High alpha strike piercing brawling gun

[SapphireSage]

Good day to those of you reading this!

I've been playing Starsector pretty recently, and I was thinking about some of the different roles for the weapons that were mountable on the ships. Some guns would have similar functions to other guns much like in Icarus (i.e. Anti-shield, Anti-armor) but performed their roles in different ways (i.e. consistent damage vs. high alpha strike, high range/accuracy, low range/high damage) and I thought about a missing weapon role that existed in the game.

In terms of weapons that perform piercing damage we have the minotaur, the gatling, the mercury, the hades, and the harpoon. Of these guns the only one that can be said to do a large amount of burst is the mercury field gun. Although the minotaur also does decent piercing damage, its also used mainly for pushing enemy ships around and its shatter damage as well. The harpoon isn't really expected to break armor on its own, and the two main guns are the gatling and the hades which do very good consistent damage.

The idea I had then was to have a close range piercing/fire gun that focused on performing high alpha striking damage instead. It would look much like a sawed-off mercury with the scope removed to make room for the turret gyros to enable it to have greater arcs that are required in melee distance and modified to fire off super-heated rounds, but at the cost of much of the range and especially the accuracy of the original.

It would have a high power, capable of stripping a goldfish or spire and getting close against the pyra and mobula in its 2 shot clip if the engineer was remiss to repair it after the first, but would have a long reload time to counteract that. This would mean that the weapon would rely on its initial high damage to strip the enemy armor (or get close enough for pre-firing) much faster than a gatling could, but would be disadvantaged in a long-term engagement. It would also do a good amount of fire damage since the gatling already does good shatter, and artemis are used for precision disables in brawls already. Fire damage has good modifiers against most things so while it won't be hammering components anytime soon it would be an important decision to either use the gun on the armor as before or deal a non-negligible amount of damage to the hull instead and potentially have to wait out the reload after armor comes up (as many people fire Hades into hull since fire does good hull damage).

It would be possible to mount two of these on a Spire for instance to try to create a ship with a greater close range alpha capability or on a squid for quick attrition damage against weaker armored ships. This way, captains who intend to brawl with a close range gun and want to do piercing damage have more choice with pros and cons than just picking the gatling gun and can allow for different attempts at builds and strategies featuring a focus on a high alpha strike capability rather than a focus on consistent output.

Thank you for your time in reading this, I hope you have a good day!

In summary: A new close range focused piercing/fire weapon that is based around a large amount of alpha strike damage toward armor with a long reload time.

[Ightrril]

It may not have Fire as the secondary damage type, but the Mine Launcher does go some distance to fulfilling this role. 1 direct hit from a Lochnagar mine does ~420 damage to armour, enough to 1-shot the armour of a Spire/Goldfish. If the mine does arm then the damage done to armour is just over 600, enough to break the armour of a Mobula or leave a Pyra with less than armour left. And you can't get much more brawly than a Loch mine

The reload time is very short (4 seconds) but including the rebuild time from Loch breaking the gun (I don't have the exact numbers, it adds several seconds though) you have the extended reload time.

The direct hit damage from Loch is similar to what you were going for with it, but it does lack the second shot per clip. However, the armed mine does give that extra damage boost.

Using the mine without Lochnagar, with only direct hits the most DPS you can get out is (unsurprisingly) with Charged rounds, ~240 damage/shot at 1 shot every 4s, so ~60DPS including reload. This is comparable to the Hades (66DPS to armour with normal ammo, 57 with Lesmok, both including reload and assuming 100% accuracy), so the piercing from the gun can be used in other ways too.

There are a couple of issues with this of course, the arming distance of Charged is 165m, and Loch is 66m, so to make use of direct damage primarily your ship must be closer and therefore be risking hitting any missed, opened mines. While the mine arcs are large (60 horizontal, 45 up, 15 down, also drop to take into account) the turning speed of the gun isn't too great, but it's not too low for most engagements.


It might not be a new gun but there are still ways to get that high immediate damage in brawling situations with what's currently in the game. A new light gun like that would certainly be interesting though.

[ZnC]

Hmm.... needs longer name.

On a serious note, my concern is that it overlaps too much with the Merc. The Merc has no arming range to limit it at close range, and does more DPS than a Gatling. The Gatling has higher DPS when you consider reload, and its arcs are much better. Combining the Gatling's arcs and the burst damage of a Merc might make the gun too strong. An idea would be to have a Buckshot mechanic like the Carronades. Incendiary Rounds can potentially throw out a lot of fire stacks, while the Piercing Damage naturally wears down Armor.

On a side note, one role I've always found that hasn't been covered is a long range, Light Flechette weapon. A Banshee, however, is similar to this and might overlap with it.

[MightyKeb]

On a side note, one role I've always found that hasn't been covered is a long range, Light Flechette weapon. A Banshee, however, is similar to this and might overlap with it.

