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[NAV]

Does the mind rot cost one token per shot, or one token per magazine of ten?

Test the round vs a naked person, mk1, mk2, mk3, and civic defenders longcoat.
Also test how many it takes to bring down a t-rex.

Forgot me.

[tryrar]

edited my action piecewise just to move this along. Also, if I can't get the Mjolnir shell this time, I'll just roll with normal shells

[Radio Controlled]

No.  Not unless the generator is strong enough to power the laser at max power.  We pretty much never run out of laser battery power, unless people use it as a cutting device, and if that's a problem we should probably just make a better cutting device.

I'm not just talking about players here, but sod forces as well. Also, people have run out of battery before, it just seems pw keeps much less track of ammo now that there are many more people playing. And a lot of people in the past have spend tokens on hooking up their laser weapons to some sort of generator, so they wouldn't have to worry about ammo anymore.

Also, maybe we could give that laser some extra functionality, like an electrolaser built in standard. Just an idea.

Chemical explosives are a terrible idea.  Electricity is practically free in ER, plus chemical explosives are a extremely inefficient way to propel a bullet- most of the force is lost in escaping gasses after the bullet leaves.

Looking at modern firearms, and taking into account that fuels/propellants in ER have incredible energy density, that little bit of chemicals explosive could give some serious extra ooomph to the weapon, while still being cheap. Sure, adding an extra charging circuit might do the same, but to decide what is most efficient, I'd like to see some empirical testing done, instead of just going by gut feeling. You guys have a shooting range, you can do it.

...Why would we make them more powerful?  They're already at the level you can shoot a guy in the shin and you'll blow his leg off.  And nobody uses armor unless it's basically tank armor. The only real improvements I can see for gauss rifles are a higher fire speed, and higher accuracy.

Because that would be the low-tier answer to mid-tier armor. Sure, it still wouldn't oneshot a battlesuit, but it should at least still do some damage if hit in the right spot. Doesn't have to be gauss per se by the way, just an example, a rocket launcher is also good (though a grenade launcher is more a support weapon, I think). Or do a mix, make it a miniature LESHO but without the guiding systems.

I like Anton's red hand design.  It has a non-lethal level, although I guess it's not necessarily reliable.  It's still a wonderful sidearm.

It's not usable in vaccuum though, or underwater. Or a stiff breeze (though pw probably won't ever take that into account). Not to say it's not good, but perhaps not universally usable enough.

Then, make an automatic sub-machinegun of some form.  We have a distressing lack of them, and they are very powerful weapons in CQB.  Especially considering how little armor most people wear, this should be a no-brainer.

Could be combined with the second idea, since most battles don't go beyond lower medium range anyways. Keep things a bit streamlined.

[Sean Mirrsen]

I like Anton's red hand design.  It has a non-lethal level, although I guess it's not necessarily reliable.  It's still a wonderful sidearm.

It's not usable in vaccuum though, or underwater. Or a stiff breeze (though pw probably won't ever take that into account). Not to say it's not good, but perhaps not universally usable enough.

Haha, yeah. Although it's pretty much the perfect engineer's sidearm. With a built-in feeding mechanism for welding wire, it will effectively become a self-contained universal repair tool - it can cut, it can arc-weld, it never runs out of power and in fact can act as a decent powersource, it's reasonably precise, it doesn't need a holster or occupy a hand, and it's also a reasonable self-defense weapon, both as a hand laser and with the electrolaser function.
True about the limitations, though the stiff breeze won't make it not work, it'll just make anyone standing downwind of you really uncomfortable. But you can always electro-punch people with it.

Really, I have only a few modifications to make to it before I commit it to the armory. The mentioned feeder for welding wire is one, but what it really needs is a bigger emitter than the hand laser, perhaps a phased array of several hand lasers or just a reworked laser rifle emitter - the generator is made to power the high-voltage spark gap, so it can fire a much more powerful weapon without it. It can also use some kind of universal jack-in power port to recharge batteries or power small mounted weapons. So, as soon as I have the time to overhaul it into a non-jury-rigged contraption, I will make it available.

[Tavik Toth]

I'll probably finish my Halberd design after this mission.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Also, my own string of answers to stuff in the OOC thread (since it's IC here):

No.  Not unless the generator is strong enough to power the laser at max power.  We pretty much never run out of laser battery power, unless people use it as a cutting device, and if that's a problem we should probably just make a better cutting device.

Making it "standard" is probably not wise, but the Gungnir-S conversion kit, if sold separately from the saber and the rifle, is effectively just a custom bolt-on stock for the laser rifle that has a generator and slots into the power pack chamber. The generator effectively doubles the price of the weapon, but if it's made as a simple add-on pack instead of a DIY "assembly required" deal, it can very well be used as "standard".

