you don't know what firing modifiers it'll have.

There were a few surprises to me. I was unaware just how much damage the Sonic Cannon, the VFRP, and the Blast Cannon do. With the Sonic Cannon and the VFRP, the high damage is just due to the multiplication effect. The VFRP, having a To-Hit of 6, doesn't do a whole lot of damage until you're up close, although if you fire all three shots it can achieve an average damage well in excess of a single rocket when you're not at point-blank. The Sonic Cannon, though, gets its double damage no matter how far back you are, as long as you have line of sight (LOS) to two sides. This makes it crazy powerful.

And the Blast Cannon? Nothing strange going on there. It has 4D of damage, with the same accuracy as a Machine Gun. I guess I just hadn't noticed it before because I've been focusing on flashy things like Lasers and Sonic Cannons.

I didn't bother calculating incendiary damage into this, because there are too many components involved in determining how much damage fire does. Also, I don't think fire is all that practical in combat. The odds of it catching and the amount of damage it does are too small.

There are a number of other ancillary details that were left out. For instance, the Blast Cannon permanently reduces a car's Confetti Number by 5 every time it hits. The Sonic Cannon creates a D1 hazard when it hits. The Surge Rocket kills a car's power plant for three seconds, making it a lot less maneuverable. All of these are details that can potentially be used to create lots more damage, but they're too complicated to reduce to an equation easily.

In the end, while this may help to indicate how effective each weapon is, there are still several more factors to take into account. The weapon that produces the greatest average damage is not necessarily always the best choice. In some situations, the best weapon might be the most powerful one that you can fit in a car and still have 150 points of armor, or HC 3, or a weapon that you can afford to stick in a turret or on all four sides. You may want a weapon that does specific effects, or a weapon that can't explode on you.

And last, a single number isn't enough to give you a full idea of the amount of damage a weapon will do. You'd really need a graph to show that, or at least a standard deviation number, and an understanding of what the standard deviation means. For instance, when there's a -1 To-Hit modifier, the Light Laser and the Heavy Rocket both do a mean average of 2.92 damage. However, the Light Laser is much more likely to strike, with its To-Hit of 10, while the Heavy Rocket is much less likely to strike, with its To-Hit of 6, but will do a much larger amount of damage when it does make contact.

I'll have to give this some thought before I decide how or whether these numbers will affect my general Car Wars strategy. I already leaned towards the exotic high-To-Hit weapons, and this analysis mostly just backs up how cool they are.

Of course, Heavy Ramplates and Heavy Structural Reinforcement blow all of these out of the water.