Lasers

[FreeRiderCz]

Well for some time when i buy my first power armor (similar to F4) i thought about some laser weapons, mby even some laser turrets as defence for colonists, should be cool and add more hi tech future feeling from game :-)


Also cool stuff could be some laser gates (for prison) or laser defence equipment (for hallways near entries)

[skullywag]

We have mods with lasers in them, guns and turrets. I dont think theyre right for the core game as the only energy weapons are charge weapons i believe.

[Mikhail Reign]

which is why their should be more. Its the far future - it doesnt make sense that 90% of weapons are the same as the ones we use today. I mean we are moving away from kinetic weapons NOW.

+1 for Laser weapons. A whole batch of them. With their own mechanic if possible - eg: slower fire rate, higher damage, hits everything in a straight line for X squares. I'd like lee enfields and m16 to be a rare random find, not what everyone is using in the the far future.

[FreeRiderCz]

exactly my thinking behind this.... when humanity can travel among stars, bullets are ye old technology.... lasers or plasma guns or something with x-rays or mega slime ball shrapnell or w/e :-D infinite number of choices (lighting gun oh my god!!! ) and we got tribal noobs with spikes and maces :-)

im not saying we should have 20 000 weapons but some kind of hi tech (for example like glitterwood health care) we could ahve glitterwood weaponary :-)

[JesterHell]

While I do think that there is room for high tech weapons to be added to Rimworld but I think that the majority will always be projectile weapons, this seems to be the case in most sci-fi where there is disparity in tech level though out the setting, its generally explained with the tech level need to build and maintain lasers weapons being a lot higher then that needed for basic firearms.

[Mikhail Reign]

Well... Even Firefly had them carrying some kind of energy based weapons.

Given the tech that surrounds them, and that they create, it would seem strange if they were just happy to use 2000 year old weapons tech. I mean I always figured that they used some kind of energy weapon to mine.

[Limdood]

Charge Rifles....

[Mikhail Reign]

Charge Rifles....

Yeah but its the only (right? havent seen any others) energy based weapon in the game. Thats like if today we all used bow's and arrows, but there was also occasionally a rifle. The game is set over 3000 years in the future.

[Iwillbenicetou]

Charge Rifles....

Or maybe have a charge rifle esc turret
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[NephilimNexus]

I'd be cool with lasers as long as they're done right.

Lasers, even military grade ones, are not very powerful.  It takes a laser the size the of a freight container just to melt through a steel beam in under five minutes; you could do more damage with a blowtorch if you could get close enough.

So why bother?  Accuracy.  Despite a lifetime of Hollywood nonsense, the fact is that nobody and nothing is ever going to dodge a laser beam.  If you can see it, you can hit.  You don't have to lead your target, you don't have to worry about bullet drop or wind conditions.  Unless you're near a black hole or stellar mass it's just point and hit.  This is why the military focuses laser weapons on taking out planes & missiles instead of battleships.  They're really good for swatting fast moving, hard-to-hit targets that are fairly fragile to begin with.

What does this mean for the game?  A realistic man-portable laser weapon should have three main attributes:

1) Incredible accuracy over vast ranges.
2) Instant shot impact.
3) Very little actual damage per shot.

In other words, a laser rifle would be perfect for a novice hunting squirrels.  It would be crap for stopping Mechanoid Centipedes. 

See, the problem is that Hollywood can't tell the difference between a laser weapon and a plasma weapon (Star Wars is probably the worst offender of all time in this regard).  A plasma weapon would have visibly moving projectiles (still damn fast, though), would likely have accuracy issues (magnetic containment is tricky) but do obnoxious amounts of damage.  In other words, the exact opposite of a laser.  Plasma weapons are what you break out to stop Mechanoids, not lasers.

Ideally, you'd give people a choice, as they both have their applications.

[Mikhail Reign]

I'd be cool with lasers as long as they're done right.

Lasers, even military grade ones, are not very powerful.  It takes a laser the size the of a freight container just to melt through a steel beam in under five minutes; you could do more damage with a blowtorch if you could get close enough.

You have to add 3500 years of technical advancements tho....

[Nonmomentus Brain]

I'd be cool with lasers as long as they're done right.

Lasers, even military grade ones, are not very powerful.  It takes a laser the size the of a freight container just to melt through a steel beam in under five minutes; you could do more damage with a blowtorch if you could get close enough.

You have to add 3500 years of technical advancements tho....

And also 3500 years of advancement for projectile weapons, but we don't see any of that. We know that many worlds have had several major disasters that reduced their tech level significantly, so it's not unreasonable that there would be technology from our near-future as well. If there are guns from the late 2nd millennium, then it stands to reason that there would be laser weapons from the early 3rd millennium.

And while we're at it, why not add a greater variety of weaponry? In addition to high-accuracy, low-damage laser weapons somewhat short-ranged (because the plasma confinement would fail at longer distances), low-accuracy, high-damage plasma weapons (as suggested by NephilimNexus), decent-damage, low rate-of-fire, significant range Gauß weaponry (which fires electromagnetically accelerated kinetic projectiles). Some of the current projectile weapons could be replaced by those "advanced" variants so there aren't too many weapons (for example a Gauß sniper rifle instead of the current one).