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« on: January 28, 2016, 11:10:58 pm »
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.
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