This is... really relying on sci-fi, so I can't exactly argue against it very well, but I'm just gonna guess the weapon would have to be especially complex, and probably quite heavy, to do this.  Most of the time, I'd think having a normal gauss weapon with a standard caliber would be sufficient.

It's certainly a neat idea though, and that might be enough.  It really just depends on how much more costly it would be compared to standard designs.

The only sci-fi it relies on is a metamaterial that instantly transitions from liquid at room temperature to solid with the right conditions, while retaining magnetic properties in both states. Everything else can already be done in-universe, it just needs to be mashed together with enough force. (you know, so it fuses. )

My ideas:

First, Fix the gorram MK.1.  The UWM found some way to do away with heat fins, so we should probably copy that.  Then, add a large generator to the back, at least large enough to power a red hand.  Add a power port to the back of the forearm on each arm, and connect weapons to that.  This way, basic suits would cost more, but weapons would overall be cheaper because each one doesn't need it's own power supply.

Taking a page from Anton's MCS, add hardpoint all over it to accept things like a larger generator, a (sod) brain box, or special weapons.  Don't include stuff like exoskeletons and cameyes by default though.

Also, make sure it has a robust computer system so I can make WAFFLES very advanced.  _{No, I don't know what that stands for.  It's a battlefield awareness thing.}

The Mk1's we use are basically oldtimey spacesuits, relatively speaking. We use them because they're the cheapest and simplest thing around.
Really, anything we do to upgrade the Mk1 will just bring it closer to a Mk2, and is unlikely to do so at lesser cost. Though perhaps we could outfit the Mk1 with some of the Mk2's survival features, like medical systems and anti-breach compartmentalization features, at little enough cost to make this sort of a "Mk1.5" suitable as a default suit replacement.

Then, make an automatic sub-machinegun of some form.  We have a distressing lack of them, and they are very powerful weapons in CQB.  Especially considering how little armor most people wear, this should be a no-brainer.

And yet you say chemical explosives in weapons are useless... there is no way to make a compact and deadly SMG with gauss tech. Sometimes, there is no replacing an FN P90.

I think the main question we need to ask ourselves is what we want basic weapons to be for. Are they for expendable sods to use en masse? Are they for standard usage until you get something very specific for very specific purposes? Are they for newbies to remain useful even if they don't have a ton of tokens? Are they for unreliable people with stupid ideas to do things without causing too many problems? Because depending on what we're going for, the answer to what we want will change pretty radically. If we're hoping for newbies to keep up with vets, for instance, we'll generally want basic weapons to be short-lived but powerful, or to have a lot of utility built in that's likely to be useful but not replicated by more powerful individuals. If we want to keep newcomers from screwing everything up, we might want uncon and exo basic weapons that aren't amps or manips.

My idea for "basic" weapons is primarily "weapons that are intended to be most widely used in our forces", sort of "standard issue". They may not be the cheapest or the simplest weapons we have (no beating the Gauss and Laser rifles for cost-efficiency and blunt simplicity), but they must be suitable to a wide range of uses, and be cheap enough to mass-produce, while still maintaining a measure of "punch-above-your-weight" ability for the really desperate times. Both weapons I described seem, to me, fit that idea.

You sure these are going to count as "basic?" They seem pretty elaborate.

Going from the designs, though, it seems like your goal is flexibility and quite possibly standardization- making "basic" guns "normal" or "standard" rather than "garbage you use until you can afford something better."

This makes me wonder what the average life cycle of an ARM operative looks like. How many of what kinds of people are going to value these designs for how long?

Ultimately, a whole lot, I think. A lot of civilians are going to appreciate being guarded by Sods (and Artees) that have weapons advanced enough to handle a wide variety of tasks. The weapons we have, have a certain series of flaws, or perhaps one big flaw - they are too specialized. A gauss rifle, once you choose it, is good for exactly one thing - punching a hole in the thing you point it at. It's really good for it, as long as there's only the one thing - the refire delay means that you can't engage multiple rapidly approaching targets with it, and the shot power means that if you're threatened by something numerous and unarmored - like if Xan decides to flood the universe with Xanlings - then you're wasting your limited ammo on massive overkill of single targets. Conversely, the laser rifle is great for sweeping the beam around and killing little things, but it takes a longer, more concentrated and more accurate attack to kill something big with it. The designs I thought of try to address those two points, giving the weapons more versatility so that if a soldier has only one type of weapon, he is less screwed if he encounters a situation his weapon is not intended for. While, hopefully, staying cheap enough for mass production.

[Unholy_Pariah]

boot up the tinker.

