Why can't we manually press a reload button for weapons with half-depleted magazines?
- Thread starter smintili
- Start date
Overheating is defeated by heat sinks. Plus, people will get upset at the added heat.
So have it built into the gun, have it automatically pause to cool for a bit after 5 consecutive shots. You'd still get the same effect as clips but you'd always have a "full clip" when you started shooting.
I always thought the concept of magazine changing on a ship mounted weapon was the height of silliness. Far too FPS gamey a concept for a simulation orientated game imo.
I'd be for early reloads, even with lost of ammo in the magazine. Multicannons are aggravating when you have 10 rounds left and the target's already dead. Cannons are somewhat less bad, but I'd still drop a single round in exchange for not reloading at the start of the next fight.
Most, if not all modern guns haven't used clips for decades. It's hard to imagine any of the weapons in E
using clips at all, much less with the fact that it's like three thousand years in the future.
I just assume that ammo comes pre-packaged for use with automated ship loaders. Multicannon ammo, for instance, is probably belt-fed rather than an actual magazine. It would likely just be fed from a shipping crate, and when empty the auto-loader ejects the crate and moves the next one in place.
Most, if not all modern guns haven't used clips for decades. It's hard to imagine any of the weapons in E
using clips at all, much less with the fact that it's like three thousand years in the future.I just assume that ammo comes pre-packaged for use with automated ship loaders. Multicannon ammo, for instance, is probably belt-fed rather than an actual magazine. It would likely just be fed from a shipping crate, and when empty the auto-loader ejects the crate and moves the next one in place.
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Most, if not all modern guns haven't used clips for decades. It's hard to imagine any of the weapons in E
A bit nit-picking here: The game takes place 1286 years in the future
Why is the concept of magazine changing in a sim game the "height of silliness"? It's just as realistic as anything. And it would make for much smoother gameplay.
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A bit nit-picking here: The game takes place 1286 years in the future
Why is the concept of magazine changing in a sim game the "height of silliness"? It's just as realistic as anything. And it would make for much smoother gameplay.
OK lets look at modern parallel's, I can't think of one vehicle weapon system larger than a machine gun which uses clips. Can anyone?
*Magazine.
Swedish S tank,
US Dragonfire mortar
Those are just off the top of my head.
Edit: If I recall the S tank was expected to be a handful of bad news. It had a pretty high rate of fire and that meant it had a decent chance of hitting you with 2 or 3 rounds in the time it took a manually loaded gun to fire. The Dragonfire's a nasty piece of work, too. Same deal there: 10 120mm rounds in the air, they more or less hit at the same time; it's a huge amount of hurt.
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From a coding point of view (I'm a non-FD game-dev) at least, that would be awkward. Looking at the multi-cannon, I am pretty sure that they store it as 2 values; current magazine (X) and reserves (Y), which is why the last magazine on a multicannon contains 30 rounds. To do that, you suddenly have to store one value for each magazine. On a multicannon with 2100 rounds in 90-round magazines, that means storing 24 (or more) different values per gun in use in the game rather than just two.
It also means rewriting the code that handles reloading, the code to read from and write to the database, etc. Alternatively, you can fire your last five rounds into space...
Looked into those, all the references I found mentioned auto loaders and firing single shots. The auto loaders primary purpose was to increase rate of fire and reduce human crew requirements. None mentioned burst fire modes before auto loaders having to engage (ie clip concept). But please prove me wrong
I hate this too, also the reload time can seem long when you are taking punishment and can't shoot back.
My ha'p'orth: the last gun mountings that I maintained that had a magazine would've been 20mm Oerlikon 7A's, over 20 years ago, they had a 60 round drum magazine. They got replaced with GAM-BO1's that were belt fed from a replaceable ammo box on the front.Looked into those, all the references I found mentioned auto loaders and firing single shots. The auto loaders primary purpose was to increase rate of fire and reduce human crew requirements. None mentioned burst fire modes before auto loaders having to engage (ie clip concept). But please prove me wrong
I've had 2 different 30mm systems that were belt fed from an ammo bin - I think these would be a better example for the in-game system - where even though I had several thousand rounds in the ship's magazine (stored in boxes of 30 belted rounds) only 200 could be slapped into the mounting at a time. Normally you'd blat them all off before reloading, but it would've been possible to top-up the bins during a lull in the action by cracking the links and popping in some extra belts (a bit like magically reloading magazines I suppose, just a lot slower).
If it has the same effect, then whats the point?
One of the downsides of using kinetic weapons.
Maybe I wasn't clear, the same cooling effect but each time you started firing you'd always have the equivalent of a full clip. The point being you'd always know that on going into combat it wasn't going to shoot just one shot and then pause to reload.
It would prevent prolonged continuous fire which I assume was the design reason for having clips but stop the irritation of half-full clips.
Its not very realistic is it? Lets look at the multi cannon. What does it have in a magazine, like 90 rounds? This weapon is built into the ship and should have a massive magazine. It would be like a fighter jet firing 90 rounds from its machine gun and have to reload, which obviously isnt the case as each magazine has 1000's of rounds. It seem to more represent a hand held machine gun, but even with that you have the ability to discard a magazine anytime you want. Also the ship already has the ability to discard the mag when its empty so obviously it should be able to discard it when its not completely empty.
So they should either let the player discard the old mag (including any left over bullets) or let the magazine hold all your rounds like it probably would in reality. Right now you have futuristic ships which have machine guns that predate ww2.
So they should either let the player discard the old mag (including any left over bullets) or let the magazine hold all your rounds like it probably would in reality. Right now you have futuristic ships which have machine guns that predate ww2.
That's a pretty good example, just watched some American blat one off at the gun range on youtube, those crazy yanks!
I love how ridiculously complicated some people make these posts, some of the over-thinking is hilarious. How the ammo is stored in the game isn't coded because it dosent need to be, further more a reload feature is already implemented hence when we run out of ammo, our guns reload. All we need is a button/option that we can press and it forces that reload to occur. No role-play responses no discussion its a no brainer really. Its a Sci-Fi space sim but we cannot manually reload our multi cannons on a ship that has the feature, to reload its multi cannons......Its really simple.
If you want to be realistic, the closest real-world analog would probably be the 30mm GAU-8/A cannon on the A10 Warthog. It's a gatling gun much like the multicannon. It doesn't use multiple magazines, but it also only holds a total of 1,350 rounds in its ammo drum...which you can't reload without landing. At the fire rate of 3,900 rounds/minute, that means you get to fire for a little over 20 seconds before you're done going pew pew for the rest of the mission. (In reality the gun is fired in 1 to 2 second bursts, since continuous fire wastes ammo and is hard on the barrels. Which you have to replace every 20,000 rounds, by the way.)
So maybe it's better not to wish for too much realism.
So maybe it's better not to wish for too much realism.
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Although I get your notion, and I myself too think that making it overly complicated isn't really helpful, some in-world explanation would be great to have, since from what I gather FD tries to make this as believable as possible, so stuff like that should possibly be explained somewhere, right? At least it'd be better in a simulation to know a little bit about where the ammo comes from.