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

[b0rsuk]

Or maybe, just maybe, those gunpowder weapons are pretty much pinnacle of what's possible with that technology. It's like with spears. Everything has been done and perfected already. There are only so many ways you can sharpen a stick. To get something better you would have to have access to glittertech factories, and you obviously don't.

[CrazyEyes]

Yes, a spear is a spear is a spear and the functionality of a sword isn't likely to change. But there's a reason they started making swords and spears out of steel instead of bronze and wood.

It's the same with the guns. The functionality shouldn't change, but the design and materials should. A plasteel gun, for example, would be lighter and could be fired longer without risk of overheating. The components would be more durable and less prone to breaks or jams. It doesn't make sense to use a gun model that has already been antiquated for decades.

Again, the functionality doesn't need to change, and I'm not advocating for pew pew laser weapons. I just think that changing the look of the firearms, purely for flavor purposes, would help them fit the aesthetic of the game better.

[Boston]

Yes, a spear is a spear is a spear and the functionality of a sword isn't likely to change. But there's a reason they started making swords and spears out of steel instead of bronze and wood.

It's the same with the guns. The functionality shouldn't change, but the design and materials should. A plasteel gun, for example, would be lighter and could be fired longer without risk of overheating. The components would be more durable and less prone to breaks or jams. It doesn't make sense to use a gun model that has already been antiquated for decades.

Again, the functionality doesn't need to change, and I'm not advocating for pew pew laser weapons. I just think that changing the look of the firearms, purely for flavor purposes, would help them fit the aesthetic of the game better.

The reason swords started being crafted from iron and steel isn't because steel was better (hint: preindustrial steel wasn't. Modern steel is, but that isn't what they had. Look up the difference between "bloomery steel" and "crucible steel"), but because the bronze age economy collapsed, making bronze extremely hard to get. So, they started using inferior iron, because that is what they had available.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse

There is nothing that even suggests that plasteel would let a firearm be fired for longer without overheating (heat is heat), nor that the components would make for less jams.

Firearm jamming is a function of the cleanliness of the firearm and the complexity of the moving parts, not how "durable" the parts are. The more moving parts a firearm has (aka, if it is semi or fully-automatic), and the dirtier you get it, the more it will jam. Full stop.

Yes, even AK-pattern rifles can jam, they can actually jam pretty fucking bad, contrary to the mythos built up around them, (that is because they have such loose tolerances, which in itself lends to their reliability, but when stuff gets in there, they get jammed all to hell), and they require regular cleaning, just like every other firearm.

The designs of firearms don't have to change, because they work, and why fix what isn't broken?

[b0rsuk]

What I read about the bronze is that bronze was simply more expensive to make, even if slightly harder and heavier (about 10%). Early on, officers had bronze swords while common soldiers had iron.

A plasteel rifle is not necessarily a good idea. It's light, yes ? So you'll suffer more recoil. Plasteel maces, or mithril maces, would be a dumb idea for the same reason balloon hammer is a dumb idea.

[Boston]

What I read about the bronze is that bronze was simply more expensive to make, even if slightly harder and heavier (about 10%). Early on, officers had bronze swords while common soldiers had iron.

A plasteel rifle is not necessarily a good idea. It's light, yes ? So you'll suffer more recoil. Plasteel maces, or mithril maces, would be a dumb idea for the same reason balloon hammer is a dumb idea.

That is pretty much it. Bronze requires some relatively-hard-to-get materials (tin, mainly, because copper is everywhere), and when the BAC happened, the trade of tin died off, meaning bronze got prohibitively expensive, on top of already being expensive.

So, warriors and warlords turned to the next best thing: iron. Iron was more widely available, which meant that, even if an iron spear was inferior to a bronze one, you could equip many many more warriors with them, and quantity has a quality all of its own. 1000 iron-equipped warriors are going to defeat 100 bronze-equipped warriors.

Such as it is with directed-energy firearms and ballistic firearms. If you can no longer produce/maintain an adequate number of Charge Rifles, you drop down to what you can produce: Assault rifles and Survival Rifles. Or, failing that, muskets. Or, failing that, spears and bows.

[Mikhail Reign]

Bronze isn't better for making swords. It's a soft metal....

Also can't produce charge rifle, but a power suit is fine. And a reactor. And a space worthy ship.

[Boston]

Bronze isn't better for making swords. It's a soft metal....

Also can't produce charge rifle, but a power suit is fine. And a reactor. And a space worthy ship.

You obviously don't know very much about metallurgy.

Bronze is pretty hard, actually, depending on what goes into it. Most high-tin (which is what weapons were made of) bronze swords are harder (and therefore sharper) than their early iron contemporaries. Plus, you work-harden the edges, making it harder still.

http://www.differencebetween.net/object/difference-between-iron-and-bronze/

The reason bronze "lost" to iron is pure logistics, plain and simple. Uncarburized (meaning not steel) iron is pretty flatly inferior to bronze in term of strength and edge-retention, but it is found in ample amounts on every continent. Tin, however, is extremely localized, meaning that if you want bronze, you need to have trade to the sources of tin.