Spawn monorazor sword.
Spawn one token worth of monorazor proof grade A vibranium metamaterial.
Put in a third slightly elongated limb in the centre tipped with a vibranium control anchor to hold the wire.
Move the hilt behind and trigger the vibrations from this new limb.
Reduce the distance between the original two limbs to form th crosspiece.
Make sure the new limb is thin enough to slide, or squeeze, through the hole torn by the monofilament.
Replace limb material with something stronger if necessary.

So yeah basic idea is this:

An extremely thin Vibranium shaping tip is attached to the new central limb and sort of welded to the wire itself.
This limb is then vibrated, either on its own or In conjunction with the original vibration source and allows the razor to perform slashing and stabbing attacks while the new thinner limb slides into the grooves the monofilament shreds in the target.
Basically monoatomic butchers cleaver becomes monoatomic gladius, or dirk, probably a dirk.

[piecewise]

Yeah, I know that mortars don't get to be used often, but I'm on the mission to the south pole so unless I need to actually get inside the thing we are digging up I won't have a problem not using this

So, if nothing here isn't something I can't carry by myself, ramp this up to 80mm, 100mm, and 120mm and see if I can still carry the 120mm. Afterwards, test out the Mjolnir shell. What is it's blast radius? What affect does the amp have?

Next, options for the incendiary shell. What substances can I use to achieve the maximum carnage with burning death?

Finally, cost breakdown of all the mortars, shells, and materials. Would this be able to be prototyped?

For simplicity, I want to get the biggest one I can carry prototyped. If that's the 120mm mortar, cool. If not, the 100mm

No, what I meant was nothing here looks to be something that needs to be modified in order to work. If you keep making it bigger you're not gonna be able to carry as many shells. I mean, 120mm are stupid big. You'd be able to carry like 2 and nothing else.

That shell would really only be effective if it's directly over something. The explosion is just gonna create a  really powerful downward shockwave because the amp will focus all the force of the blast straight out as an expanding cone of force. So you'd basically need a direct hit.

Namite

Cost? Oh, shells will probably be pretty cheap. Token or 2. Mortar itself is upwards of 8 to 10. As per prototyping, you're gonna have to explain to the armory master how this thing is significantly different from just buying a gauss cannon and firing in parabolas.

Yeah, I was thinking that the main limitation of the Rainbow Cannon is energy consumption (and possibly overheating, haven't tried firing for that long).

So if I were to be able to gain power easily from anywhere I want (by simply ripping power cables off a wall and attaching them on the battlesuit's armour for example) I could fire for much longer without having to wait to recharge the battlesuit's capacitors, at the cost of becoming stationary, essentially trading mobility for firepower.
That's why I wanted to know if I could modify the battlesuit's Electrified Surface Defence System. So that this power transfer could happen automatically, simply by attaching the wires on it without me having to get outside the battlesuit and try to connect it with the power manually.
The ability to gain power by teammates (or enemies) hitting me with a tesla saber or one of Sean's electrolasers would be an added bonus, although it probably wouldn't see much use.

Would it be possible to do the above (charging the battlesuit's main capacitor) by inserting those capacitors you mentioned and perhaps a few variable transformers or diodes and linking the above to the battlesuit's main capacitor?
Maybe add a sensor and a physical switch so that a powersource can be tested before linking it to the suit, so as to prevent damage in case it's too powerful or too weak?

Ah.

In that case, there are a few routes you could go.

1. Your idea, wire mesh and capacitors and such, would work fine, but be easily breakable.

2. My Suggestion is that you use a "universal" plug (ie a conductive metal cup that you could just jam wires or cabling into) and have that fill an internal battery. You'd still need the capacitors and such to bring it down or up to the right current, but that battery, if you rig it up right, could then be charged from an external source or, if the suit isn't using it's full power, just charge the battery with it.

Does the mind rot cost one token per shot, or one token per magazine of ten?

Test the round vs a naked person, mk1, mk2, mk3, and civic defenders longcoat.
Also test how many it takes to bring down a t-rex.

Forgot me.

It costs 1 token per small bottle. How far that goes depends on how much you put in each round.

And really thats rather important, because if you're just putting a small amount in there, all thats gonna happen is when the bullet hits the blood flowing out is gonna take the Mindrot with it and not gonna effect the target. You're better off using some sort of gas grenade or chemical sprayer, or a dart round.

boot up the tinker.

Spawn monorazor sword.
Spawn one token worth of monorazor proof grade A vibranium metamaterial.
Put in a third slightly elongated limb in the centre tipped with a vibranium control anchor to hold the wire.
Move the hilt behind and trigger the vibrations from this new limb.
Reduce the distance between the original two limbs to form th crosspiece.
Make sure the new limb is thin enough to slide, or squeeze, through the hole torn by the monofilament.
Replace limb material with something stronger if necessary.

