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About Laser weaponry.


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Posted

So.. after thinking,observation, and examinations.. I was always thinking of making Laser weapons to have magazines.


The year is 2456 (Correct me if i am wrong)

Science has advanced for who knows how far, there has been a lot of technological advances. And now that most people use the laser weaponry 24/7 in all their daily lives for military, or other important things that may or may not occur, the laser weaponry feels...sluggish. My point is, not the laser weapon strength, their rapid fire, but about the charges they contain.


The fact that you can unload a lot of laser beams on one person in mere seconds is fun (For some not since they brag being killed fast and moan on OOC...but that's something else) But the fact, when you go *Click* *Click* moment, you're fucked. What bothers me, is that technology went so far, that we still use old means of how to power weapons, by putting them inside the recharger, sure they are logical why we need them, but once you are bottle necked, and you're on the other side of the station with few last charges left in your gun, and some carps are coming to r*pe you hard, well, kiss your ass goodbye, since you'll be only able to kill one or two, out of six or five.


And the main idea why i am making this post is, since we are able to modify protopistols, but they still need to be recharger by recharger, why not make all the laser based weaponry to have Laser cells? Simply like Ballistic weapons having magazines with shiny bullets of democracy installed to make the freedom out of you (By meaning, DEAD) why not make the Laser weapons have Laser cells, but with a twist, that of course, they wont be modifyable, they will contain as much power as the gun will have as if it has full power, and you will need to power the cells them selves in the rechargers.


But that is only meant to laser weaponry, tazers are not included. So, please comment on your ideas if this is a good idea, or bad, or just give your own opinion on this.

Posted

I've actually been quite baffled since I started playing this game that Power Cells in fact could not be used in conjunction with Energy Weapons. Maybe I've been spoiled by Fallout, or NT is super serious about that 'Void if Seal Broken' stickers for the Warranties on all their weapons. It definitely shows in gameplay, during Red Alerts, Security will grab 2 or 3 rifles and pistols a piece, ERT comes bundling in with an armory (the fact that someone is not in charge of stuffing all the weapons into one locker and dragging it around surprises me,) Traitors and Operatives that use weapons will carry small arsenals themselves. It's a comment on the inventory system more than anything, but being able to have power cells or weapon specific batteries that could fit into Security Belts (bonus points if Stun Batons, Tasers and/or Flashes used them too), Science could manufacture them, research upgraded versions and distribute them as needed to Security and Heads (More lines of beneficial communication and interaction with other departments = stable and productive crew)


Keep Recharges and Weapon Recharges about where they are (maaaaybe give RnD one,) recharges refill cells at a set rate, weapons chargers will refill at a faster rate but the cell must be in a valid weapon. Defeating a heavily armed player means you'd be happier to take his spare ammo than to run off with his gun if you already had one or two, especially if said ammo could fit inside webbing, armor pouches or belts where the weapons could not.

Posted

Laser weapons are balanced to be less effective than projectile weapons in-game (less damage (no shrapnel), longer time between the shots, fewer charges overall (you can just put a new mag inside of a projectile weapon).


While the game balance is built that way, I have to agree that it makes no sense ICly for anyone to use laser weaponry, due to how terrible it is. No portability, inability to lay down suppression fire - I would understand if lasers did more damage, or if ballistic weapons were rendered ineffective by modern armor, but that isn't even the case in-universe - laser weapons feel like they're at a heavily experimental stage, but have impossibly replaced their still vastly more efficient ballistic counterpart as the mainstay of Nanotrasen's defense force.


Now, what are ways we can fix this, balance-wise? Clips? Overheat/cooldowns with infinite ammo? What are the advantages/disadvantages of all proposed suggestions, from a gameplay perspective?

Posted

Hrmm. I was thinking of the balances also.Infinite ammo? No. Its bad. If it recharges, probably but on few guns id say..


As you said, it is based on balance, the only thing what will be implemented, is Power coil cells that can be Emped easily. Since you know, power and all. About the damage clip size or cooldown, those shouldn't be changed, since we do not know what outcome will be if we have laser weaponry with these adds. But what i worry about..is about the Protopistols.. Maybe they shouldn't have Power cell coils since they can be modified? I don't know. But its better then having half armory taken to deal with one mob.

