Rail gun ready for testing

[z1967]

A cooldown and charge up period should be mandatory, no exceptions.

 

[TechnoMagician]

I am going to assume they have rails made out of a graphene like material(incredibly strong and conductive), or perhaps out of a superconductor. The Bullet is made out of a super low friction material, or maybe they shoot tiny amounts of plasma out of the rail to conduct electricity to the bullet so the friction is almost non existant.



My point is, you can easily explain stuff in the universe, the only thing we should be discussing is the mechanics and why they help deliver a good experience to the player.



For instance while having to make specific shapes with holes in them is an interesting idea, but has some problems with conveying information. If we are going with a complex idea like that I think a much better one would be to have 2 blocks, rail blocks and capacitor blocks, rail blocks must be placed straight in a line(or perhaps 2 parrallel lines 1 space between them) and capacitors must be attached to them. The longer the rails the faster the shot and hihger the power cunsumption(more time to accelerate) and thicker rails would allow higher accuracy. Capacitor blocks would attach to the rail blocks and behave like regular weapons where they just have to be connected to each other, the more capacitors the faster they regain energy, thus the higher the fire rate of the cannon.

You would have the railgun only able to fire straight(fires straight down the middle even if you are aiming to the side) as your rails only face the one direction. And it would drain constant energy from the ship to recharge the capacitors, maybe even when they are recharged if you want to make the gun more powerful(give it a drawback of energy use always to add more power).

This design would make it much harder to fit on fast turning turrets as they would have to be very long still, it doesn\'t completely take away the ability to pump blocks in it to improve it\'s strength, but the damage it deals depends on the length of your ship, and if your ship is too long you will have a hard time aiming because it only shoots straight.

 

[darkvoid1998]

The problem with dimension based weapons is that if people use the gun as a main weapon they will only build in those dimensions. In this case, it would just be a big space dick. If it were to ever be added to the game, it would most likely just use the battery blocks as the capacitors for the sake of simplicity and time coding more blocks than we need.

 

[z1967]

Saying that the problem with a dimension based weapon is that it would cause \"space dick\" designs is irrelevant. The starmade universe seems to favor cubes and related shapes. Whether you realize it or not, design only makes a small impact. Especially with the new turning mechanic.

 

[darkvoid1998]

The projectile that a rail gun fires is tiny compared to the rest of the gun, and certainly not the size of the gun itself as you are sugesting. If in your sugestion the shell is not the size of gun as you build it, it would be kind of questionable to just have it spawn in the middle of a box. Plus the diamiter of the shell scales so small to the energy used to move it, that say a one meter by four meter shell would take a entire space station to power the gun and fire it. You say it should use dimensions to determine power, so then why does the other weapon that involves projectiles not use it?

 

[tubadancross]

I think the original post stats were correct, but left out one major thing. I was there when this idea was being thought up and believed the most important thing for balance was reload. I would also say each block should use more than 25 energy.
This weapon is meant to be a weapon with potential insta-kill capabilities, but it would be near impossible to actually do it. With a beam of half a cube width and one cube length with a spread of 1 cube you\'d need to hit the core nearly perfectly to insta-kill. Reload was meant to be long, very long. Like, a quarter of a second per cube attached. Sure, you can have a 10,000 block cannon doing 1,000,000 damage. This would do 500,000 to a shield or cut through around 50,000 unarmored blocks if they were lined up perfectly, but it would take 41 min for the shot to recharge. That may be a bit too big, but for a gun this big it would likely take over five minutes to recharge.

I also heard the idea that there should be on-gun storage for it\'s power, so let\'s say each block requires 50 energy to be ready to fire. On this same 10,000 block cannon you need to fill it with 500,000 energy BEFORE it starts reloading.

Tl;dr: It should be amazingly powerful, but very much not a gun you rely on for any long amount of combat. One and done for the battle.

