New Antag Weapon: the Hunting Revolver

[DronzTheWolf]

Station antags are lacking in ranged weapon solutions. As far as I'm aware, they're unable to get any long-ranged weapons, because the antag sniper costs more than the TC of your average station antag, and there is no longer TC in the vault to make up for it. So, to remedy this, I've come up with an alternative: the hunting revolver. A five-shot revolver that's single-action. To simulate the single action means, it'll use a bolt-action style where you have to "cycle the bolt" to cock it, so it can't do fast successive shots.  It must be loaded and unloaded by hand, and doesn't have any speedloader Similar to the NKA Consular's revolver. The general idea is that it'd be high cost for a station antag, but not take up all of their TC.

I propose we make it chambered in .50 AE, the same caliber as the .50 Magnum Pistol, because of it's nature as a big bore revolver and a gun made for hunting. 

For the style, I've modified an older sprite I had to fit. I basically just added a scope to it.

One sprite uncocked: 

One sprite cocked: 

Upsized versions of each:





 
 

[Oddbomber]

I remember suggesting something like this a while ago in dchat. I think it's a good idea, personally. It gives the antags something that's long range and powerful, but balanced in the respect that they only have a limited number of shots, may only reload one shell at a time, and must manually be chambered before each shot - which, obviously, would make the weapon massively inconvenient to use during a firefight or at close range.

[Daemon]

also make this included in the cowboy crate and coalition pack for mercs, it'll make them look more like wild west rangers since iirc the revolvers they get are the small snub nosed Zavodskoi spritres. 

[DronzTheWolf]

1 hour ago, Daemon said:

also make this included in the cowboy crate and coalition pack for mercs, it'll make them look more like wild west rangers since iirc the revolvers they get are the small snub nosed Zavodskoi spritres. 

Coalition crate gets the mateba/autorevolver, not the Zavod one iirc.

[Kintsugi]

2 hours ago, Daemon said:

also make this included in the cowboy crate and coalition pack for mercs, it'll make them look more like wild west rangers since iirc the revolvers they get are the small snub nosed Zavodskoi spritres. 

We don't really need to encourage more cowboy stuff. That coalition crate is an OOC joke, in any case -- moving on.

I don't think this item should be added. I really don't like anachronistic weapons - and furthermore, the sprite itself just isn't very good. I don't mean to insult your abilities - spriting is a difficult thing that takes a lot of talent, and being able to sprite at all is something to be proud of - but it heavily conflicts with our current art style and is far too simplistic. It wouldn't fit in. As far as ranged firepower is concerned - why not just add the marksman rifle to the uplink if it isn't already an option? And if it is an option and costs more TCs than the average antag could afford, why not just lower the cost? 

Hard -1 from me, apologies. If you want a cheap, one-handed scoped weapon, it should at the very least fit our current art style and it shouldn't be a weapon that looks like it's from six hundred years ago.

[Susan]

There is a reason long-range weapons are gated behind exorbitant cargo costs, between 8 and 10 thousand credits -

Getting clicked from off screen by someone you cannot see who ostensibly has not even said a word to you is not fun roleplay. There is nothing engaging about standing in the hallway and getting shot from someplace you cannot even see; while marksman rifles and LWAPs must be ordered or are given only as a high-quality RNG spawn (ala merc and raider) they are end-game high-powered weapons for when the action has already been long engaged. An antag does not need the ability to murder people from two screens away right out of the gate.

'Slow fire rate', and 'bolt action' and 'limited number of shots' mean nothing in the current medical system where a single arterial can spell round end for you.

[Scheveningen]

I don't find this idea to be particularly compelling, some for the aforementioned reasons already, but I may as well risk repeating others in doing so anyway in order to cover my view on the situation.

Firstly, revolvers - relative to existing options - are quite terrible self defense weapons, not to mention equally terrible for long range on top of that, alongside other primary and secondary weapons of their generation compared to those of the existing generation. During the times in which revolvers were manufactured and machined, they were effective sidearms to draw on an opponent in a period where shot capacity was rather limited, and the overall quality of various firearms was extremely terrible due to relative inaccuracy compared to current generation firearms. It was also evident in many cases that drawing a sidearm on an enemy after running out of ammunition for an SLR, bolt-action, or submachinegun in order to continue firing at a target, was simply more effective than trying to reload a self-reloading rifle, bolt-action or submachinegun. It was 'good enough', but definitely not passable enough to be an effective tool for killing as many other primary issued weaponry options at the time of its inception.

Compare not only to current date but also to the current status quo: There are many weapons available to traitors with high capacity, high rate of fire, and high hit rate. In a raw sense, the up-front damage is completely irrelevant if you simply pick the tool that permits you to dominate at every effective range in SS13 by landing more bullets than the opposition, which is to say within immediate sight radius. The .45 Thompson pretender submachine-gun is relatively cheap at the moment, but the Adhomian submachinegun can be purchased through cargo, through which I believe does not have a weapon lock on it as it is considered a budget weapon with slightly less rounds and no drum mag TC option. Both these submachineguns in question have reasonable shot capacity, and are quite effective in terms of personal defense and achieving the goals of a saboteur or a mercenary, or whatever.

Through this we can infer that outside of engagements where you can fire off all 5 rounds one screen away and hopefully hit all 5, the hunting revolver will be quite useless in all engagements except that which was already mentioned, so therefore as a tool, it is completely useless except outside that very specific and uncommon scenario. And to be in that ideal sweet spot, one requires intentional positioning and to be constantly two steps ahead of security, which is not always a feasible position what with the existence of hallway camera trackers and so on. Security can literally flank you, then commit to an omni-directional push, and then you are dead because you don't have enough bullets for more than one person. We can pretty much conclude in saying that a hunting revolver with a scope will be of very dubious usefulness to any antagonist player aside from IDEALLY killing one person and then immediately getting overwhelmed and pinned by high-capacity projectile or laser weapons.

Now, frankly, I am not really of the personality anymore to come up with new ways to goon on security anymore, but in terms of effectiveness, mobility and high capacity, high fire-rate, high hit chance weapons are immediately more valuable, whereas the marksman rifle and the LWAP are extremely limited to their intended engagement ranges, and do not guarantee quick takedowns either. 

The kind of antagonist playstyle that requires you to sit at a range outside of what is possible to be conventionally engaged from, is ironically neither mechanically nor socially engaging in any fashion. If you really care about 'winning' gunfights with security, I would instead suggest you acquire a ballistic submachinegun and LARP as a trench-runner instead if you want to get cheap frags on security and then immediately duck back into cover to suit some idea of personal fun. You'd also be in range to verbally taunt them before you kill them! Or whatever, really. The current loadout for traitor weapons is quite satisfactory, it is not really guns that are the problem insofar as the current specialized armor sets hard-countering specific damage types rather than being less reliable. But that's a different subject. We have enough weapon variety for the moment, although stationary weapon emplacements would be neat for both sides.