These are ideas for people who don’t know what to make for the Space Weapons challenge of mine. The challenge itself is located here!
Kinetic Weapons.
Probably the simplest weapons, these are your dumb round firing railguns, cannons, and more exotic systems. Since this is SR2 the weapons here will be very different from ones IRL but will still follow some general principles:
1. Rounds are unguided solid objects. Guided rounds go under the Guided weapons tab found later.
2. Is reloadable: these weapons should be reloadable, due to dumb rounds you generally fire a spread with these weapons to on down a target.
3. Has a limited effective range: based off what I’ve seen, in SR2 most ships generally can avoid a projectile if they have 45 seconds warning of its impact. Always? No, some ships are just too large, but generally a projectile’s effective range is equal to velocity x 45
Alright, now that we’ve covered principles let’s get into the details of the different ideas I have
Rocket cannon
What? A rocket cannon? You’re probably saying “isn’t that a guided weapon?” Rocket cannons are basically just launch tubes for unguided rockets. Weapon life is quite high as the cannon takes no damage from firing each round but in exchange you have to accelerate the round over time, giving you a reduced effective range of approximately median velocity x 50 rather than max velocity x 45. I’d generally suggest a revolver system for these just to reduce part count but that’s just me
Booster cannon
This is similar to the rocket cannon but reversed: instead of the engine being mounted on the round it is mounted to the ships and pushes the round out of the barrel. In exchange for a lower max velocity compared to a rocket cannon the booster cannon immediately reaches max speed, making it more useful in close range combat
Piston pusher
This one is rather simple, a stack of pistons with high velocity shoves the round down the barrel before releasing it at max velocity. These are probably the most effective weapons overall, very high max speed, doesn’t have to accelerate down the barrel, piston pushers seem like the best mass driver out there.
Missiles
These can basically be sorted into two categories, kinetic kill and explosive.
Kinetic kill
These missiles are extremely fast and are designed to kill a target with kinetic energy from impact. Not much more than that to say here.
Explosive
These are the missiles you all are used to: big boom on hitting the target, in SR2 these will mostly be XML-modded nukes but some smaller missiles might be out there as anti-missile countermeasures.
Energy weapons
These are your run of the mill lasers, plasma cannons, and whatever else. In SR2 I’ve only come up with one version
The Thruster Torch
Through XML modding you can modify a thruster to have an extremely long, narrow, plume, capable of burning through a target, these will mostly be anti-ship weapons due to the difficulties of targeting missiles in SR2, but should generally be low alpha damage, very high damage over time weapons.
To all you guys seeing this, I’m looking for more ideas! If you have something I missed, leave it down in the comments and I may add it at a later date.