This is 3000+ years from now and we're still using projectile weapons?

[SpaceDorf]

Larger lasweapons have larger charge packs, and deal more damage.  Lascannons (anti-tank weapons) and multi-lasers (machine-gun equivalents) have charge packs described as being the size of car batteries.

Which again fits the comparison to their ballistic counterpart, RPG's and Ammo-Boxes for Machine Guns.
I think Lascannons are the only ones which are clearly better then RPG's in this case because
they could fire multiple shots before reloading.

Also count me in for the double barreled plasma shotgun.

[b0rsuk]

You know it could be interesting if Rimworld had energy weapons which used the colony's power grid as ammo. They could cause brown-outs, would drain STATIONARY batteries, would compete with turrets and would absolutely not work far from conduits. If you wanted to attack with them you would have to take and install a battery.

Total Annihilation had Commander robots with super powerful weapons which worked that way.

[Boston]

Larger lasweapons have larger charge packs, and deal more damage.  Lascannons (anti-tank weapons) and multi-lasers (machine-gun equivalents) have charge packs described as being the size of car batteries.

Which again fits the comparison to their ballistic counterpart, RPG's and Ammo-Boxes for Machine Guns.
I think Lascannons are the only ones which are clearly better then RPG's in this case because
they could fire multiple shots before reloading.

Also count me in for the double barreled plasma shotgun.

The counterpart of Lascannons are Autocannons, not RPG's. Lascannons are, yet again, only superior in the logistical sense, getting 5 shots out of a charge pack before it requires a reload. Autocannons, on the other hand, beat it out in ROF and in capacity. On the other-other hand, autocannons require actual ammunition, while lascannons can be recharged by hooking them up to a vehicle generator, which is actually what usually happens.

In WH40k, ballistic (also known as Solid-Projectile) weapons are superior for specific missions and targets, while lasweapons are more effective logistically. Just because lasweapons are the main weapon of the Imperial Guard, doesn't mean SP weapons aren't used, or "laughed at", as one poster so blithely put it.  In situations where logistics aren't really an issue, such as police officers, Planetary-only militaries, or civilian use, chances are SP firearms are going to be in use, because, well, they are cheaper than lasweapons, require much less of a technological base to produce, and can be custom-built to certain situations that lasweapons can't.

For example, I brought up the topic of different ammunition earlier, but SP firearms can be silenced/suppressed, and have flash-hiders installed. You can't do that with a lasrifle, so when you fire one, the opponent will know where you are.

My Dark Heresy character was a former Guardsman, so they had a lasrifle that was their baby. However, when push came to shove, and I needed to be stealthy, kill hard targets, or do anything other than "be logistically efficient", I would switch out to an Autorifle with a suppressor, laser-dot sight and different magazines, varied between standard, armor-piercing and hollowpoint ammunition. I also had a Stub revolver (a.... basic revolver, pretty much), a laspistol, and a double-barrel shotgun stowed in my kit.

Don't get me wrong, I loved the lasrifle (60 shots per charge pack, and very little jamming? YES PLEASE), but autoweapons definitely had a place in my arsenal as well.

[Boston]

On a related note: it is really easy to reskin the Dark Heresy tabletop rules for use as a Rimworld setting. I've done it, and it works really well. Like, all you are doing is refluffing, no mechanical changes at all.

That has to be my favorite aspect of the WH40k universe, that is, the fact that you can do anything, anywhere, and it will fit. Different technological settings? WH40k has it.

Bows and spears and swords? Feral/Feudal World!

Muskets and revolvers, frontier settlement and such? Frontier/Colony World!

Cloudy with a chance of cyberpunk, high technology and conspiracies? Hive-World!

Note that the planet-types used as backgrounds in Rimworlds are almost-literally just ripped from WH40K.

Urbworld: Hive-world
Midworld: Civilized World
Rimworld: Frontier World
Indworld: Forge World

etc

[Mikhail Reign]

Why are you going back to 40k? I thought we kinda established that it was an off topic tangent? Different game. Different world. Their ballistic weapons aren't guns you can buy today - ie: they look 'cool'. 

[Jake]

Returning briefly to the original topic...

What limits the available firearms tech in this game isn't so much science but logistics. You're playing from the point of view of a tiny, isolated settlement that's totally dependent on what they can find locally or buy off the odd caravan. What do you think is easier to get hold of, glitterworld-Clarketech batteries to power a charge rifle, or a few hundredweight of sulphur to make gunpowder with? Or even fulminate of mercury for primers, come to that.

Same goes for the weapon itself; any half-decent metalwork shop can turn out some rough-and-ready but perfectly functional Kalashnikovs or Sten guns, but fancy glittertech kit requires the kind of tolerances you can only get with computer-guided tooling and probably a laser cutter.

[Mikhail Reign]

Yet I can hammer together solar panels, nuclear reactors, batteries, etc etc out of nothing.... Production isn't the limiting problem.

