Oh, cheers to you then.


No, it makes it look out of place with the rest of the game. The raw unit and weapon designs are enough to differentiate. Out-of-place shading (or lack thereof) isn't necessary to do this.

To each his own I suppose.

In anycase I'm not going for shiny polished metal anyways, but I'm trying to give more "life" to my weapons.

Problem: the big sniper laser rifle shoots itself. Or was it the regular sniper rifle? It's one of them.

Also, I'm liking this mod more now for some reason. My only suggestion right now is to maybe make it so there's some major difference in performance between the ballistic and energy weapons. Like maybe the bullet weapons are more penetrative but only cause one wound per shot, and the energy weapons cause multiple wounds per shot but are nowhere near as penetrative (so there's a chance that some of the wounds just don't happen, even on vanilla units).

If this game had any kind of standard force field or energy barrier, I'd suggest making it so the energy weapons are more effective against energy barriers, and bullets are more effective against raw material targets. But unfortunately this isn't the case.

Whoho! greatest mod Ever. thx for update an that other crap

Hrmph, some brainstorming today during one of my classes:

Cannon fodder scout units: Floating scout/attack drones with tinfoil DSTech armor. They're pretty much the preliminary attack force, why? So the secondary attack force (Oculus series and up) won't get eaten by some neat little weapon preped for em. Armed with dual sentry turret guns, cheap (compared to the all powerful humanoid versions), sorta the thousand man army-ish unit. You'll almost never see these around a DSTech base though, that'll be a job for another set of drones, if I ever get to making it/making it work.

After reading Darlo's comment <a few days ago>, my ballistics shall be pretty much leaved as is, they're penetrative enough already. Though for beam weapons, I'm guessing I'm going to have it fire AK-47 shots. As I'm seeing the penetration is actually hundreds of particles hitting the target, then burning its way out. And AK-47 shots can still damage my robots. What does this mean? Extremely high firing rate, small magazine size. AND. Say good bye to the pulse laser rifle and the laser shotgun!

Why am I not seeing dual weldable gatling guns anywhere else?! Grragggggghhh!!!

I like the sound of that. The few high quality units backing up a mob of cheap units. Sort of like how infantry squads support tanks.
Will any of the drones basically be flying ankle biters?



I haven't used the DSTech energy weapons much myself, since I mainly use the ballistic and grenade/rocket weapons.
A laser shotgun never made to much sense to me, so I probably won't miss it. I could see a very rapid fire of lasers into a wide firing arc in a very short period of time, but not all shots at once like a real shotgun.

I would see a pulse laser as a weapon that sacrifices power for a large magazine and a high rate of fire. That being said, I could see the existing pulse laser be given a larger magazine, a faster rate of fire, but be made much weaker, say take at least a good 10-20 shots to take out a light clone. Perhaps be like an energy based SMG, except fairly accurate.


I can think of a non CC instance of dual wielded gatling guns.
Kos-Mos, from Xeno Saga, 18 barrels of bullet hosing total.



On a side note... that medium sized rapid fire rocket launcher (MRL?) has WAY to wide of an arc of fire at times. I've had units blow themselves up because they were aiming down at a 30 degree angle (had the higher ground) and a rocket seemed to come out at an extreme angle and slam into the ground the unit is standing on. The occasional rocket seems to come out at up to a +/-75 degree angle.

Fixed that, just gotta tweak the muzzle flash a bit... Have a attack drone design!

Info dump time, regarding regular vs pulsed lasers. tl;dr: weaponized lasers would probably always be continuously-firing pulse lasers anyway, unless it was a one-shot nuclear pumped laser.

Some starting info: the way a laser works is that there's a chamber filled with a "lasing medium," which, in simple terms, has a bunch of free particles that get excited and do certain things when some kind of "seed" is introduced, such as light from a flashbulb or even another smaller laser. The particles go back and forth between getting excited and becoming unexcited, releasing light the entire time. This light then just gets "funneled" out of the end of the laser, usually through some mirrors and lenses.

