I was just thinking, after reading the thread about having repair beams feed off ore in your cargo hold.

How bout cannons that actually shoot the stuff?

you could fill your cargo hold with premium xith and have a green ultra-flechette.

shape,

and the advantage above eyecandy is what?

reload ammo without docking. just collect the scrap from the bots as you pulp the little buggers.

It's a good idea, but the problem is that with rapid-fire weapons, having ammunition means that twice the amount of information needs to be sent, so most people would tend to lag on firing.

This issue was brought up with ammunition for gatling turrets, and apparently it was pretty bad when only one turret was firing, and REALLY bad when lots of turrets were firing. And seeing as flechettes have a higher ROF, I'd assume that it'd have the same problems.

In practice (VO-wise), a flak cannon would work best mounted on a capital ship with no ammunition count but instead the cannon would be good for a set number of shots (say 100-175) before needing to be "reloaded" at a station.

Essentially it would be running on a battery that did not charge.

Yeah, that's what I was thinkin too. Don't make it ammo based, just
stop it after the number of shots equals the amount in the hold.

it might be workable.

"Yeah, that's what I was thinkin too. Don't make it ammo based, just
stop it after the number of shots equals the amount in the hold"

That would be the same as if you had real ammo, the only difference in the engine is that you'd have to click the buy button....

Shape and Celkan: I'm not sure (I'm certainly no authority on how this kind of thing works, I'm just going on what I recall hearing in the past), but I think even that is counted as "ammunition" because the server and client still need to agree on how much of each cu of cargo you have, and how much you're using.

It's not that I don't like the idea, just that I think I remember this being brought up before in the past.