[OFWG]

...You're playing from the point of view of a tiny, isolated settlement that's totally dependent on what they can find locally or buy off the odd caravan....

Exactly, just the same reason you can't build a spaceship to leave the planet and have it autonomously pilot you to salvation.

Wait....

[Bozobub]

You're acting as if "reasearch" in Rimworld is anything like hwat we think of it.  This is patently foolish; how long do you think it would take, to research fro "here's how you dres stone" fo "here's how you build an antimatter reactor"?

IMO, "research" in Rimworld is merely your colonists figuring out how to implement and use found/known tech in their own situation]/i], not truly inventing it from scratch.  Think of a lifepod's "survival database", perhaps.  This would also handily explain why colonies share the same tech tree =) .

Remember, also, that these worlds have *compacted machinery* as a mineable material.  If you think 5000 years or so would be enough to turn machinery into a "pseudo-ore", I have a lovely bridge in NYC to sell you.  Don't take the given timeline as gospel.

[CrazyEyes]

Things like steel, plasteel and machinery aren't ores. The key word there is compacted. What you're digging up are the ruins of ancient structures that have been obliterated by the never-ending cycle of war that consumes the Rimworlds.

The lore is essentially that every inhabited world reaches a "tipping point" where the inhabitants either annihilate themselves back to the stone age with nuclear war, or (much, much more rarely) manage to put their differences aside, unite as a culture and develop into a glitterworld.

In Rimworld, your colony is located on one of these inhabitable worlds that has destroyed itself with war, potentially many times over. That is why you are able to dig up things like steel (which is an alloy) or components. It's why tribal societies exist alongside industrial colonies and space-age pirates. It's also why, outside of the glitterworlds, technological development tends to be limited - societies get to what we would consider the modern age or maybe a couple hundred years beyond, then wipe out all that progress with nukes and revert back to tribal status for several centuries.

To tie this back into the point of the thread, the explanation for the prevalence of "ancient" gunpowder weapons is probably because to the people on the Rim, those weapons are relatively modern and just about the best you'd expect to find given the general technology level.  Exceptions exist, but in general these weapons are abundant, easy to make and cheap to maintain so they're what people use.

[Mikhail Reign]

Geothermal plants, interplanetary rocket engines and nuclear reactors are'abundant, easy to make and cheap to maintain' using that standard.

What you know affects what's easy.

If I asked someone 100 years ago 'make me food right now' compared to now, what they would create would be entirely different. What they have on hand, what they individually know, what they culturally know - all those things would mean that what you make would be different.

So in the year 3000, on a derelict planet, after falling from the sky, if I ask someone 'make me a gun' they shouldn't hand me an M16.

[Headshotkill]

The lore holds true, even today on a much smaller scale there are still vast differences in technology used around the world.
We may have had ballistic weapons for over 500 years but during the Rwandan genocide alot of the murders happened using machetes, not because they like them so much but because the country was poor and technologically behind.

Now expand this concept on the scale of a galaxy with isolated worlds near the rim and having medieval worlds next to industrial worlds in a single solar system isn't too far fetched.

[Mikhail Reign]

My problem isn't with the mix of technology. It's with it all looking like I brought it from the corner shop in 1995. Like why of any gun design to be passed down through the ages, whispered around tribal camp fires, handforged in medieval furnaces, mass produced on fantastical futuristic glitterworld industrial islands an M16 clone?

[Jake]

Exactly, just the same reason you can't build a spaceship to leave the planet and have it autonomously pilot you to salvation.

Wait....

Yes, but look at how much of a challenge that is, and how much of the necessary raw materials you have to buy from external sources. Plasteel, uranium, even components for the most part; one settlement by itself can't do that.

And in any case, I didn't say it was impossible. Just really, really impractical without a lot of work and a much larger and more complicated supply chain, and for only marginal benefits; tribals or ill-equipped pirates die just as quickly to a bullet as they would to a charged-particle beam.

My problem isn't with the mix of technology. It's with it all looking like I brought it from the corner shop in 1995. Like why of any gun design to be passed down through the ages, whispered around tribal camp fires, handforged in medieval furnaces, mass produced on fantastical futuristic glitterworld industrial islands an M16 clone?

I prefer to think of the weapon sprites as a sort of visual shorthand; they probably don't look anything like that in real life, but they're shown that way in the UI so that we can identify them at a glance.

[CrazyEyes]

I don't know about that; we're able to learn to associate new things with existing concepts. I would be 100% in favor of some or all of the weapons getting a reskin to fit a bit more closely with the retro-futuristic look. They could keep the names "assault rifle" or "sniper rifle" rather than "VariTech VX77 Enforcer"  so that we as players know what we are crafting or looking at (although the descriptions can and should have such names). It shouldn't be too hard to identify them at a glance - for the most part, a pistol looks like a pistol and a shotgun looks like a shotgun.