There's two different ways to use this to make a laser: continuous wave and pulsed. With continuous wave, all that happens is that the "seed" keeps getting pumped into the medium and the particles just keep releasing light as they may. This results in a stream of photons that is constant, but weak. Pulsed, on the other hand, has the medium set up so that it lets the particles get more and more excited for a while before it finally allows them to drop to a lower energy level and release all of their photons at once. This results in a short burst of a laser, but the burst is way more powerful in that time frame than a continuous wave laser would be in the same time frame. Furthermore, the medium is typically capable of moving between its collective excited and unexcited states very rapidly, resulting in something that "looks" like a continuous laser anyway, even though its far more powerful overall. So really, there's no reason NOT to use a pulse laser if all you're going for is raw output, which is what a weaponized laser would be aiming for.

Now this is where ♥♥♥♥ gets creative: lasing mediums are often various gasses, liquids, solids and plasmas. Really, all that matters is that you can set it up so there are particles that get excited, and then drop in energy level to release photons. The above method of "send light into a normal lasing medium" works to achieve this. What ALSO works is putting an explosive in a confined chamber (capable of withstanding the explosion, of course) and blowing it up so it excites the inside of the chamber, which would be lined with a reactive material. "Explosive" refers to everything up to and including nuclear explosions. So basically, one could put a nuclear bomb into a sufficiently designed chamber, detonate it, and funnel the resulting photons into one short but godawfully powerful laser burst. This is a "nuclear pumped" laser.

I could pretty easily imagine a cool one-shot weapon based around this, where the "magazine" is the nuclear chamber, which has to be replaced between shots. Besides that specific case though, your average laser weapon would probably just put out a constant powerful stream of pulses.

The drone looks like something from the Tau Empire. Especially the head.

But whatever, it's still nice. Like to see it in coming updates.

In that case I'm using a gas based laser, where gas is fed into a a generator and spun up to some high speeds, generating intense amounts of light and energy. Light <photons> is focused into a beam, though most of that energy will be depleted fairly quickly. Probably for my redone DSWE01 Rifle, a continuous wave type, short firing time though, as the gas needs to be respun. It'll be a sliding scale of beam power. Would look interesting in-game, if I could get the current ammo count of the said weapon that is...

Though for the pulse gun type, that would probably use the same set up, but it doesn't release all of the built up energy at once. So its a constant barrage of high-energy short beams...

That would mean my laser weapons have a charge time before it can fire.

How cute!! :3

I'd like to know what kind of devices do you plan for the drone...

First of all, I wasn't really trying to suggest a particular lasing medium. It doesn't really matter, especially in a futuristic context where lord knows what they'll have figured out by then. Secondly, my main point before is that continuous wave lasers would be pretty useless for a weapon. Your BASIC laser weapon would be a pulse laser. There shouldn't be a "normal" laser to differentiate it from in your arsenal. Aesthetically and functionally though, it'll still just look like a continuous beam until you let go of the trigger, or have to reload. Really, you wouldn't necessarily have to specifically call it a pulse laser. The fact that its a laser weapon pretty much implies it.

Also, regarding the lasing medium... it doesn't really get "used up." It's not fuel. Perhaps there is some kind of long-term wear-down of the medium (I don't know, I'm not an expert in lasers), but it's probably not enough for it to be a consideration through the length of a battle, so you could effectively ignore the fact. Your "ammo" would probably just be a battery that runs the thing that feeds the initial light source (or electrical discharge, which seems the more likely option now that I read about it) into the medium, which in a weaponized laser would probably be something that eats up enough energy to be a short-term issue. Something else that would be a short-term consideration would be the fact that high-power mediums generate a lot of heat that needs to be dealt with somehow.

Of course, like I said, lord knows what they'll have figured out so far in the future. Maybe there could be some new medium that generates massive amounts of light when you make it move really fast, but it also deteriorates somehow so it needs to be replaced. There's no medium like that now, but hey, whatever. It would still be a pulse laser though.

I know I'm talking on and on about this... but lasers are so cool!

Scotch tape. Or rather, the space-y equivalent. Well, I dunno. Unwinding scotch tape releases x-rays, which would be perfectly serviceable by themselves or as an energy source for other wavelengths.


Amen. Especially when they sparkle.

SAY WHAT?