Why can't we manually press a reload button for weapons with half-depleted magazines?

[GunnerBill]

I know every fps allows you to do that but it's basically nonsense because you keep the leftover ammo.

I'd be happy to dump a few rounds between dogfights though. At my discretion. You know just before you rip onto thst Annie!

 

[silvermistshadow]

I would hesitate to call a system that lets you keep the rest of the bullets 'magic clips'. Besides which, clips are what you put in a magazine. They're used for storing individual rounds of ammunition in groups, ready to be put in a magazine. The magazine goes in the gun. A clip has no feed mechanism, a magazine does.

In real life, soldiers do often reload before they run out of bullets in one magazine. They then keep this magazine. They don't discard it. Why? To redistribute the leftover ammunition later, when they're not fighting. But with our spaceships, we have a system that does the reloading bit for us. Without knowing the exact configuration of the weapon (does it have a magazine, is it belt-fed, or what?), I don't think we really know how hard it would be for the system to load additional ammunition into the current magazine/belt/whichever. Perhaps it's the sort of system where it could just shove a few more into the bottom of it or whatever. What I do know is, there's no real reason to waste perfectly good ammunition, whether by shooting it or ejecting the magazine. At the very least, the system could always use the downtime when the hardpoints are retracted to add more rounds to the belts/magazines/whichever.

Disclaimer here: I'm not actually experienced in these matters. I just spend a lot of time on the internet and know just barely enough to sound somewhat convincing very occasionally.

 

[Exeider]

I would hesitate to call a system that lets you keep the rest of the bullets 'magic clips'. Besides which, clips are what you put in a magazine. They're used for storing individual rounds of ammunition in groups, ready to be put in a magazine. The magazine goes in the gun. A clip has no feed mechanism, a magazine does.

In real life, soldiers do often reload before they run out of bullets in one magazine. They then keep this magazine. They don't discard it. Why? To redistribute the leftover ammunition later, when they're not fighting. But with our spaceships, we have a system that does the reloading bit for us. Without knowing the exact configuration of the weapon (does it have a magazine, is it belt-fed, or what?), I don't think we really know how hard it would be for the system to load additional ammunition into the current magazine/belt/whichever. Perhaps it's the sort of system where it could just shove a few more into the bottom of it or whatever. What I do know is, there's no real reason to waste perfectly good ammunition, whether by shooting it or ejecting the magazine. At the very least, the system could always use the downtime when the hardpoints are retracted to add more rounds to the belts/magazines/whichever.

Disclaimer here: I'm not actually experienced in these matters. I just spend a lot of time on the internet and know just barely enough to sound somewhat convincing very occasionally.

And yet, your suggestion rings truest of all, it makes absolute sense, perfectly logical and straight forward.

oh don't worry this community has a tendency to not let such things pass by unnoticed. but in the mean time, here is some rep for ya.

 

[aRtFuL]

I think it more than an issue of balance to set up kinetics in such a way it is also got to do with ship safety and ergonomics as well (lore wise).

Mechwarrior also have the same system of armmo storing compartmentalized - it is because if ammo are hit and explodes it won't destroy the whole ship/mech.

Switching clips with be simple and make sense in a first person shooter since we have arms and legs, but in a mech/ship game it doesn't quite work because you are assuming that ammo are stored like pockets on a soldier where there is an arm to swap it - where as instead a ship/mech obviously ammos are stored in a specific manner which would make the ergonomics of swapping clips impossible (you can't just have a lot of empty spaces between clips inside or ship for no reason, obviously. Designers will never design a ship that way).

 

[Guyperson]

I can't think of any reason that would hold up to scrutiny for these weapons to not be continuous-feed. Any conveyor system that's loading the ammo in chunks could just as easily have been designed to keep the rounds coming one by one regardless of how they're stored. It's just chalked up to gameplay purposes.

 

[NavyBee]

I am under the impression that FD modeled space combat heavily after 20th century air *and* naval combat. E.g. the damage model fits more to naval than aerial combat, while the weapon choice or the combat distances fit more to aerial combat.
Ammunition handling seems to lie somewhere in between, and I can accept that MC ammunition is pre-clipped due to storage restrictions, while cannon ammunition may not have to be clipped but prepared and primed.

 

[Bostlabs]

Pardon me. I have a twitch forming.

This is a clip. Ammo bays do not have clips. carry on!

 

[Arioch]

Pardon me. I have a twitch forming.

This is a clip. Ammo bays do not have clips. carry on!

Spoiler

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/97/Clip_M1-SKS.JPG

Would I exacerbate your twitch by showing you what I used to load the old Bofors 40/60 with?

