Ok. a few people wants a uber high power snipr weapon. Others dont because of the "would you want to give it to a bot?" approach. Hell no! i dont want some bot carrying a gunb that goes really fast and does 12000 dmg or some sh** like that!

But i DO want a very, very highly acurrate, very, very fast (velocity) gun. But to prevent it from being 1 hit KO and useable for ram attacks, make it weak. Like 500 dmg per shot with uber zoom. And a slightly slow reload rate.

BUT!!!!!! have it so when specific hits on certain parts of ships do more/less dmg or do certain dmg, make it so this gun can punch through a cockpit and kill the pilot. So if you manage to hit the 'pit on a ship, it's a 1 hit KO, but if you just hit the rest of the ship, big deal.


I would feel safe giving this to a bot because unless specificly programmed, they wouldn't go for 'pit shots. They'd just pop you for 500 dmg.

So.... For the lazy people who dont wanna read..

Sniper Rifle (that name really, really sucks for a space sim..)

Dmg: 500 ('pit shots are 1 hit kills)
Speed: 3000 m/s (a bit.. questionable...)
Range: 6000 m
Ammo: 60 metal slugs (cheap stuff)
Reload Rate: .5 sec

Extra: Fills up 1 small slot:
High Powered Scope
When activated, allows you to see out to 6000m clearly and dead accuretly.

Hmmm...ok.

Make it a large weapon. Make it require 150 energy to fire. Make it have zero autoaiming. Change the name to 'warp cannon' or something.

Critical hits would be cool, but I'm not sure 'one hit KO on the cockpit' is that cool. More along the lines of 'engine produces 50% power for 30 seconds', 'battery storage reduced by 50% until repaired in station', 'weapon #2 knocked out of commision for 30 seconds', and so forth. Then rather than make this weapon totally different than all other weapons, when/if we get critical hits just make this weapon inflict criticals at double the normal rate.

but if you puncture someone's pit...... he's dead.

Nah, there's enough air in there to last a few minutes until the force field kicks in. Didn't you watch Nemesis? :P

I really really really really like the critical hit = ship failures approach. Mostly because it allows players to pirate RPG-style rather than FPS-style. (yes... on the RPG soapbox again :)

FPS-type pirate: kill people. Take their cargo.

RPG-type pirate: Disable ship. Demand tribute. If none is given, destroy ship and take cargo. <-- this doesn't work now, because if you take the time to type your demand, your prey gets away.

Combined with in-space repairs, this leads to enhanced teamwork as well ("help! I'm floating dead in sector 7. There's three pirates here, so come in a group!")

Sorry for the double post...

Back to the topic of the sniper rifle...

To expound upon Celebrim's idea:

With any weapon, when your hull reaches zero, systems should start to fail. That is, zero hull doesn't equal immediate death. Rather, it makes every additional shot rip up your critical systems. This is basically the same thing as death, as you will be a sitting duck.

Rather than having the sniper rifle bring the hull to zero, have it do piss-poor damage as suggested (less than 500... maybe only 50). But the sniper rifle bypasses the hull completely, and does critical damage regardless. You destroy internal systems leaving the hull intact. This would help to balance the sniper rifle, as it would leave the ship somewhat intact. It would also make sense; the very tiny hole created by the sniper would not destroy hull or armor, but it would penetrate them and get the soft gooey innards of your ship.

Of course, some of those internal systems should be VERY critical... such as life support (3 minutes to live), fuel system (explosion causes major damage and another critical hit), ammo (all ammo/rockets jettison and explode at random intervals), navigation (dead in the water), battery (dead in the water and defenseless), etc... oh, and a very slim chance of hitting the pilot right in his face. Splat!

the way the community is, i don't like that idea.

1 question how is this not the best close range weapon that would be in the game? 3000m/s you could hit anything ever time, you'd just have to keep a distance of 200-400m and they couldn't hit you, where as you'd have no prob hitting them (assuming the scope can be un-activated).

Also there's no particular reason that the cockpit has to be weaker just because it's see through. The material used could be ever bit as strong as the rest of the ship.

Eldrad: I'd thought of that, which is why I suggested large weapon only and low efficiency rating. Large weapon implies reasonably unmanueverable ship (Prometheus aside). Low efficiency rating implies few shots can be made within a short period. However, even so I'm largely in agreement with you. Most people suggesting 'sniper weapons' don't seem to be able to imagine how they would actually be used. I just get tired of running down ideas and this one seemed better than most.

Let's suppose one of these. You can fire four (almost five) times before running the battery dry, at which point your rate of fire falls to your charging rate, or one shot per ~3.3 seconds. Since each shot only does 500 damage, it doesn't take alot of hits by the opponent to even things back up, and since it takes alot of energy to fire and your ship isn't the nimblest thing hopefully there is some chance that a ship could come to close range and maul you.

I also recommended that there be no autotargeting. This will present no problem for a bot, who will hit with every shot with this weapon, but will at least make it difficult to employ for a human. Still, because of the high speed there won't be much need to lead the target and just putting the cross hairs on the opponent and pulling the trigger should be good enough out to a pretty good range. I think you are basically correct in your assessment of the effective range of the weapon. Assuming lateral motion of 65m/s (the best case) and a ship's width of about 8m, the weapon will 'never' miss at less than 184m and will be impossible to dodge at less than about 300m. In the hands of a bot it will probably hit most of the time out to 600m, but only the best human pilots would have fine enough control to manage that except head on. Much beyond 900m and I really don't expect the weapon to be effective at all because I don't expect a human to be able to properly lead the target, though you'd probably get occasionally hits out to about 4500m if the target was moving more or less straight at you or way from you. It might be best to introduce a weapon like this at 1500m/s or less - which is still about 4 times the velocity of a railgun.