So yeah basic idea is this:

An extremely thin Vibranium shaping tip is attached to the new central limb and sort of welded to the wire itself.
This limb is then vibrated, either on its own or In conjunction with the original vibration source and allows the razor to perform slashing and stabbing attacks while the new thinner limb slides into the grooves the monofilament shreds in the target.
Basically monoatomic butchers cleaver becomes monoatomic gladius, or dirk, probably a dirk.

That would basically just snap the filament at the stress point of the "Vibranimum" Thats the problem with monorazor stuff, you can't really stab with it.

You could stab with something like renen's sword,  but his stuff has all sorts of unique problems.

[Unholy_Pariah]

Is the monofilament able to be bent at any small degree or is it impossible for... reasons?

[Parisbre56]

Yes, your idea does sound better. And using my teammates' electrolasers as a link gun probably wouldn't find much use.

How many tokens for that plug (I'm assuming it's just two metal cups with things to hold the wires and prevent them from falling off) and the capacitors and other electronics for the thing?
Would it cost extra to have a sensor that would test the current for whether or not it's too powerful, something like a breaker switch?
Could I use that rechargable vehicle battery I have connected to my industrial mining laser or does it not have enough power to make a significant difference? 
If not, what would I need to make the red plasma beam fire for twice as long? How much would it all cost?

While we're at it, what's the best energy to size ratio battery I can get installed in this system, how many times more long-lasting is it compared to Gilgamesh's main capacitor and what would that bring the cost to?

Oh, irrelevant, directed more towards our other tinker people designing weapons, but I read that the Russian Military is using some kind of generator that gets its electricity from an explosion to power their prototype railguns. Assuming that that technology has advanced and can create more power than our standard generator/capacitor combo, you could use it to create a gauss gun or pulse laser that would be more powerful at the cost of not having unlimited power.

[tryrar]

Oh, in that case just go for the 80mm then. As for how to explain how this is different from a gauss cannon firing in parabolas...Hm. Test how a gauss cannon firing like a mortar differs from using an actual mortar(range, shell accuracy, ease of aiming, etc.). If it's sufficiently different to satisfy the AM, great. If not, check the newbie fund to see if there's enough left to fund building this thing and at least 4 shells(combined with the five I haven't spent, that is). Of there is, save the shcematics to my wristpad and go to the AM to get this thing done and hit the shuttle. If there isn't enough credits left, shrug and just save the project, then log out.

 As for the Mjolnir shell....check how far out the cone of effect hits out to, and how far it's diameter expands. See if there's an optimal height to airburst the shell for maximum carnage to an area. Finally, load up a battlesuit and an AoW have each of them hit by the Mjolnir to check how well this thing destroys armored targets.

[syvarris]

Looking at modern firearms, and taking into account that fuels/propellants in ER have incredible energy density, that little bit of chemicals explosive could give some serious extra ooomph to the weapon, while still being cheap. Sure, adding an extra charging circuit might do the same, but to decide what is most efficient, I'd like to see some empirical testing done, instead of just going by gut feeling. You guys have a shooting range, you can do it.

Eh, true, we don't know how good propellents are in ER.  It still stands that regardless of energy density they're inefficient in how they apply it, which is what I was trying to say.  More than half of the kinetic force that leaves the barrel is still in the gasses ejected, which means that a gauss weapon with the same bullet velocity and size should have less than half the recoil of a chemical propellant firearm.  Muzzle brakes can mitigate this somewhat, but they can't fully solve the problem.

Beyond that, adding propellents to the bullets makes them larger, and more expensive, even if you make them caseless.  And you get muzzle flash, which is more a tactical disadvantage but it's certainly a bad one.

Because that would be the low-tier answer to mid-tier armor. Sure, it still wouldn't oneshot a battlesuit, but it should at least still do some damage if hit in the right spot. Doesn't have to be gauss per se by the way, just an example, a rocket launcher is also good (though a grenade launcher is more a support weapon, I think). Or do a mix, make it a miniature LESHO but without the guiding systems.

Gauss rifles already do damage against battlesuits if you shoot them in the joints.  Not much, but you can cripple them.  And as far as sandpapering their armor... well, a Sibillus does that.  I thiiink a series of overcharged gauss rounds can sandpaper a battlesuit too, but that was literally fifteen hundred pages of on-ship ago.  And nearly two years...

And you're not gonna make a 'low-tier' mini-LESHO which fires a round larger than a gauss rifle.  It's a railgun, and uses a fancy (and expensive!) meta-material that reverts to it's original form when it gets shocked.

[Anton's Red Hand is] not usable in vaccuum though, or underwater. Or a stiff breeze (though pw probably won't ever take that into account). Not to say it's not good, but perhaps not universally usable enough.

