I'm trying to mod the game to my personal tastes and am trying to accurately judge how much dps the various weapons do when i'm modding the ship stats. I was wondering if anyone knew how beam duration/damage works for instance:

Beam Damage = 200
Duration = 3.000000

does that mean that when the weapon fires it will do a grand total of 200 beam damage over the course of 3 seconds, which would mean the duration is just for graphical effect of how long you want the beam to last, or is it doing 200 every second for 3 seconds?

sorry if this is a dumb question i just don't want to start modding and make some ships grossly over/under-powered