Ranged flechette has always been one of the riskiest game designs muse has had to face. Balloon is the biggest target on most ships and, in a scenario where all guns had the same ballistics in the game, landing hits on the balloon is much easier than any component. At the same time, Balloon is one of the hardest components for a ship to recover as it takes 5 mallet hits, which is 45 seconds total cooldown, which is enough for 3 to 4 lumberjack clips at most and 2 at least, and in a good engagement, they only need 1.


Due to this, muse has made it so that in order to access any sort of long range flechette, there needs to be conditions. Right now these conditions include the requirement of a Heavy Gun ship, Arming time and a skill ceiling, aswell as some usability for the mostly-outdone gunner class. And even then, Lumberjack remains to be one of the best area deniers in the game.


The only way I can see the ranged light flechette being balanced is having the purpose not to take down balloons, but "putting stress" on it, eventually wearing it down as the fight progresses more, similiar to Mercury. Similiar to mercury then, it becomes clear that some sort of an arc limitation might have to be in effect aswell, perhaps not as severe as Merc but enough that you can't use it like a makeshift carronade without putting effort into it up close. With this playstyle though, I would not suggest arming time, as arming time weapons tend to rely on putting out high dps before the enemy can close the distance. For secondary damage type, I think I'd be okay with anything but Shatter. Current meta commonly consists of shatter damage weapons, there's no need to add to the list and contribute to repairing guns/engines of Icarus. I think Fire would go well with the "weary down" playstyle, though. I think it should be able to deal somewhat more than 250, perhaps up to 350 balloon damage in total, so in order to keep up the balloon repairs the engineer has to break chem and allow the flames to come in, or leave the balloon damaged for a few seconds. Either way, you have more leeway to get out of it's arcs than a Lumberjack, but the question remains that what would it's arcs be. It'll take me some time to come up with that, but for now I think reverting all Light/Heavy Carronade nerfs except the H.Carro's downward arcs will make the carronade game balanced, as now it rewards you with high damage for getting up close like it used to, but without the heavy clip making it so that you get high damage simply for mid range- as it would stay nerfed.

[SapphireSage]

Ah, my apologies about the long topic name of jumbled words; I was trying to have a title that quickly described what I was going for with this.

Disclaimer: My numbers are not updated recently, so they may be off. I'm also not very good with crunching numbers like this so if there's a mistake please let me know.

From the numbers I got involving the mine launcher(charged) and Hades(normal) the damages will seem to work out as posted below with the following information(assuming ideal, perfect conditions of course).
Hades(normal) Damage per shot(armor): 91.5, shots per second: 1.25, Clip size: 8, Reload time: 5.5 secs
Mine Launcher(charged): Damage per shot(armor)(Piercing): 243.8 (Impact): 104, Clip Size: 1, Reload Time: 4 secs

secs.     damage(piercing mine)     damage(Hades)
  0                      243.8                           91.5
  1                      243.8                           183
  2                      243.8                           274.5
  3                      243.8                           366
  4                      487.6                           549 (2 shots due to 1.25 fire rate)
  5                      487.6                           640.5
  6                      487.6                           732 (begins reload)
  7                      487.6                           732
  8                      731.4                           732

From then on it is as you suggest where they become much more similar in numbers. However, the only time where the mine launcher has an advantage in this case is in the first 2 secs where it outputs its 243 damage instantly and afterwards the hades takes over. Although I am unsure of how the buff is calculated alongside charged bonus using this formula:
Damage * (charged bonus + buff bonus) * (damage modifier) = total damage results in 281.3 and
Damage * charged bonus * buff bonus * (damage modifier) = total damage results in 292.5

which isn't enough to come close to stripping a goldfish unfortunately, making its use as an alpha armor remover with charged dubious at best.

In terms of lochnagar though, I will not deny its power; I will however say that it is situational at best due to the mine deploying directly in front of you.

I do thank you though for taking the time out and considering the potential of a new weapon niche.

In response to the idea of changing the weapon from a slug weapon into a shotgun type certainly sounds interesting. It could commit to a moderate amount of damage at standard engagement range or you could try to wait to see if you'll survive long enough to close and deal the maximum amount of damage you can on the enemy due to its long reload. It could also be extremely beneficial for a ship that managed to perform a successful flank and close to point blank distance before the enemy was able to spot them or open fire at the cost of reliability in a traditional engagement that you can get with the more consistent gatling gun.

Many thanks to those of you that take the time to read these walls of texts.

In summary: lochnagar mines are situational(low range), direct charged mines are outperformed by hades in the beginning, and a shotgun type weapon could provide interesting changes to the concept.

[Lueosi]

Most things in this game are additive, so

Damage * (charged bonus + buff bonus) * (damage modifier) = total damage

is the case. Also check this out in the wiki (actually didn't find it in the wiki, will come soon ).