No trade, no bronze.

Meanwhile, I could go down to the swamp in back of my house, and with some careful searching, find a source of bog iron. Not even bringing up hematite ore and other sources of iron. Sure, the bog iron will be inferior to bronze, but if that is all that I have........

[BoogieMan]

It's more about what is readily available, than what is best.

[Shurp]

So let's continue the bronze/iron analogy to charge rifles.  Let's say you have some brainiacs who know how to make awesome charge rifles but there's no plasteel around, so they make do with ordinary steel.  What do they come up with?

How about a single shot charge rifle that requires a significant cooldown time?

[CrazyEyes]

I'll admit I appear to have been wrong about bronze vs. steel.  And no, there isn't any evidence to support that plasteel is necessarily less prone to overheating, etc.  I was making a point.  The point is, while the functionality of gunpowder weapons are not likely to change significantly in the future, especially on the rimworlds, the materials and design of such weapons would change.  Maybe they're still made of steel, but a gun found on a colonized planet 3500 years in the future should not just be exactly an M16 - a model of gun first introduced in 1964 and already replaced by the M4 Carbine. It should be reskinned (NOT rebalanced or otherwise mechanically changed in any way unless game balance damands it) so that the visual aestetic of the gun fits the overall theme of the game.

So let's continue the bronze/iron analogy to charge rifles.  Let's say you have some brainiacs who know how to make awesome charge rifles but there's no plasteel around, so they make do with ordinary steel.  What do they come up with?

How about a single shot charge rifle that requires a significant cooldown time?

What would be the point of having such a weapon instead of, say, a sniper rifle?

[Boston]

So let's continue the bronze/iron analogy to charge rifles.  Let's say you have some brainiacs who know how to make awesome charge rifles but there's no plasteel around, so they make do with ordinary steel.  What do they come up with?

How about a single shot charge rifle that requires a significant cooldown time?

Amusingly, WH40k has that, a "Laslock". Single shot lasrifles, often cribbed together from spare parts of other rifles, with crude charge packs that, while they are tempermental, pack a hell of a punch compared to "standard" lasrifles. They are used in colonization efforts (appropriately enough), on lower-teched worlds, and in down-Hive gangs and cults that make them themselves.

Ultimately, all of this discussion about ballistic firearms vs energy firearms is really meaningless, at least until ammunition and the like becomes a thing.

I agree that weapons could do with a reskin, but that isn't really a priority. Like, at all. I would much rather have effective and well-implemented mechanics over some, bluntly, non-important reskin any day. That can wait until the game is finished.

[Mikhail Reign]

I agree that weapons could do with a reskin, but that isn't really a priority. Like, at all. I would much rather have effective and well-implemented mechanics over some, bluntly, non-important reskin any day. That can wait until the game is finished.

This is the most derailing argument. The whole point of discussions is to discuss stuff - saying 'oh well I'd prefer X over Y' is subjective as hell. Everyone is also aware that stuff takes time. Its not like anyone is demanding that this happen now, in the next alpha.
/rant

That said - how many passes have the characters had? Thats just fluff for stats - exactly the same as the guns. Its not like any characters have any back stories as cliche as "Fought in the Reitbam War before becoming a mercenary". If they were all that bland and obviously a contemporary carbon copy, it would all get old pretty fast.

Off the top of my head now - in the same way that statues have 3 or 4 variants for the same thing, why not guns? It would better represent the way guns would look if they were constructed adhoc on random planets. They could all be stack-able, have the same stats etc etc, but each gun would have 3 or 4 variations of skin (it could even be related to the quality ie: a legendary pistol would look like some kinda railgun/bullet hybrid like Mals from Firefly, and a poor one would look like M1911 clone - the stats etc wouldn't change from how they are, given that a legendary pistol is already better). This would help with identifying stuff on the ground - instead of having to click through all the weapons laying around on the ground to find the good ones, you could just SEE which ones were better guns.

You could even take this a step further and do this to all crafted items - nice hats look better then crappy ones, a little bit of wear on them when they are buggered etc.

I'm not saying never add anything new, but the game has plenty of different systems, I think a little bit of time spent tying them together into something a little more focused wouldn't be a bad thing.

[brcruchairman]

I'd considered contributing to this debate earlier, but after writing a solid three pages, I realized the point that I was arguing wasn't the point being made any longer. It sounds like everyone still here agrees that 1) Kinetic weapons (that is, weapons who do damage by propelling mass to a high velocity and letting momentum damage the target) are more likely to remain relevant in the Rimworld setting. 2) The basic functionality of such kinetic weapons (that is, using chemical accelerants to propel slugs of metal, and the designs to do so) is unlikely to change substantially.

