At normal recharge speed, which you start out on, lasers and shields don't recharge.

You have to boost them using F9 and F10 to actually get them to charge.

You can also transfer weapons between lasers and shields - in fact, this is often essential. As far as I remember, it was more effective to keep laser charging at maximum and shields at 50%, and transfer laser power to shields, rather than having both at 75%

Also, when lasers are above 50%, pretty sure they do more damage. Hence running with below 50% lasers is wasteful. Let lasers reach 100%, transfer to shields down to 50, then keep charging.

The traditional start in X-Wing was to hit F9 and F10 twice at the beginning and dump all laser energy into shields so that your shields are doubled up, then reduce shield charge to half-way and have laser charge at Max if you were a single-shot continuous fire player (i.e. a noob) or 75% if you were a quad-shot (i.e. have a damned good joystick).

The reason for that is in single-shot mode, an X-Wing (Or TIE Interceptor!) can continuously fire pretty much forever with the laser recharge at max.

However, if you are good and use the quad-shot mode, you can kill TIE Fighters and TIE Interceptors in one shot (This is *very* satisfying), and because you aren't firing continuously, you can get away with only having the laser recharge at 75%, and get the benefit of higher speed.


In TIE Fighter, this is mostly moot at the beginning as you;re stuck flying an unshielded TIE Fighter a lot of the time, so you're always toggling between 0% recharge (To get to your target faster) and 100% (For the shooting!)

The real fun starts when you get the TIE Advanced, but boy do they make you earn it!!