Custom Bullets

[jayman38]

I was inspired recently by a picture of multiple identical in-game probes in a row.
Custom Bullets.

How it would work:
You would create a ship and dock it and link the dock to the weapon. If the docked ship fell within certain limits (e.g. less than 50 percent of each dimension of the docking weapon and less than 80 blocks overall), then it would be saved as a VBO or other similar GPU-based reusable low-impact construct and used as a replacement in place of the normal cannon "bullet".

With this, you could have a significant-sized "bullet" without having to build up multiple cannons to create multiple output shots. It would only be a visual representation, so there would be no rail/physics calculations to slow things down.

I imagine you could do the same thing with missiles.

Furthermore, I imagine you could do something like that with beams, where you make a 1-block-thick "bullet", dock it, then when it fires, it renders the bullet ship, stretching it out along the z-axis along the line of fire to maximum range or to the first thing it hits, in place of the normal beam.

With this, good builders can create and share popular "bullets" on the Community Content to share with everybody, for quick and easy integration into weapon systems.

Edit:
Various effects would not be rendered on the bullet ships as they are fired and travel at high speed.
Effects that would not be rendered:
Display block displays
Lights
Thruster plumes
Logic Connections
etc.

Instead, the whole bullet would be given a generic glow, depending on what light block (if any) with which the weapon computer was linked.

 

[NeonSturm]

And perhaps make the weapon out of scaffolding and show projectiles inside it ready to be fired :D
I don't see a problem with this good suggestion as long as the projectile-ship can be converted to a sprite-object (2D picture).

Some might want this:

 

[jayman38]

And perhaps make the weapon out of scaffolding and show projectiles inside it ready to be fired :D
I don't see a problem with this good suggestion as long as the projectile-ship can be converted to a sprite-object (2D picture).

Some might want this:

Showing the "Bullet" inside a see-through weapon would be an excellent use of this idea.

For cannon bullets, I don't think they would be converted to sprites, but for beams, I think stretching the bullet object out to the length of the beam would accomplish approximately what you are saying. Imagine a flat circle made of lava or other bright or translucent blocks, stretched out from a thickness of one meter out to the standard beam length (2000?). It should be relatively easy to stretch such a docked bullet out to represent the entire beam at once for not too much processing power.