So the idea for this thread, is for people to post new ideas for weapons that would be easily adapted from old weapon templates. For example, here are 3.

Rockets/mines with an explosion that is not spherically symmetric. Imagine a circle of energy emerging from the rocket, sorta like in the butchered versions of Ztar Warz, where the Death star doesn't just go POOF.

Mines/rockets akin to "Death Blossom" from the last starfighter. Exploding and firing n3's in random directions, like a shrapnel grenade.

Non-spherically symmetric rails, i.e. like disks, very thin on one axis, a bit thicker in another, making direction specific dodging necessary.

Here are two ideas for weapons based off the railgun. I recomended the first one before in the thread on the PK mettal (and got reasonably good feedback).

1. "coup cannon" : This weapon would fire like a normal railgun, but instead of dealing damage if enough hits are scored it leves a mark on the target player's profile saying something to the effect of "Player X has counted coup against you". It would also increment a counter on the firing player's profile something to the effect of "you have counted coup X times". The only way to remove a coup count from your profile is to defeat the player who counted coup on you inj a duel.

2. "flack cannon" : This weapon would fire like a railgun but deal at least twice as much damage and have proxcimity detonation.

Healing Mine. Like a lightning mine but instead of hurting any ship within radius, it heals them.

Healing beam. Like a mining beam except it heals ships that you target and shoot. Much slower at repairing than the Repair Gun, but needs no ammo, only energy.

Concussion missile: Like a concussion mine, but a missile instead. (No damage, severe jostle)

The Demineralizer: A mining beam that does damage to other ships. Range 100m.

Tsetse rockets: Fires a salvo of 100 dumbfire rockets that do 10 damage each. Weapon has 5 salvos. Dont use any fancy textures on the graphics, lol.

Plasmoid Arch: Fires an arc of energy out from the ship, doing damage to all enemies within a certain radius.

The Flechette Cannon Mk IV: Actually does damage, and sprays a lot wider shot.

Tramsheds Special: Energy weapon that temporarily disables the 'roll' key.

Based on Shape's suggestions, different blast patterns and warhead types for missiles. (there are lots of real-life examples of these weapons. The AIM-9M Sidewinder uses an annular blast fragmentation warhead)

Spherical blast warhead: the simplest warhead, a simple spherical explosion with a small damage radius.

Conical shaped charge: a warhead whose explosive energy is directed in a cone forwards. It does very little damage to the sides, but the range of the cone is much longer than a normal blast warhead.

Annular shaped charge: a warhead whose explosive energy is directed in a ring that propogates outwards from the sides of the missile. Less damage occurs to the front and rear of the missile, and greatly around the sides.

Fragmentation warheads: warheads surrounded with fragmenting material that creates lots of deadly shrapnel to increase the damage radius.

Life Blossom: like Shape's death blossom, but fires repair gun instead of neut mkIII.

Falsify: Creates fake ship explosion animation, fake ship explosion noise, and fake ship explosion splash damage, at the current location of your ship. Your ship, however, is fine, and everything continues normally.

Strike Force Whistle: Calls a strike force to warp in to your location.

Bot Whistle: Causes hive bots to warp in to your location.

Poison Pickle: Drops cargo that has the same name as your current cargo, but is actually worthless, and weighs 10,000kg/cu.

Blinders: A series of weapons designed to blind and/or visually confuse the enemy. They act similarly to the 'mineral scanner' (the green scanner), but they have important variations. Some have increased speed... many are of an extremely intense bright white color, some have various ranges, and some can fire at the enemy without your ships nose being pointed in that general direction (much like Gatling Turrets are now).

Ravebeam: Entertainment version of the mining scanner, with rainbow colors, vast range, etc etc. For fun.

Here's another, less of a wep, and I'm POSITIVE its been suggested before, but I'd like to see em consolidated in this post.

