Shock Cannons are amazing looking weapons, but in terms of carving out a unique niche compared to existing weapons they seem to fall short. Due to their low ammo count (ammo exhaustion in 1m 54s at 100% fire cycle), they're mostly compared with Rail Guns (1m 20s of ammo @ 100%), but they lack the massive damage potential. This suggestion will be to move the Shock Cannon into a new role, and replace it's current somewhat unique mechanics with a new weapon.
Shock Cannon => energy ammo: The central change here is to move the Shock Cannon from an ammo-limited weapon to one that consumes the weapon capacitor only, like a laser. Currently only laser weapon (and their derivatives) are non-ammo based, so it would be nice to expand the options available.
To avoid making the Shock Cannon just a laser with projectile travel time that requires you to pull the trigger multiple times. I say keep the travel time, "ammo clip" & auto-reload components, and make the clip refill from the weapon capacitor. Also, change the damage type to Thermal/Kinetic with something like an 80t/20k% split, as the Shock Cannon "wraps" the energy projectiles it fires.
Thus a standard encounter with Shock Cannons would see commanders rapidly firing from the weapons during a pass of the enemy, then allowing the weapon to reload the "clip" from the weapon capacitor energy while turning to get the enemy back in their sights.
To replace the Shock Cannon's role as a medium fire-rate kinetic weapon with a burst option, I propose a new Auto-cannon.
New weapon: Auto-cannon: The Auto-cannon would fit between the high fire-rate/low damage Multi-cannon & the low fire-rate/high damage Cannon.
To mimic the Shock Cannon design, it should have an auto-loader built in, and have a default medium rate (around 1/3 of an equivalent sized multi-cannon) of fire which is activated by holding the trigger down. However, commanders could achieve a higher rate of fire by rapidly pulling the trigger, at the cost of accuracy, heat, and suffering a longer reload time.
Thanks for reading.
Shock Cannon => energy ammo: The central change here is to move the Shock Cannon from an ammo-limited weapon to one that consumes the weapon capacitor only, like a laser. Currently only laser weapon (and their derivatives) are non-ammo based, so it would be nice to expand the options available.
To avoid making the Shock Cannon just a laser with projectile travel time that requires you to pull the trigger multiple times. I say keep the travel time, "ammo clip" & auto-reload components, and make the clip refill from the weapon capacitor. Also, change the damage type to Thermal/Kinetic with something like an 80t/20k% split, as the Shock Cannon "wraps" the energy projectiles it fires.
Thus a standard encounter with Shock Cannons would see commanders rapidly firing from the weapons during a pass of the enemy, then allowing the weapon to reload the "clip" from the weapon capacitor energy while turning to get the enemy back in their sights.
To replace the Shock Cannon's role as a medium fire-rate kinetic weapon with a burst option, I propose a new Auto-cannon.
New weapon: Auto-cannon: The Auto-cannon would fit between the high fire-rate/low damage Multi-cannon & the low fire-rate/high damage Cannon.
To mimic the Shock Cannon design, it should have an auto-loader built in, and have a default medium rate (around 1/3 of an equivalent sized multi-cannon) of fire which is activated by holding the trigger down. However, commanders could achieve a higher rate of fire by rapidly pulling the trigger, at the cost of accuracy, heat, and suffering a longer reload time.
Thanks for reading.