Toxic Weapon Effect

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    With the new super-secret feature to space stations with .175, anti-alien combat is now a thing. Combined with new features making first person shooting a little more interesting (rocket launchers, snipers, etc.), this means that, occasionally, there will be asymetrical battles between (very small) ships vs. people, ships vs. aliens, aliens vs. people, and people vs. people.

    I was in the process of designing a light boarding craft for clearing abandoned space stations (tiny ship, relatively high shielding and weak, rapid cannons) when I realized there's a missing niche for effect blocks in such a circumstance: Toxic weaponry. In the same way that Ion effects increase damage vs. shields and reduce vs. hull, toxic effects will increase damage vs. organic entities (ie, players, aliens, NPCs), and decrease it to hull and shields, eventually dealing 0 damage to hull.

    This could be used to create weaponry for sweeping and clearing abandoned space stations without accidentally blowing the station to pieces, in the event that you wanted to capture it.

    Of course, the battle is already heavily slanted in favour of spacecraft, especially large ones. But this isn't for those ships, which will already have no trouble whatsoever swatting the occasional PC that gets in the way of their batteries. This is for very, very small spaceships (the size of one docking module [7x7x7] at the most) designed to fight aliens and players on their own terms.

    It's a pretty rare circumstance, but the development cost is probably pretty low--the textures would simply be a recolour of other effect blocks, and the math is already in place for ion weaponry.
     
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    What about the reverse? Could we get something that eliminates damage to players, even if it still does normal damage to shields and hull? Not sure what to call it, though.
     
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    What about the reverse? Could we get something that eliminates damage to players, even if it still does normal damage to shields and hull? Not sure what to call it, though.
    EMShot?
    Lore on how it'd work: the electromagnetism can disrupt shields and can cause extreme (damaging) currents within hull and systems.
     
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    Sounds too similar to EMP
    Anti-material?

    Though what would the defensive be? For toxic, it could be resistance to player and creature damage. Perhaps anti-material would be impact damage resistance.
     

    Winterhome

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    Sonic Cannon.

    Tuned to the resonant frequencies of the metals most often used in shipbuilding.
     
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    Corrosive and anti-material would be better than sonic, which doesn't make sense for a space game.
    Let's go with corrosive, since that's pretty simple.
    Toxic: Reduces damage versus structures, increases damage versus players and NPCs. Fractionally small power cost.
    Corrosive: Reduces damage versus players and NPCs, does NOT increase damage versus structures. No power cost.
     

    Winterhome

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    Corrosive and anti-material would be better than sonic, which doesn't make sense for a space game.
    Let's go with corrosive, since that's pretty simple.
    Toxic: Reduces damage versus structures, increases damage versus players and NPCs. Fractionally small power cost.
    Corrosive: Reduces damage versus players and NPCs, does NOT increase damage versus structures. No power cost.
    Ah, yeah, true enough. Sound needs a medium, and space isn't a medium - forgot about that for a moment. Could call it an EM cannon or something, dunno.
    Needs at least some minimal semblance of logic.
     

    NeonSturm

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    EM Waves can induce sound in materials.

    I like the idea of special modulation for weapons to be effective against specific components.

    A weapon may require for example a block to have 30% price in some component and scales from there linearly or exponentially up to 100% in that component.