They can be an artifact drop, and would be used against another ship in combat. Basically doing a lot of damage in one attack, more than what would be considered normal for a particular level. Could have one type or several types, each with an increase in RP cost. They would require energy to fire but cost less energy than what it would take for an average ship of their level would by just by firing guns alone.

Examples:
Plasma Torpedo
Energy: 10-15
Damage 3-5 times average ship damage for level 40
1,500 -2K AP

Graviton Torpedo
Energy: 10-15
Damage 3-5 times average ship damage for level 75-80
4K AP

Singularity Torpedo
Energy: 10-15
Damage: 3-5 times average ship damage for level 130-150
6-7K AP

Damage would be countered by defenses of course, but would overide the damage cap (as most of the time they might meet or exceed the damage cap mabye)

I would tune down the damage, but also I'd like to have them to 'set' like traps, because it makes sense that you would fire those torpedos defensively.

No, torpedos are diffinitely not a defensive weapon. Trust me. I was on a submarine for 6 years. One torpedo from a US submarine is enough to sink any vessel. Might be a little to overpowered for Dan to implement here.

No this would definately not be a defensive weapon, We already have traps that do that anyways. You wouldn't want to tone down the damage too much because it wouldn't be energy efficient, but since I'm still a lowbie I'll leave up to the devs to decide what an appropriate level based level of damage output should be.

My idea is that it's more "energy efficient" means of dealing damage, aka, it would cost less energy to deal x amount of damage with the torpedo vs the same amount of damage just by using your onboard guns. Where I see this realy shining is in those long fights against uncommons/rares/elites where huge amounts of hulls/sheilds damage and defense and usually require quite a bit of effort to bring down. Launching a couple of these at it would greatly reduce the amount of time fighting it, and greatly reduces the chance that the damage cap would come into play. Wether or not they could be used for pvp would be up to the devs, and they could just make them strictly usable against NPCs, but they should be shareable and likewise raidable. This would allow higher levels receiving a lower level torpedo to be able to pass it on to their lower level allies wich will have substantial more use from it against lower level NPCs, where as a higher level that gets a torpedo that does 1k damage would probably laugh since they're onboard weapons already do more than that. Then again they could just make one type of torpedo at a high level.

dan was saying that he wanted something like this... im all for it, more energy efficiency for me