Posted

The primary reason why removeable cells haven't been added to laser weaponry is because cells hold like.


A lot. Of charge. Skull tried to bump lasers up to a bigger cell and it took ages for them to charge, so there's a lot of infrastructure that needs changing that would in turn change a lot of other things. I don't want to deal with rebalancing lasers to work with 30k cells.


Lasers have a firedelay because old firedelay 0 lasers were way, waaaay deadlier than current lasers even when they only did 20 damage a shot. They were ideal for ganks. You whip out a laser and blast someone while they're talking and they're dead before they hit the floor. Or at least in crit, which is as good as dead, really.


Laser bullets interest me though. Could hack together a thing pretty easily. But, ugh, I don't want research to have it, and I don't know how to make the battery rechargeable without writing original code for the recharger. Will probably do unrechargeable insertable laserbullets.


Could add faster-shooting laser, but it would have to be a lower damage variant, like the rapidlaser. Or like a toggle burst for laser rifles, though the damage will have to be lower.


If we're talking lasers vs. ballistics, what are the strengths you imagine laser weapons have over ballistic weapons?

Accuracy, greater or lesser capacity? Deadliness? Agree lasers are almost entirely inferior to ballistics-- though if we're comparing with nuke ops, we should note that they're kind of supposed to be deadly. Need thoughts on where lasers should be stronger before actual buffing happens. If it happens.

Posted

LLA had power cells for energy weapons at one point. They were annoying as hell.


I've always put it down to energy weaponry being at eithe r(a) A highly experimental stage, at which there is no concievable way to create a removable power unit, (b) It is more cost-effective to manufacture them as a whole unit, and Nanotrasen are all about costs, or © It's better not to think so deeply about this. 2D Spessmens.

Posted

The thing is, i am including some new other then the current power cells. We will use something called Laser power cell, coils, what ever. Basicaly a new item, a new magazine. For example, how many shots can a E-carbine do? 8-10 shots? They will still have the same count but they will need their own type of magazine/coil/cell type for them to be able to be used. Meaning nothing will be changed, except for the ability to reload a weapon (Laser) while you still have back up mags/coils/cells with you and you can atleast do something back against the enemies.


AS for protopistols... Those are a tricky one. If the game hits late game/miners did nice job and Science got the resources, they can make preety much powerfull 40burn damage 21 magazine sized protopistol that can unload in 4-5 seconds. For that...it can be limited? But about Protopistols balance should be taken to new discussion.

Posted

There's a WH40K themed SS13 where the Imperial Guard (security) has Laserweapons with magazines.

They got about 80 shots but are slightly weaker then balistics if I recall correctly.


I asked why mags in laser guns and was told it contains capacitators or however it's called.


Maybe half the ammount of ammo and we got us our Laser guns with mags.

Posted

I, personally, would like to see some kind of energy reload system. Maybe have power cells, sprited and fluffed to look like small magazines, that could be loaded and unloaded from energy weapons, and recharged at any standards weapon recharger. I was considering filing a custom item application for an energy pistol (for playing as my HoS character) with this exact functionality.

Posted

The idea is not to change the ammo capacity (Unless the mags can be modified with the help of science or if that will be allowed in the first place) but to implement a reload system for energy based weapons.


Rechargers can recharge weapons only if they have the magazine inside (Empty of other type of ammount of power) and other good things. Also WH40K is abit... over the edge in my opinion. Don't get me wrong, IG's are great and their las-weapons but with that capacity on Aurora is making it cheap. Maybe, just maybe increase all E-guns capacity by two or three shots? But i dont know, if that will be good (Balance wise).

Guest Marlon Phoenix
Posted

We seem to be ignoring that we have a laser pistol that recharges itself - two, actually. The laser tag guns and the 'advanced' laser with a reactor inside it. Why not just reskin those?

Posted
We seem to be ignoring that we have a laser pistol that recharges itself - two, actually. The laser tag guns and the 'advanced' laser with a reactor inside it. Why not just reskin those?

 

Captain's Side arm makes 3, if I'm not mistaken. Having weapons that recharge on their own is a good thing, but these should be unique or at least very hard to acquire.


The argument to the clips is this. Security has an armory. I have never done a head count, but lets say there are 20 different energy weapons of varying form and style in there. In a logical, IC sense, we can give 20 Security officers, deputized citizens, mutinous revolutionionaries or just survivors in an alien invasion a gun for self defence.