Spoiler

40mm rounds

Even though I'm all for a reload button (and I know the current method is probably due to gameplay balancing), I still think the lore can easily be explained away, as per my previous post. There's a difference between ammunition conveyors/lifts and feed systems.
I would've loved to have a feed system on my old ships to provide ammunition directly from the main magazine, would've saved me and my lads having to hump 18 boxes of (heavy) 30mm rounds and several thousand 7.62mm rounds to and from the gun mountings every time we left/entered harbour It could've been done, but it'd be expensive, take up a lot of space and be a maintenance swine.
My 4.5" gun was supplied directly from the main magazine, though. I suppose I can see parallels with how Elite handles things.

 

[GunnerBill]

I can't figure this on my phone but someone needs to upload the picture of the gun stipped from the A10 sat next to a VW... one mahoosive belt drum of ammo!

GAU 8


https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f5/GAU-8_meets_VW_Type_1.jpg

 

[Don_Von_Hulio]

Imagine trying to load 4 mutlicannons worth of ammo into a Asp at once. That's why

Is a belt fed system that hard to imagine inside a docking bay?

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lol, Im surprised no one corrected the use of "Clips Vs Magazines" on the first page... this topic in general always causes a semantical debate regardless of forum.

 

[lysan]

Force reload and ejecting remaining ammo, thus wasting it sounds good to me.

 

[GunnerBill]

Of relevance:

 

[jabokai]

They've thought about this issue way back but, like a lot of good ideas, it's never made it into the game.

We're actually thinking about having a sort of continuous automatic reload going on in the background so that in general if you keep shooting you'll eventually run out of bullets faster than your system can put new ones in. Although short bursts of fire will make sure you're always topped up in general. This nicely avoids the necessity for a new button you need to press and offers careful players an advantage over those that just blissfully fire away all the time (who will incur a longer reload time before they get a good amount of bullets to fire again compared to the careful guy who leave time between bursts to top up their bullet buffer).

 

[Kahiir]

Hollywood guns? No, that's how real-world engineers would build something. The less moving parts there are, the less chance there is for failure. If you have one big belt of ammo as opposed to multiple boxes of ammo and an automated reloading system, you've gone from two points of failure (firing system and ammo feed) to five at the very least (firing, ammo feed, ejecting, reloading, container feed - not to be confused with ammo feed, this is how you get the next box of ammo to the reloading system). On top of being more prone to failure, your weapon is now both heavier and occupies more volume, both of which are going to already be at a premium on a spacecraft.

OTOH, if you have an issue with the long belt your weapon is useless until repaired. If you can eject a jammed ammo box and slot in a replacement, you can recover from a failed box. It depends on the likelihood of the various failure modes and the consequences of each. (real-world engineer)

 

[yyy]

Makes combat more interesting so I don't agree with ejecting part-used clips. Besides if you did eject a clip a replacement still has to be loaded. Are you going to ask for immediate clip reload? No thanks.

 

[Noctover]

I would hesitate to call a system that lets you keep the rest of the bullets 'magic clips'. Besides which, clips are what you put in a magazine. They're used for storing individual rounds of ammunition in groups, ready to be put in a magazine. The magazine goes in the gun. A clip has no feed mechanism, a magazine does.

In real life, soldiers do often reload before they run out of bullets in one magazine. They then keep this magazine. They don't discard it. Why? To redistribute the leftover ammunition later, when they're not fighting. But with our spaceships, we have a system that does the reloading bit for us. Without knowing the exact configuration of the weapon (does it have a magazine, is it belt-fed, or what?), I don't think we really know how hard it would be for the system to load additional ammunition into the current magazine/belt/whichever. Perhaps it's the sort of system where it could just shove a few more into the bottom of it or whatever. What I do know is, there's no real reason to waste perfectly good ammunition, whether by shooting it or ejecting the magazine. At the very least, the system could always use the downtime when the hardpoints are retracted to add more rounds to the belts/magazines/whichever.

Disclaimer here: I'm not actually experienced in these matters. I just spend a lot of time on the internet and know just barely enough to sound somewhat convincing very occasionally.

Its called wet and dry reloading. Games like ARMA simulate it well.

 

[smintili]

Makes combat more interesting so I don't agree with ejecting part-used clips. Besides if you did eject a clip a replacement still has to be loaded. Are you going to ask for immediate clip reload? No thanks.

No, definitely no immediate reload. I just want to be able to force the reload we already have ingame.

 

[NavyBee]

[...]
This is a clip. Ammo bays do not have clips. carry on!

Thanks, not sure to whom you are referring, but when I wrote "clips" I actually meant "clips". ;-)

Personally, I just imagine that the ammo is stored pre-clipped in an onboard magazine (i.e. storage space exclusively used for storing ammunition; non-native speaker, so we may have a translation issue here) for... hardpoint space, gameplay, "FD decides this is how ammunition is handled in the 34rd century" reasons.