Cloaking device, same as in EV, it would drain energy consistently maybe 55-60 per second with an initial investment of about 100.
you wouldn't be able to fire with it on, you couldn't jump sectors either. Also, you should be ever so slightly opaque, so that if they look hard enough they could get a read on it. If you're hit, it turns off, drains all your energy, and you take double damage.

(I'm sure if people think of a way in which this is broken, they can find another downside to this which would make it useable)

However, you WOULD disappear from the radar while it was on. It would be a way to introduce interesting maneuvering techniques on the battlefield, while they're still working on being able to hide (behind asteroids, etc..).

This should basically just be equivalent to changing the ship's colors during flight and could probably be tagged on to the same development as Guild skins (which would also require changing colors during flight).

in the meantime, before electronics slots come out, this could take up a wep slot, and weigh about the same as a normal blaster, 600-800 kg. This would make Cent mk III's into scouts, and would allow larger ships some surprise tactics.

Edit: to prevent drastic misuse, perhaps this would work well as an ammo based wep, you get 4 cloaks.

On a note of curiousity, I wonder if the devs could respond with the steps they undertake in making a new wep.

I remember in Escape velocity, one of the beautiful parts about it was that if you had a little program called Resedit, you could make plugins for the game which would go in the game folder.

The templates for weps/items were very straightforward, and it was easy to play around with them and come up with new interesting versions. You could also use this to create new missions/systems/planets-stations IN systems, really whatever you were interested in. Combining the the flags for existing weps allowed very interesting ideas, and if you had Photoshop, you could just make new ships/wep graphics on your own.

I would suggest, that there should be a quick way for the devs to
add content, so that adding devices/weps is a weekly process. So that the adding is not merely a way of introducing features, but a feature in itself.

I know that right now this seems like normal gamer talk. Ask for new devices when you're balancing, and for balancing when you give us new devices...etc.. Please take your time with what needs to get done.

But it would be nice if introducing a new wep or device was not a difficult process, so that you guys could do it very quickly, and so it wouldn't take time away from the important things.

It doesn't seem to be a difficult process... but they seem to take it slow as to avoid massive balance problems.

Asteroid Generator: Your ship gives off the same radar and computer information signature as an asteroid. At close range, though, they can easily tell that you are not an asteroid!

Aggro Missile: High maneuverability proximity missile that does 10 damage. It has 50 ammo.

I would really like to see ammo-related high rate of fire weps.

take a rail, multiply the ammo by 3, take the velocity down to 190-200. Make em reddish-white. drop the mass to 600 kg. and up the fire rate to about 4 per sec. dmg at about 700. No autoaim, slight spread to the fire. You've got a machine gun.

I would in fact like to see lots of ammo related weps.... they're much more interesting, people don't just spray everywhere, they don't waste their shots.

Shape that is cool, i like that idea too.

I'd like to see high ammo capacity weapons based on the energy weapons we have now. So the ammo neut, for instance, would have maybe 200 shots, a higher ROF and lower energy usage. It would be a non-CTC type weapon, maybe on par damage and speedwise with a neut2. The regular neut2 would stick around for botting purposes, but ammo based weapons would be the ultimate in PvP as one could actually use that turbo and fire at the same time. The higher ROF is so that you run out of ammo fairly fast with sustained bursts, although the neut2 fires fast enough for that I suppose.

Add in a reload beam and a support Rag would actually be a support ship with repair and rearming capabilities.

yeah that'd actually be pretty neat. Rags become the supply ships.

I like the idea of more ammo based weapons

I also like the idea of a cloaking device and here is my idea of how one could work. It would drain 50 energy per sec so that a ship with a fast charge battery could use it infinately but would not be able to charge while cloked. Also it would not allow non energy draining weapons to fire. I think that energy draining weapons could fire because you only get a small number of shots, anny battery other than the fast charge will not be able to maintain the cloak indefinately.

Another idea i would like to perpose is a mine weapon where the mines look like cargo boxes, and read as cargo when scaned at any range grater than 5m beyond their detonation range.

Yeah a rag supply ship would be very cool