In actual game terms, everyone is going to take 2 or 3 weapons at least, because damn near any situation that justifies opening the armory at all means that there is hostiles actively roaming the halls and you aren't going to have a chance restock and recharge. So we have maybe 8 people now who can be deemed ready to defend themselves and the station (or overthrow it)


Now what if we back up, every energy weapon has a removable power cell. Nothing else changes. We have a rack or locker full of power cells, lets say there are 30 spare power cells and 15 (stocked) weapons. We've reduced the number of weapons on the station, but literally doubled the number of people capable of defending themselves while allowing them to maintain about the same amount of firepower on themselves (being disarmed is a different story, but in most fights once you've lost your gun pulling out a second one may or may not help much at all.) It's a far more realistic approach and makes a lot more sense in character as opposed to having security officers shoving another carbine or pistol into their bag, tossing away standard equipment to make room.


Coming back around to the point, these weapon would only have a finite number of shots based upon how many clips you brought along with, maybe pistols could squeeze more low powered shots out of a single cell than a rifle could for balance reasons, but there is a hard limit on how much damage you can do before you need to withdraw, restock and recharge. The advanced laser rifle and captain's sidearm, can fire indefinitely, the advanced rifle may overheat and burn you, but otherwise the self recharging weapons allow you stay in the fight until one side is dead, you're not limited to how much you can bring but rather how much fire you can take in that case.

Posted

Swat is about right. Laser mags don't need to hold more than 8-10 shots - assuming you bring at least one mag with you, that's already more than the charge a rifle currently contains.


Any more charges than that (80 shots per mag? Wat?) effectively makes the weapon ammoless - and while running out of ammo is more of an annoyance than anything else in singleplayer FPSes, resource management is actually an integral part of SS13's ranged combat, and removing ammo requirements from lasers will simply turn firefights into even more of a killfest with no pacing than they are now.


This should ideally stop everybody from having to bring 2-3 weapons to every fight, which is rather ridiculous. It also doesn't create any balance issues since jobs that already carry a pistol (captain, HoP) wouldn't be expected to have spare mags with them, their weapon being only for emergencies - so it doesn't dramatically bolster their combat effectiveness with standard equipment at all.

Posted

I'd argue that laser pistols themselves should regenerate shots over time.

Posted
I'd argue that laser pistols themselves should regenerate shots over time.

Why?


There's two ways to do this. Either the pistols regenerate ammo at a rate that's significant enough to be of use in a fight, at which point every pistol is ridiculously OP (and stronger than a rifle) like the antique laser gun before we nerfed it, or they don't, in which case we might as well give them the option to recharge with magazines rather than forcing the user to wait around a terribly long time.

Posted

As tasty as self rechargeable weapons may sound, but there are minor issues with it. First, the recharge rate. If you notice on how fast recharges captains pistol, is fairly low. Youll be killed/raped/gunned down while you wait for that one charge to charge up, leaving you in a dumb spot.

The second flaw. It may be immersive but the fact making the e-guns rechargeable (them selves) is kind killing down the rechargers (brig mounted ones) losing part of their main usage.

Idea is to not to make more charges inside the gun, since it is just a standart magazine (or modify able later if this will seem as a good idea as mentioned before) and make few things change in the game.


1.st is to not make people carry to bloody much weapons.- this reminds me of fallout3 that a 21 year old character can carry around 10 rocket launchers that weighs around 10-20 kg. Even in army, sokdiers dont run around with two .50 cal mounted machine guns, bullets crazy, but has actually have their own loadout (most one main rifle or two with a side arm) course, correct me if i am wrong.


2.nd The year! It's 2456 and people still use such technology where you still have to use some recharging stations?! (Reminds me of half life 1) hell, maybe next time we should really make singularity backpacks that recharge weapons as you store them inside in the bag. (Just silly, and it will look like some dumb ghost buster show, everyone with bags of singularities and e-guns doing lightshows.


3.rd It's sonething 'new'. Of course it's nothing game breaking or to gamechanging, but rather a simple idea that was overlooked on. Maybe the e-guns will bring some advantage? But the fact is, station uses e-guns 90% most of the time (excluding nyke ops)

Posted

Okay, been throwing this ball of yarn around, may have an idea. So, the key about weapon systems is that they need to, and are often made to, fit purpose.


