Rail gun ready for testing

[abdakada52]

Maybe to remove some of the railguns \"OPness\" you could make it so that the damage reduction as it passes through a block is multiplied by the resistance of the last block i.e
if it passed through a block of 200 damage restistance then one of 20 resistance through those two blocks the damage reduction would be -20000 rather than -220. Another suggestion i can make is that you have it so that it does no damage to the sheilds of the deffending ship. Just a couple of suggestions

 

[Ixalite]

This weapon requires two things:
Physical Ammunition: require that a storage module be attached, and filled with a new non-placeable ammunition. The Ammunition will place upper limits on the damage output, as no matter HOW fast it is going, a copper ball is only going to go through a certain thickness of steel plate. I reccommend tiers 1-5 of both armor piercing, and area of effect ammunition. This way, you can have something that shoots completely through a ship, or makes a large blast, but not both. The ammunition will simply impose a damage maximum.
A physical restriction: I reccommend that only the largest dimension of the array size be used in damage/velocity calculations, so the most effecient( only efficient) shape would be a straight line. IF you wanted a railgun with 40,000 blocks, it would have to be 40,000 blocks LONG to give you that effect. Of course, this would be moot, as damage with a tier five shell should top out at about 100blocks worth.

 

[MrNature72]

You can fit a ridiculous amount of weapons in a fairly small area. Refer to the post I made above yours to get a more detailed idea.

 

[MrNature72]

That\'s a coilgun, not a railgun. Coilguns use a ring of rapidly firing magnetic coils that carry the projectile along the barrel. Railguns utilize a set of solid electromagnetic rails. Railguns also DO NOT USE CYLINDRICAL PROJECTILES. Most railguns utilize a block projectile (once you hit the speeds that railguns are able to produce you create a compressed cone of air around the tip of the projectile, that and a circular design would have minimum rail contact, and any distance between the one rail and the total face of one side of the projectile will cause a flash weld during the firing, which will wreck the entire weapon beyond repair and probably rip out the base of the entire gun). Or a torus. But that makes things complicated.

 

[Angus and Alexis]

I for one go with this idea.

Something like, the longer the gun, the faster the projectile, and damage is added from width of barrel times length.

Penetration is calculated by speed of projectile, mass and size.

 

[mtech47]

You are incorect it that hypervelocity impacts like what would happen from a railgun don\'t really depend on the material of the projetile or the projectiles shape for that matter

 

[Legolas170]

CHARGE THE DEATH LAZOOOOOR!!!

 

[Angus and Alexis]

I can only suggest that a spinal mount railgun that is 400M long should be a one hit kill to snub fighters and mess up anything to battleships.

 

[ltmauve]

You want a weapon with shield and block penetration. Because of these properties, it will be a 1-hit KO.

To balence this: It will have a low rate of fire and a high energy cost. Because it is the only weapon in the game to have shield-penetrating capabilities, it should also take down the shooter\'s shields when it fires, thereby making the possibility of a mutal KO. To prevent just spamming it, it should have physical ammunition. Not that each shot needs to be reloaded, but that you have to reload at some point.

I agree with the idea of self-damge. This means the weapon will need to be exposed to be repaired, making it more availble to damage in the event of shields going down.

Also, given that this weapon is supposed to go very fast, two points: make it a beam, to make the physics easier and prevent it from just tunneling through a target. Also, make it have some sort of spread effect. A railgun projectile will almost certainly be traveling faster than the speed of sound in hull material, meaning that there will be damagin shockwaves travelling throughout the entire ship. If it hits, it should do random low damage to nearby blocks.

 

[Myxam]

The solution, and some pieces of the limiting should come from the set up. The Rail gun would have to be set up with two, non-bridged arrays with no more than a X block gap between them. The arrays themselves must be built in a line format IE 1x1xZ. The length of the arrays determine the damage, power consumption, and reload time. A pair of short arrays (5 long maybe) fire (relatively) quickly and deal low damage, but will deal penetration and small AOE damage. A long array, (100 in length), would fire slowly -- above the cooldown of missiles-- but will deal large amounts of penetration and small AOE. The Damage would be calculated by a second block that\'s built in the X & Z planes ( 1 block tall ) that amplify the damage and exponentially increase the power consumption.

To fire the weapon you will need to charge up the firing mechanism, perhaps 5 to 10 seconds before it fires.

Ammunition size will be determined by the gap between the arrays. The Gap will increase the AOE size and the power consumption as well.

Another balancing method is to restrict movement and turning while \'powering up\' the shot. This keeps it from being used on smaller ships, making it nearly useless to anything but seige and anti-capital ships.

And finally, shields are designed against kinetic weaponry, so it makes sense for there to shields to mitigate LARGE amounts of the damage it deals, 70-90%.

 

[refirendum]

real railguns sustain wear and tear along its rails due to the friction. regardless of how little damage is done, the rails are slowly damaged when fired. also, nobody\'s using railguns yet. we\'re only testing the technology and it\'s not implemented into anything besides test railguns.

 

[Angus and Alexis]

Due to a railguns immense kinetic energy and velocity.

I say that a railgun should penetrate shields if it does an X% of damage in one hit.

 

[refirendum]

i think that in addition to this, the railgun\'s power requirement would be drawn from power tanks. if you don\'t have the power storage to fire for max damage of the railgun, you don\'t get all the damage from it



ex: 200m long railgun with 2m gap. max damage requires 5000*length*gap^3 (cubic projectile) and as such would be 8,000,000 energy storage for max damage in 1 shot. if you only have 4,000,000 energy storage, you only get half peak damage, 2,000,000, a quarter of max damage.

damage wise, i think that that total tamage possible from a single railgun shot is all penetrative damage, and is equal to 1/2 the amount of energy required for max damage. so in the above example, this gun would require 8,000,000 energy to produce a single 4,000,000 damage shot that has penetration

AOE characteristics of radius 2m(gap is 2m) from center of the shot is what i\'d say, and the damage amount for the aoe would be 1/distance^2 so damage applicable to the blocks 1m away from the first impact would be 2,000,000, 2m away and the applicable damage would be 1,000,000.

penetrative damage would be calculated by subtracting shield health that would have to be breached first, then the HP of each block destroyed.

at 1 block penetration against hardened hull, with an AOE raidus of 2m, the total damage subtracted from the initial damage would be 400x21xN(some variable here to make railguns more or less effective depending on value. higher for less effective railguns) blocks (8,400 damage times N) (a circle of damage centerd on 1 block on a flat surface with a radius of 2 touches 21 blocks)

 

[Ben2150]

In one game, the rail gun weapons make use of capacitors. One of the down sides is that it takes a while to charge. The other big one is that if the weapon is hit, then the capacitor will explode, causing AOE damage, and effectively destroying the weapon. This would encourage people to make the weapon as internal as possible. Another possible requirement is that at least one or more blocks be exposed (pretty sure that would be challenging to code).

I like the idea of the weapon temporarily knocking out the shields of the ship firing it. Maybe explain it by saying that the weapon causes an EMP that temporarily takes out hte shields, or that its firing takes that much of a drain, unless the person has a ship that has one massive power core.