It's still a very good sidearm, and IIRC most of the cost was for the generators, which would be negated if we link suit power to our weaponry.  It would be a suitable replacement for our current hand laser.

Could be combined with the second idea, since most battles don't go beyond lower medium range anyways. Keep things a bit streamlined.

Yeah, to be honest we could probably replace all our weapons with SMGs and we'd be doing better.  I'm as much an advocate of battle rifles as anyone, but we really don't fight many battles where range is needed.

The only sci-fi it relies on is a metamaterial that instantly transitions from liquid at room temperature to solid with the right conditions, while retaining magnetic properties in both states. Everything else can already be done in-universe, it just needs to be mashed together with enough force. (you know, so it fuses. )

The piezoelectric shards are a liquid that changes into a crystal under an electric current, I believe.

...This might be a good time to mention that I was thinking of making a piezoelectric SMG.

The Mk1's we use are basically oldtimey spacesuits, relatively speaking. We use them because they're the cheapest and simplest thing around.
Really, anything we do to upgrade the Mk1 will just bring it closer to a Mk2, and is unlikely to do so at lesser cost. Though perhaps we could outfit the Mk1 with some of the Mk2's survival features, like medical systems and anti-breach compartmentalization features, at little enough cost to make this sort of a "Mk1.5" suitable as a default suit replacement.

Yeah, that's a good point.  I still say the improved generator is important, because not having a power source in every gun would be quite useful.  Also, moving the power transfer point to the palm of the hand, so that weapons can be drawn easily and not have to be plugged in.  That would be very bad.  It might also double as an emergency taser- just slap the enemy with your electrified glove!

And yes, we would need versions of weapons with their own power sources for black ops.  Those could be specialized versions that are more expensive, or modification kits.

And yet you say chemical explosives in weapons are useless... there is no way to make a compact and deadly SMG with gauss tech. Sometimes, there is no replacing an FN P90.

D:< 
Honestly, there's probably no possible way you could have stated that better, considering how much of a P90 fanboy I am.  RL P90s would probably be sufficient for our purposes, actually.
But I disagree with you on the gauss weapons.  The P90 still has a ten inch barrel, which I'd think is still an effective length for a gauss weapon.  We can easily shrink the round to a 5mm too, and on top of that the weapon would probably have lighter recoil than a real P90. Not that that really matters.  Fires like a dream already...

Between that, and powering it by suit, we could easily get a high rate of fire.  And a gauss weapon can fire more bullets in a magazine by size, because it needs no propellant.


...Anyways, I'm only going to try for a gauss SMG if the PSL (hah) can't be miniaturized into a SMG cheaply.  Considering how massively effective the foot long shards are, a two inch shard should still be pretty horrific against a human.

Ultimately, a whole lot, I think. A lot of civilians are going to appreciate being guarded by Sods (and Artees) that have weapons advanced enough to handle a wide variety of tasks. The weapons we have, have a certain series of flaws, or perhaps one big flaw - they are too specialized. A gauss rifle, once you choose it, is good for exactly one thing - punching a hole in the thing you point it at. It's really good for it, as long as there's only the one thing - the refire delay means that you can't engage multiple rapidly approaching targets with it, and the shot power means that if you're threatened by something numerous and unarmored - like if Xan decides to flood the universe with Xanlings - then you're wasting your limited ammo on massive overkill of single targets. Conversely, the laser rifle is great for sweeping the beam around and killing little things, but it takes a longer, more concentrated and more accurate attack to kill something big with it. The designs I thought of try to address those two points, giving the weapons more versatility so that if a soldier has only one type of weapon, he is less screwed if he encounters a situation his weapon is not intended for. While, hopefully, staying cheap enough for mass production.

Yes, making specialized weapons does carry the risk that the soldier runs into a situation that he can't deal with.  But, he will be able to  deal with the situation he runs into most often very effectively.

Attempting to make every weapon be able to perform every role will mean that your soldier will be able to deal with any situation, but he won't be able to deal with any of them as well as if he had a specialized gun.  If 80% of the situations he runs into can be dealt with the specialized one, you should give him the specialized one because chances are he'll die in one of those situations anyways.

Besides, we have swiss army knives in our forces anyways.  We call them space wizards.


Also, Radio and Sean, when you're quoting posts could you start writing your message on a newline after the (/quote) tag?  As it is, you just have these massive lumps that are hard to parse in the message box.


Completely unrelated: HEY!  PIECEWISE!  Do robot-body people have things that mimick the functions of glands, like the adrenal glands?  Do they suffer/benefit from fight-or-flight?

[Sean Mirrsen]

And yet you say chemical explosives in weapons are useless... there is no way to make a compact and deadly SMG with gauss tech. Sometimes, there is no replacing an FN P90.

