Rail Guns a New Aproch

[Spartan-228]

I have seen many people suggest rail gun or gauss gun weapons and I am one who would love to see a true rail or gauss gun.
However given how easily OP these weapons could become I have come up with a few suggestions that might fix that.

The first is of course ammo. Players would actually have to have ammo to use the weapon.

Second is in order for the gun to work you would actually have to build a barrel. For example a rail gun you would have to build two rails with a gap in between for the round to pass, or for a gauss gun a line of coils for the round to pass through.
There would also be several things to take into account when building your gun. One the longer you make your rails or the more coils you use in you barrel. The faster your round is going to travel and thus better penitration. Second the bigger the bore the larger the round, but that also means you use a lot more power in firing it.

 

[Incap]

TE already made one. It's a cannon with beam slaved to it, with a punch through effect.

Railguns have been suggested over a million times already. Your own approach isn't new at all, it's been suggested 9/10 when it comes to railguns. Please check other threads before you post your own. You can avoid a lot of grief like that. As for your suggestion, it's pretty redundant in the face of the current system. That gun isn't really a railgun, but we named it that because we wanted to. That's what the devs wanted to give us, the choice to customize and name things as we see fit.

 

[jayman38]

The only thing keeping you from making a rail/coil/gauss gun as described in OP in game right now is the lack of a block dispenser. (Let me know if there is one!) Then you can use logic and a push pulse system to propel a dispensed disintegrator block at high speed.

A few points of sadness:
1. You are not required to build out the rails. On the other hand, this gives you greater freedom, and you can build rails if you want to see rails. You can build coils if you want to see coils. Etc.
2. You cannot add damage or damaging speed to a disintegrator. On the other hand, you can use more disintegrators and more energy to launch them to increase damage over time.
3. You cannot use effects, but let's face facts, you don't want this weapon to have special effects, other than Punchthrough. For this, you simply must send more disintegrators downrange.
4. You will need to use logic to first dispense the disintegrator and then trigger the push-pulse system. On the plus side, you get to use logic!
5. In universes (game servers) with space friction, the range of your cannon is severely limited.
6. The projectile can be shot down.

Bottom line: you don't have to ask for a new weapon system. Ask for a block dispenser instead!

Edit: I'm not sure how you would want to handle shielding. I would want my shields to resist this type of attack, and force the attacker to drop my shields before using their rail gun effectively.

I'm not sure exactly how dispensing would work, but I can imagine dispensed blocks being one-block asteroids, subject to being moved, separate from the host structure, oriented to be square with the dispensing block, but one unit away, so that it does not appear at an angle in relation to the dispensing ship. On the other hand, for future changes, such as moving blocks, you might make the dispenser configurable to dispense either structure-attached blocks, or independent blocks (one-block asteroids).

 

[Proxima_Centauri]

Reminder that the "railguns" featured in the Halo franchise are nothing like real railguns.

 

[Lecic]

Sniper Cannons or Siege Cannons + Punch Through would give you the same effect. No support.

 

[Valiant70]

It's a cool idea, but sadly it seems to have no place in the current state of the game.

 

[Mariux]

Or, try beam computer with pulse slaved and punch-through effect.

 

[WaffulMann]

You know, I always thought this was a good idea. There could be 2 types of weapons.

1. The noob friendly one: like the current mechanics. Easy to build and makes no sense realistically. But fun. You can always link a cannon to another cannon with space magic and have a good autocannon.
2. The realistic one: requires a lot of research into game mechanics to build, and costs a ton of skill to operate but is ultimately worth it. Kinda like how we used to make asteroid-destroying railguns with pulsators. Things like railguns and superlasers where you have to build batteries and coils. But of course, not OP.

This would make specially designed ships (ex: death stars, halo ships, mass effect ships...... etc) actually specially designed and not just some power-thruster shell with a weapon slab that you can swap out in 3 minutes.

Just my thoughts, might make a thread out of it. You, OP, have my support, even though I will get a lot of grief for this.

 

[Valiant70]

While this is an old idea, suggested to death, I see no particular reason not to implement this if enough people like the idea for it to be worthwhile. I would use it. It would be particularly interesting if different types of ammunition could be swapped out instead of attaching effects like the current weapons.

The weapon system we have now works great for beams and cannons, but leaves some things to be desired with missiles, and leaves pulse weapons largely unused as master weapon modules. The current system is good. It's really good, but let no one tell me it cannot be improved and expanded.