 

[darkvoid1998]

basically you want it to be useless. especially with the way AMCs work at the moment, it needs to have a competitive DPS compared to missles AND AMCs. The reload IS the amount of energy required. It will use so much energy that it will take awhile to get enough to fire, but have a minimum of 3 seconds to fire to prevent machine guns. It should not be able to one shot another ship of equal scale otherwise it would be the only gun people use.

 

[tubadancross]

It would be able to one-shot, technically. If you can land a shot directly on the core. Imagine this ship, however:
A one-shot kill would only be able to be pulled off by a very large ship.
A very large ship is very large.
A very large ship is often protective of it\'s core.
The targeting recticle on a core is larger than the farther away you are.
A very large ship protecting it\'s core often keep it\'s core far from others, especially in combat.

You have a slow-turning ship aiming at another ship that could be moving at any speed with a general area marked out of where the core is (even more general if the ship has turrets or docked ships on or in it). Expect at max speed (putting all points into speed of fire bonus) you can get off a round every five, or even three seconds. A speed like this wouldn\'t even get through the shields. If you want an amazing gun that will break through the shields and all the way through the other ship you\'ll need to make it pretty big.
Let\'s say the minimum charge time for a shot is 5-seconds and the maximum charge is 1 minute. I think this would be fair.

Possible ways to nerf it if you still don\'t like this:

Make it a forward facing weapon: it only fires to the center of the screen, not the mouse.

Give it a pre-shot charge: after you click to fire the gun \"warms up\" for a second or two. This means you\'d need to stay pointed at the target while you wait for the shot to leave the cannon. It also gives a good means of adding a cool charge effect (be it visual or sound or both).

It does not break shields: shield piercing as long as the damage equal to 2x the shields is taken off the shot the shot pierces through, but the shields themselves do not actually take damage so it\'s not an easy method of just taking down enemy shields.



I tried to encompass everything in my argument, which is difficult because from what I read in your comment you seemed to think it was OP and also useless.

 

[killerdude8]

To Truly balance this weapon out, The ROF should never get any faster, But slower, So a small Railgun would fire more often than a Cap ship size setup, Which means it could take a really long time to fire off that 1hk Railgun.

 

[seablaster]

Why not just stick a pod packed with disintegrators and a detonator peg on top into a \"rail\" system or firing tube? have a BOBBY or similar redshirt fly it.

 

[darkvoid1998]

Yes I agree it should be difficult/improbable to one shot another ship, but not possible to insta-kill another ship of equal size/ability. The bigger the gun the more energy is used when you fire, and then you can\'t fire again untill the 3 seconds is up and you have the energy required to fire again. The maximum rate of fire is one shot every 3 seconds, which is easly attainable with ships that only have a small gun, but unless a ship with a large gun is specifically built to use that gun, the time it takes to recharge the energy it takes to fire creates a longer reload.

To Seablaster, what you consider the \"obvious solution\" as you discribed it, is nothing more than a suicide bomber, which has nothing to do with the topic being currently discussed here.

 

[Saxfire]

We already have a railgun, just use amcs, for example place a row of different amcs like you were building a shotgun around the location where you want the railgun, then build a line from each antimattercannon to the line where you want your railgun to shoot, that way you can with 10 amc cannons, build a railgun that pierces 10 blocks with 1 shot, ofc you gotta \"assign\" the active \"rows\" of the railgun location of the antimatter cannons manually, unless they have made way to avoid it alrdy. but yes. there\'s your railgun that fires fast and pierces blocks aswell...

 

[SpacezG]

AMC cannons are not railguns.... and they will never be as for they are rapid fire, constant blasting weapons unlike the railgun where its one shot then wait to fire again but it packs a punch (if you hit the target with it).