D:< 
Honestly, there's probably no possible way you could have stated that better, considering how much of a P90 fanboy I am.  RL P90s would probably be sufficient for our purposes, actually.
But I disagree with you on the gauss weapons.  The P90 still has a ten inch barrel, which I'd think is still an effective length for a gauss weapon.  We can easily shrink the round to a 5mm too, and on top of that the weapon would probably have lighter recoil than a real P90. Not that that really matters.  Fires like a dream already...

Between that, and powering it by suit, we could easily get a high rate of fire.  And a gauss weapon can fire more bullets in a magazine by size, because it needs no propellant.


...Anyways, I'm only going to try for a gauss SMG if the PSL (hah) can't be miniaturized into a SMG cheaply.  Considering how massively effective the foot long shards are, a two inch shard should still be pretty horrific against a human.

Gauss SMGs face a whole slew of problems even not taking the power requirements into account. Everything from heating to electrode erosion is an issue, and the required capacitors alone would take up significant space. Not saying it's impossible, but it will need a rather drastic rework of the whole principle of the weapon.

Yes, making specialized weapons does carry the risk that the soldier runs into a situation that he can't deal with.  But, he will be able to  deal with the situation he runs into most often very effectively.

Attempting to make every weapon be able to perform every role will mean that your soldier will be able to deal with any situation, but he won't be able to deal with any of them as well as if he had a specialized gun.  If 80% of the situations he runs into can be dealt with the specialized one, you should give him the specialized one because chances are he'll die in one of those situations anyways.

Ah, but I am not taking away the weapons' primary strengths. Both of these still allow the weapons to function in their original role - the metamaterial rifle will still be able to hock large metal slugs at ludicrous speeds at the enemy, and the FEL rifle will still be able to produce an on-demand laser beam that it can fire continuously. In these cases, the weapon upgrades only serve to expand their usefulness, not make tradeoffs with their primary function.

Besides, we have swiss army knives in our forces anyways.  We call them space wizards.

They are rather more like swiss army chainsaw-chucks.

Completely unrelated: HEY!  PIECEWISE!  Do robot-body people have things that mimick the functions of glands, like the adrenal glands?  Do they suffer/benefit from fight-or-flight?

I believe fight-or-flight and some other things are dependent on the hippopotamus in your brain hypothalamus gland, which resides somewhere around your brainstem, so robobodies should still have their various hormone-powered reactions.

[syvarris]

Gauss SMGs face a whole slew of problems even not taking the power requirements into account. Everything from heating to electrode erosion is an issue, and the required capacitors alone would take up significant space. Not saying it's impossible, but it will need a rather drastic rework of the whole principle of the weapon.

The capacitors probably wouldn't take up all that much space, actually.  The capacitors plus generators are only the size of a deck of cards in a full gauss rifle, after all.

And you can add capacitors to the side of the gun, rather than increasing the length.  The whole point of a CQB SMG is being short, so width isn't a problem.  It mostly just hinders where you can store the weapon.

Ah, but I am not taking away the weapons' primary strengths. Both of these still allow the weapons to function in their original role - the metamaterial rifle will still be able to hock large metal slugs at ludicrous speeds at the enemy, and the FEL rifle will still be able to produce an on-demand laser beam that it can fire continuously. In these cases, the weapon upgrades only serve to expand their usefulness, not make tradeoffs with their primary function.

Well, again, I'm stupid and don't understand the principles that your guns work on, and haven't googled them, so for all I really know your suggestions could be obvious no-brainers.  Sorry.

Still, the rule of "There's effectiveness, flexibility, and afforability.  Pick two." tends to stand strong.  Especially when you're working in a world where god dynamically changes the physical laws to keep things balanced.

They are rather more like swiss army chainsaw-chucks.

Yeah, that is correct.  Still, they're being compared to simple daggers.  I'm more affraid of the perfect master of the SWC-C than the perfect master of a dagger.

I believe fight-or-flight and some other things are dependent on the hippopotamus in your brain hypothalamus gland, which resides somewhere around your brainstem, so robobodies should still have their various hormone-powered reactions

Epinephrine is produced by your adrenal glands, above your kidneys.  There's other non-brain glands which produce stuff which affect your brain, I believe, but FOF was the first to come to mind.

[piecewise]

Is the monofilament able to be bent at any small degree or is it impossible for... reasons?

Well, it's an extremely thin, strong but brittle, filament vibrating at extremely high speed. The reason it's suspended between two points with a metal frame is because it will basically cut anything and the things it can't cut will cause it to break. Mono-filament is quite limited in that way.

Maybe you could ask the Heph people to make you something that is made for piercing.

Yes, your idea does sound better. And using my teammates' electrolasers as a link gun probably wouldn't find much use.