On the other hand, I know that the beam cannon moves really fast and can be dodged. Whether this is due to to deficiencies of the auto-aim or some factor I'm not taking into account I don't know.

It'd be interesting if multiple people sniped in groups, a good way to defend the flag, but it would be really annoying trying to do caps.

*wants to say something about the Dev Rail but wont*

Rogue> Don't get me wrong, I love long range wepons most likely more then anyone here, it's just that I'm tired of having my ideas shot down for long range weapons and it seems that everyone in this "community" doesn't want them at all. I've been hopping onto Tac-Ops and Infiltration to get my sniper fix for a past few weeks, that's why I kinda went *poof* on Vendetta. Then again, I'm really waiting for an update for this game, really really badly, perhaps then I can be on red and not have a fleet of proms back me up and have some sort of challenge.

I don't want to read through Celebrim's crap against sniper rifles all over again so this is just from a glance of the thread.

HALF A SECOND LOADING TIME? WHAT ARE YOU STUPID? You should have at least a 20 second reload time. Just to make it fair. 10 seconds is quite short if you ever watched anyone log off in-front of you. Up the damage a ton. Why I say this? Because the devs are going to slap a bullet trail on anything that can fire from such a large range. Not that the devs ever reply to these ever-so-stupid posts about sniper rifles. I bet I have to explain that too don't I? Well, there is a common goal in the game, always. Either it's the station or the warp, so you can easily kill someone with a weapon with such range. Get it? "I'm going to goto the station now that I've been fired at" "I see you going to the station" *boom* "ow" "I've only been playing for 8 minutes. I rule. Everyone else sucks"

hehe

mmhhh me loves diplomacy driven to the top :D

cheers

That entertaining rant brings up another question: are bullet trails even possible? What would they do to lag? I would love to have trails behind rockets (especially guided ones)...

Hmmmmm. No one would ever guess that Panda hated long-range weapons, would they?

Someone should delete that post of his.

Celebrim, I heard that the dev-cannon fires at 700m/s, yet is pretty hard to dodge (personal experience), though it has been done. On-screen it appears pretty instantaneous. I would suggest nothing more for such a weapon.

The idea of the sniper rifle/rail gun is such as a "first-strike" weapon. If you can get a follow-up shot, you'd be really good. I suggest:

Rail gun
20,000 credits
Damage: 3000
Speed: 650 m/s
ROF: 1 shot per 5 seconds (count it in your head, it isn't that long)
Energy/shot: 300 (prevents doubling the weapon)

Whether it should be a large port or small port can be discussed. I would favor either a specific ship, or make it a "medium" port, which I just detailed in another post.

teh dev cannon is hard to dodge because it has uber auto aim. If you're in the shooter's screen, it auto targets you. sorta like a bad ass turret.

I dunno about in post-3.2, but in pre-3.2 it had 0 autoaim and was incredibly easy to dodge. Oh, and because I don't wanna be accused of going off-topic, I like SirCamp's gun. Looks like fun.

"I don't want to read through Celebrim's crap against sniper rifles all over again so this is just from a glance of the thread.

HALF A SECOND LOADING TIME? WHAT ARE YOU STUPID? You should have at least a 20 second reload time."

Wow, its not often that people admit that they don't in fact know what they are talking about because they are too lazy to learn anything before jumping to a self-righteous conclusion and launching a tirade. But, while human nature is a fascinating topic, its not the subject of this thread, so I'll move on.

SirCamps: Basically, I see long range weapons in one of three forms: anti-capital ship weapons, first strike weapons, and harrassment weapons. Anti-capital ship weapons are too slow to employ consistantly against fighters, but have long ranges. We've already got one of these, the Avalon. First strike weapons have high speed and high damage, but lots of other penalties like slow cycle rate, ammunition consumption, no auto-targeting, charge time, and so forth. My proposals for the rail gun, the x-ray laser, the radar guided missile, the multi-stage rocket and the heavy rail gun are something like this to varying degrees. Harrassment weapons simply have high speed and low damage, so the can get away with fewer penalties that a first stike type weapon. My proposals for the smart rocket, the disrupter, and the streak rocket and Urza's proposal are harrassment weapons. Yes, harrassment weapons make fairly good close range weapons as well as long range weapons, but ideally you are going to be losing on damage output and ease of aiming.

Your prosal for a 'rail gun' looks ok. It's not two fast. You can't usefully group it. It's damage is high, but not enough to kill outright. The rate of fire roughly corresponds to the efficiency rating, but constant firing does drain your battery (albiet a little slowly). You'd probably get two shots in with it if the opponent engages you, but you'd be lucky to hit twice if he just breaks off and runs (as a trader). It might be best as one of the slots on a Ragnarok, to be followed up with sunflares and swarms at close range. If the weapon turns out to be a little too good, some pretty simple tweaks suggest themselves (dropping to 600m/s, upping energy to 350) and the weapon would still have its flavor.

I'd favor a 'large slot', but that's just me. I'm not entirely convinced of the need for medium slots.