 

[NullForceOmega]

Okay, first things first, that idiotic \'rail gun\' you have seen on youtube and published in international press, it\'s not a rail gun, It is in fact an electromagnetic sling. The rail gun is an asynchronus linear accelerator based on mag-lev trains, it uses alternating electromagnetic fields to accelerate a 120mm ferrous projectile to extreme velocities (last reported is 12 miles per second) and has been in continuous development since the mid-nineties by the U.S. army in conjunction with G.E., prior to that the U.S. Navy actually field tested a 5 inch variant in the seventies, but scrapped the weapon due to its power requirements. A rail gun is very similar in principle to a gauss gun or a coil gun (different weapons, similar concepts). As to actually getting the weapon in game, I am all for it, a low-refire, high-damage, direct fire weapon is exactly what I want next.

 

[ardiel]

Why would you want something like that?

Doing damage in a straight line is not that effective, especially when you have to charge between shots.

Yeah, you have a chance to maybe hit the core and take it out completely, but if you miss you\'ll have done little actual damage to the ship! You\'d only maybe take out a handfull of hull, a handful of shield, and a handful of power or weapons, but a large ship has TONS of these anyway, and even the hole you make won\'t be that useful because it would be difficult to hit the same hole again.

Well made AMC arrays however will rip some ships entirely in half and strip off very large sections of hull, and wipe out entire systems, and leave a massive breach that wouldn\'t be hard to shoot through again (with some the hole is big enough to drive a ship through!)

Also straight line damage could potentially change ship designs. Ships would end up becoming thin and narrow instead of being bricks. Something that wouldn\'t necessarily be a huge disadvantage over AMC fire except near the core, which could be bricked up anway with not much around it so that it\'s just a one block target to hit.

If ships were made long and thin, then most of the railgun power will go to waste. It will penetrate a few layers of blocks and pass out the other side, limiting the damage.

 

[madmax3004]

What about adding an ammo factory kind of block, which prododuces ammo for the railgun, and that way adds the reload time, the railgun can basically fire as fast as the ammo producer, but, the ammo producer requires a certain block/material to produce the ammo, this could work if you make like an ammo producer core, and enchancers, you gotta place the materials inside of the core to supply it, and if you link enchancers to it, it\'ll produce ammo faster, every core can hold around 3 shots or such.

 

[MrNature72]

I\'m an Engineer, and I have a bit of a relationship with Railguns. Railguns don\'t work off of direct energy input, like plugging it into a wall (metaphorically speaking). They work off of capacitors; Which means they are charged beforehand. I\'d like to see it so the railgun doesn\'t drain energy until after the shot, for the recharging stage. This would also make things interesting; You could have a massively devastating railgun shot, but firing it would severely hamper your energy recharge for a given amount of timew; and you could go into battle with pre-prepared railgun rounds loaded with their capacitors charged and ready to release.



If you have any curiosities on how the specifics of railguns work, let me know.

 

[iStormUK]

Mr Nature has a great idea. And I have another. Much like the reactors require a specific shape for efficiency, the railgun should too. And, since a railgun is effectively a long tube with coils around it, to accelerate a slug. The gun should be a T shape, a core (The I part) down which the slug travels, and a coil (The _ part of the T).



Thus, the shape of the gun dictates it\'s power, faster acceleration, means adding more coil blocks around the coil portion, more power, or momentum, means making more T-sections. Each segment requiring a capacitor, which you could tier if desired, to the number of coils per segment. It would be fairly realistic of actual coil-guns/railguns.

 

[cptkickercutleg]

We don\'t use rail guns, they\'re cost-prohibitive due to power use and the lack of re-useability caused by damage to the coils which accelerate the projectile. High heat causes material damage.

Perhaps add a heat-level instead, making it so that continuous fire damages the gun, but occassional fire doesn\'t.

 

[MrNature72]

That\'s a great idea, but I think it should be split into a couple factors. Length would decide the speed of the target, and width, because it affects the size of the target, would affect splash radius and damage moreso. However, they would both add onto capacitor size; Length would add in the amount of energy used (since longer would need more energy), while width and height would decide the time it takes to recharge (since it would affect fill rate more). It would also let you have a large cube in the rear to act as the \"capacitor\" (providing the width) while its connected to a large tube to act as the \"barrel\"