How many tokens for that plug (I'm assuming it's just two metal cups with things to hold the wires and prevent them from falling off) and the capacitors and other electronics for the thing?
Would it cost extra to have a sensor that would test the current for whether or not it's too powerful, something like a breaker switch?
Could I use that rechargable vehicle battery I have connected to my industrial mining laser or does it not have enough power to make a significant difference? 
If not, what would I need to make the red plasma beam fire for twice as long? How much would it all cost?

While we're at it, what's the best energy to size ratio battery I can get installed in this system, how many times more long-lasting is it compared to Gilgamesh's main capacitor and what would that bring the cost to?

Oh, irrelevant, directed more towards our other tinker people designing weapons, but I read that the Russian Military is using some kind of generator that gets its electricity from an explosion to power their prototype railguns. Assuming that that technology has advanced and can create more power than our standard generator/capacitor combo, you could use it to create a gauss gun or pulse laser that would be more powerful at the cost of not having unlimited power.

ahhh Not a lot. The battery is gonna be the real price decider. How big do you want it?

Well, the capacitors and such as for the purpose of making sure it can take pretty much anything you put in. Generally, if it's gonna be too much power, it will probably be kinda obvious. Any sort of normal cabling or electric wire should work; but you should probably avoid plugging straight into some sort of electrical anomaly or something.

You're probably gonna need something much more high density then that battery.

The BEST? You should know thats gonna be silly, both in how effective and how expensive it is.

Oh, in that case just go for the 80mm then. As for how to explain how this is different from a gauss cannon firing in parabolas...Hm. Test how a gauss cannon firing like a mortar differs from using an actual mortar(range, shell accuracy, ease of aiming, etc.). If it's sufficiently different to satisfy the AM, great. If not, check the newbie fund to see if there's enough left to fund building this thing and at least 4 shells(combined with the five I haven't spent, that is). Of there is, save the shcematics to my wristpad and go to the AM to get this thing done and hit the shuttle. If there isn't enough credits left, shrug and just save the project, then log out.

 As for the Mjolnir shell....check how far out the cone of effect hits out to, and how far it's diameter expands. See if there's an optimal height to airburst the shell for maximum carnage to an area. Finally, load up a battlesuit and an AoW have each of them hit by the Mjolnir to check how well this thing destroys armored targets.

It's really basically gonna be the same. You could just strap an adjustable stand to the cannon and get the same effect because the two are mechanically pretty much identical, just a tube that uses gauss coils to fire big metal shells.

And I don't think there's enough cash in the newbie fund/ don't think miya would be cool with one person hording all of it just to make a weapon he made.

Looking at modern firearms, and taking into account that fuels/propellants in ER have incredible energy density, that little bit of chemicals explosive could give some serious extra ooomph to the weapon, while still being cheap. Sure, adding an extra charging circuit might do the same, but to decide what is most efficient, I'd like to see some empirical testing done, instead of just going by gut feeling. You guys have a shooting range, you can do it.

Eh, true, we don't know how good propellents are in ER.  It still stands that regardless of energy density they're inefficient in how they apply it, which is what I was trying to say.  More than half of the kinetic force that leaves the barrel is still in the gasses ejected, which means that a gauss weapon with the same bullet velocity and size should have less than half the recoil of a chemical propellant firearm.  Muzzle brakes can mitigate this somewhat, but they can't fully solve the problem.

Beyond that, adding propellents to the bullets makes them larger, and more expensive, even if you make them caseless.  And you get muzzle flash, which is more a tactical disadvantage but it's certainly a bad one.

Because that would be the low-tier answer to mid-tier armor. Sure, it still wouldn't oneshot a battlesuit, but it should at least still do some damage if hit in the right spot. Doesn't have to be gauss per se by the way, just an example, a rocket launcher is also good (though a grenade launcher is more a support weapon, I think). Or do a mix, make it a miniature LESHO but without the guiding systems.

Gauss rifles already do damage against battlesuits if you shoot them in the joints.  Not much, but you can cripple them.  And as far as sandpapering their armor... well, a Sibillus does that.  I thiiink a series of overcharged gauss rounds can sandpaper a battlesuit too, but that was literally fifteen hundred pages of on-ship ago.  And nearly two years...

And you're not gonna make a 'low-tier' mini-LESHO which fires a round larger than a gauss rifle.  It's a railgun, and uses a fancy (and expensive!) meta-material that reverts to it's original form when it gets shocked.

[Anton's Red Hand is] not usable in vaccuum though, or underwater. Or a stiff breeze (though pw probably won't ever take that into account). Not to say it's not good, but perhaps not universally usable enough.

It's still a very good sidearm, and IIRC most of the cost was for the generators, which would be negated if we link suit power to our weaponry.  It would be a suitable replacement for our current hand laser.