The questions then seem to be, A) Would advances in technology make for any significant design changes, and B) Would a reskin of the current weapons help them fit better within the Rimworld universe? It's worth noting that the two questions do not necessarily have to be related; one could easily suggest that firearms today are likely to be firearms for our rimworlder while ceding that a reskin would make them fit a bit better. Conversely, one could also suggest that the current aesthetics fit better with the setting, even though the functions may change.

Because opinions are like arseholes, I'm going to go ahead and contribute mine. :p To point A I would suggest that advances in technology COULD significantly alter the profile of a firearm design. Things like the Smart-rifle¹ could compensate for human error, allowing much longer engagement ranges, thus necessitating a more accurate rifle with corresponding design changes.

Similarly, some sort of futuristic material could conceivably change the way heat is dealt with; a material with a high heat capacity and low conductivity, particularly if brittle but with a high melting point (i.e., wouldn't deform under heat) would make a barrel able to put more rounds through it without deforming and damaging the weapon. Or, as an alternative, perhaps a highly heat conductive metal could conduct the heat away from a hot barrel into extremities on the firearm; as silly as it might look, a gun with heat-radiating frills could, given adequate conduction, allow for a greater volume of continuous fire, and as a result also look quite different from a rifle today.

And yet another factor which is being explored today in the HK G-11² is a floating barrel; simply put, the barrel is free-floating and with its high rate of fire, the user won't feel the recoil from the case until after the last of the three-round burst has left the barrel. This makes recoil much less of a factor. The only reason it wasn't adopted today is because the design, which requires caseless ammunition, couldn't be standardized for NATO.

These are just some examples of possible design improvements. Some would have a minimal aesthetic impact, some would have major. The point here is that the firearms of today tend to be the best we can do today. I don't believe they'll improve by leaps and bounds, as the OP suggested, but I do think there could be enough little tweaks, particularly done in isolation where efficiency and not standardization is the issue, that could make a firearm of the future have a different and distinct profile. Still recognizable as firearms, I'm sure, but as Mikhail had argued, just not completely identical to the ones we have today.

As for part B) I admit I have no real opinion on the issue. The Firefly weapons seemed to have distinct profiles some of the time and familiar ones others. Mal's pistol struck me as distinct from anything I'd seen, while Zoe's rifle seemed to be a standard lever-action one. I don't think a reskin would harm the game at all; whether it's worth it for Tynnan to devote resources to it is another question which I don't feel remotely qualified to answer. :p

¹: http://www.tracking-point.com/
²: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heckler_%26_Koch_G11

[b0rsuk]

Plasteel - it is implied it's more resistant to heat because it's a spaceship material, and traditional rockets we have must endure very high temperatures coming from friction against air. Items made out of plasteel in Rimworld are very fire resistant, except power armor and charge rifles for no reason.

Why is a reskin needed ? Why not reskin swords, surely they must look different in year 5500 ?

The way a sword looks stems from
a) physics
b) human anatomy
There are variants, like longswords, rapiers for piercing, sabres which only cut, brittle katanas which require high skill to use because they're made of inferior iron, two-handed swords. But what else could possibly change ?

Similarly, assuming that physics and human anatomy don't change significantly until 5500, how do you infer different shape of a rifle from these ? If rimworlds have roughly the same materials and methods of production available that we have to day, how could they come up with something very different ? Only if there's some kind of discovery that doesn't require very high end factories and high tech production chains.

[Mikhail Reign]

Plasteel - it is implied it's more resistant to heat because it's a spaceship material, and traditional rockets we have must endure very high temperatures coming from friction against air. Items made out of plasteel in Rimworld are very fire resistant, except power armor and charge rifles for no reason.

Why is a reskin needed ? Why not reskin swords, surely they must look different in year 5500 ?

The way a sword looks stems from
a) physics
b) human anatomy
There are variants, like longswords, rapiers for piercing, sabres which only cut, brittle katanas which require high skill to use because they're made of inferior iron, two-handed swords. But what else could possibly change ?

Similarly, assuming that physics and human anatomy don't change significantly until 5500, how do you infer different shape of a rifle from these ? If rimworlds have roughly the same materials and methods of production available that we have to day, how could they come up with something very different ? Only if there's some kind of discovery that doesn't require very high end factories and high tech production chains.

Ight screw it. Nope. Screw it. Every gun in game should look exactly like guns that are currently purchasable in real life with absolutely 0 deviation. The Charge Gun should be removed because its impossible over 1500 years for humans to deviant from a design at all - since it is impossible to store enough energy to be a weapon obviously it shouldn't exist either. Leading from that, the power armour, and power shield should also be removed. The energy required by the shield is the same as required by a gun (stopping/starting a bullet is the same energy requirement) so obviously thats impossible. Looking back at history its plain to see that we have used the M16 for a millennia, and will continue to use it until the extinction of out species.