On station, that purpose realistically isn't expected to exceed to dispatching of carp, large crowds that gather, and the occasional lusty xenomorph maid. For this purpose, a weapon with a restriction on useage as heavy as a requirement to remain anchored to a singular recharge point seems fine. And let's be honest, systems like that would probably be cheaper.


But for an actual combat force, such as ERT, such as the syndicate, a singular operator needs to be self-sustaining to the point where they can extract themselves from just about any situation. Obviously a weapon that requires a recharge there is not fitting for purpose.


So, here goes my idea: weapons for ERT, syndicate and a certain crate from cargo are capable of accepting interchangeable energy-cells.


Weapons for security start out as the current standard, but we add the ability for RnD to tinker with them, and make them accept a mobile cell-swap.

Posted
As tasty as self rechargeable weapons may sound, but there are minor issues with it. First, the recharge rate. If you notice on how fast recharges captains pistol, is fairly low. Youll be killed/raped/gunned down while you wait for that one charge to charge up, leaving you in a dumb spot.

 

The same exact thing is true for magazine fed weaponry. A reload that is unplanned will screw you just as well. The nuances are different, the point is the same.

Posted

I agree, mostly unplannd reload times are bad and most of the time people will die during reload time, it is a fact.


As for security, i was thinking of them having their own stashed armory locker or some wending machine that will dispense the energy cells, coils for the gun, and only with the help of warden/hos they are able to access to them.


To the point with ops and ERT, they should have something to sustain them selves, since were talking wbout special ops. Not depend on the stations condition, if they have power or breached places where there should be rechargers but got eaten by singulo/stolen/bombed.


As for RnD, people can try tinjering the cells for 'Weapons specific' types and maybe tweak them or modify from having lousy bad cells intto more ion resistant cells that wont make the gun dry as you took direct ion shot to face. This can be debateable as to what securityand rnd have good in this, but for nyoe ops and ert (in my oppinion) is a must.

Posted

As for security, i was thinking of them having their own stashed armory locker or some wending machine that will dispense the energy cells, coils for the gun, and only with the help of warden/hos they are able to access to them.

 

Heh, makes me think of a book I read once called H.I.V.E where the security forces there had lethal weapon caches secured around the facility that could only be accessed by the Bossman and Chief of Security.

Posted

How about a mix between the charger and cells. Lasers needing to charge still, but at a certain level of research, make it possible for science to make cells that can reload lasers, and need to be placed in charges like the guns themselves. (If energy cells do end up being a thing, I vote we make them look like Fallout E-Cells or MF Cells.)

Posted

It was the main idea, but excluding that research research the power cells, but the fact that power cells are already there, and scientists by upgrading power manipulation, electromagnetic spectrum and combat tech, they can research new type of power cells to be either good against emp's and what not.

Posted
Okay, been throwing this ball of yarn around, may have an idea. So, the key about weapon systems is that they need to, and are often made to, fit purpose.


On station, that purpose realistically isn't expected to exceed to dispatching of carp, large crowds that gather, and the occasional lusty xenomorph maid. For this purpose, a weapon with a restriction on useage as heavy as a requirement to remain anchored to a singular recharge point seems fine. And let's be honest, systems like that would probably be cheaper.


But for an actual combat force, such as ERT, such as the syndicate, a singular operator needs to be self-sustaining to the point where they can extract themselves from just about any situation. Obviously a weapon that requires a recharge there is not fitting for purpose.


So, here goes my idea: weapons for ERT, syndicate and a certain crate from cargo are capable of accepting interchangeable energy-cells.


Weapons for security start out as the current standard, but we add the ability for RnD to tinker with them, and make them accept a mobile cell-swap.

I can support this. It's sort of the idea of the station security force having the civilian/not full-auto version of weapons, while ERT has high-grade gear.


Works fine for balancing purposes, and makes more sense ICly than the current setup.

Posted

On the same subject, I feel that the Security armory is under stocked in the ballistics area. A box full of low caliber ballistic pistols would be nice.


As for the laser guns, I support the non rechargeable laser battery clip idea. Would make more sense than the current clunky lasers. Keep the fire rate and such, though.

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