Could be combined with the second idea, since most battles don't go beyond lower medium range anyways. Keep things a bit streamlined.

Yeah, to be honest we could probably replace all our weapons with SMGs and we'd be doing better.  I'm as much an advocate of battle rifles as anyone, but we really don't fight many battles where range is needed.

The only sci-fi it relies on is a metamaterial that instantly transitions from liquid at room temperature to solid with the right conditions, while retaining magnetic properties in both states. Everything else can already be done in-universe, it just needs to be mashed together with enough force. (you know, so it fuses. )

The piezoelectric shards are a liquid that changes into a crystal under an electric current, I believe.

...This might be a good time to mention that I was thinking of making a piezoelectric SMG.

The Mk1's we use are basically oldtimey spacesuits, relatively speaking. We use them because they're the cheapest and simplest thing around.
Really, anything we do to upgrade the Mk1 will just bring it closer to a Mk2, and is unlikely to do so at lesser cost. Though perhaps we could outfit the Mk1 with some of the Mk2's survival features, like medical systems and anti-breach compartmentalization features, at little enough cost to make this sort of a "Mk1.5" suitable as a default suit replacement.

Yeah, that's a good point.  I still say the improved generator is important, because not having a power source in every gun would be quite useful.  Also, moving the power transfer point to the palm of the hand, so that weapons can be drawn easily and not have to be plugged in.  That would be very bad.  It might also double as an emergency taser- just slap the enemy with your electrified glove!

And yes, we would need versions of weapons with their own power sources for black ops.  Those could be specialized versions that are more expensive, or modification kits.

And yet you say chemical explosives in weapons are useless... there is no way to make a compact and deadly SMG with gauss tech. Sometimes, there is no replacing an FN P90.

D:< 
Honestly, there's probably no possible way you could have stated that better, considering how much of a P90 fanboy I am.  RL P90s would probably be sufficient for our purposes, actually.
But I disagree with you on the gauss weapons.  The P90 still has a ten inch barrel, which I'd think is still an effective length for a gauss weapon.  We can easily shrink the round to a 5mm too, and on top of that the weapon would probably have lighter recoil than a real P90. Not that that really matters.  Fires like a dream already...

Between that, and powering it by suit, we could easily get a high rate of fire.  And a gauss weapon can fire more bullets in a magazine by size, because it needs no propellant.


...Anyways, I'm only going to try for a gauss SMG if the PSL (hah) can't be miniaturized into a SMG cheaply.  Considering how massively effective the foot long shards are, a two inch shard should still be pretty horrific against a human.

Ultimately, a whole lot, I think. A lot of civilians are going to appreciate being guarded by Sods (and Artees) that have weapons advanced enough to handle a wide variety of tasks. The weapons we have, have a certain series of flaws, or perhaps one big flaw - they are too specialized. A gauss rifle, once you choose it, is good for exactly one thing - punching a hole in the thing you point it at. It's really good for it, as long as there's only the one thing - the refire delay means that you can't engage multiple rapidly approaching targets with it, and the shot power means that if you're threatened by something numerous and unarmored - like if Xan decides to flood the universe with Xanlings - then you're wasting your limited ammo on massive overkill of single targets. Conversely, the laser rifle is great for sweeping the beam around and killing little things, but it takes a longer, more concentrated and more accurate attack to kill something big with it. The designs I thought of try to address those two points, giving the weapons more versatility so that if a soldier has only one type of weapon, he is less screwed if he encounters a situation his weapon is not intended for. While, hopefully, staying cheap enough for mass production.

Yes, making specialized weapons does carry the risk that the soldier runs into a situation that he can't deal with.  But, he will be able to  deal with the situation he runs into most often very effectively.

Attempting to make every weapon be able to perform every role will mean that your soldier will be able to deal with any situation, but he won't be able to deal with any of them as well as if he had a specialized gun.  If 80% of the situations he runs into can be dealt with the specialized one, you should give him the specialized one because chances are he'll die in one of those situations anyways.

Besides, we have swiss army knives in our forces anyways.  We call them space wizards.


Also, Radio and Sean, when you're quoting posts could you start writing your message on a newline after the (/quote) tag?  As it is, you just have these massive lumps that are hard to parse in the message box.


Completely unrelated: HEY!  PIECEWISE!  Do robot-body people have things that mimick the functions of glands, like the adrenal glands?  Do they suffer/benefit from fight-or-flight?

The robodies do a pretty good job mimicking normal bodies, complete with production of various hormones and chemical substances normal in humans.

Otherwise you'd see a rather radical change in the personality of the subject placed in the body. You can turn them off manually though, if you want. Though doing so may have unforeseen effects.