Duh, spray lasers aren't that bad, you just need to increase the intensity, the spreading will be easy, they use it in construction areas.

The cooling, I'd use it for a heat gauge, you know, no more reload, just recharge.

To be honest I'm having a hard time visualizing the drones firing tri-lasers, though having a spotter system would be interesting, where a drone will "mark" targets in a radius and the mortar will fire after some calculations, prioritizing closest targets first. How do I check if a point is "colliding" with a object or surface?

Ask mail2345, and possibly Kyred for verification, but I'm going for casting Detect Obstacle MoRays.

Hey, shooting three lasers at the same time at a target would probably be able to cut through heavy armor, that and gatling would rape.

Which is what I'm going for, as this gives you nice "I can shoot the target or there's a wall between me and the target" for non-actors, and great for other stuff.

Or spinning tri-lasers heh heh heh... Though gatling would make it seem more powerful and hectic. These drones are going to be scary...

MORays will work.

Perhaps, but having multiple visibly rotating "barrels" would be overkill and a waste of energy. You'd make a much smaller mechanism that would switch out the mirrors and/or lenses internally. Furthermore, rather than flipping through them constantly, it'd most likely only switch once the current set deteriorated to a certain extent.

All of this is fairly moot for CC since you wouldn't be able to see any of it happening, plus its too much of a long-term issue for it to need to be implemented as any kind of a feature.


Many people seem to assume that a laser would blast through something like an anti-tank rifle. It would more likely have the effect of slowly melting through stuff, since all it really does is heat up a small area. There'd also be no physical force behind it. This is why I suggested that energy weapons focus on doing more external wounds, and less on being penetrative.

I figured health based damage would be more fitting as it leaves even less of a mark, but i suppose burning a hole in something isnt not going to leave a mark. A mix of both would likely be ideal. Also yeah, energy weapons should have ~no pierce but do more damage, whilst ballistic weapons should pierce properly and do less damage.
I just thought a laser would suit a dstech robot a lot more.

Lasers leave large marks on organics due to rapid expansion of steam.
What I'm saying is that a laser would make produce steam explosions on your body, leaving large wounds, so just health loss wouldn't exactly work bar an electrolaser, where the laser's plasma channel is used to transmit an electrical current.

If the idea isn't already set in stone to use lasers, might I suggest calling it a tri-barrel rotary railgun instead? That is, if you want it to be a piercing weapon. I think we could all learn a lot from Metal Slug's weapon array. While the death animations are made with comedy in mind, it should be noted that they accurately depict death albeit a little eccentrically. The laser weaponry causes enemies to swell and burst when shot, while it is a little dramatic, and the laser passes completely unhindered, it is supported by what 411570N3 just said. In theory, a laser would do all of this, but the target wouldn't bleed from it. All in all, I believe it would result in something akin to being microwaved in a concentrated spot. As for a projectile weapon like a rail gun, you could have the piercing power and get away with pretty special effects because that's what modern science fiction has made the rail gun out to be.

But if you're going for terrifying, maybe these drones should shoot beartraps that clamp on to actors' heads. I think that's a good intimidation tactic...

Fix'd. The railguns really are spectacular when fired. Besides, the spike travels so fast that it's really kind of irrelevant whether it actually hits the target or not, the shockwave it creates as it travels would likely kill any living thing that exists too close to its flight path.

Just to toss in a totally random idea that popped into my mind... related to all the talk of lasers and how (possibly millions of) rolls of scotch tape (in a vacuum) could be used for weapons.

Basically... we need...
particle beams/guns/accelerators... (or more of them, if I have missed such weapons already in the DSTech mod)
To toss in some ideas of how such things might be (sort of) possible...
Cram the accelerators into a helix style cluster of coils, allowing one to cram several meters worth of acceleration distance into a much 'shorter' area, the area the coil is wrapped around can contain the capacitors, cooling systems, etc.
Ammo could added in the form of high density matter blocks, which are 'vaporized' in ultra thin layers, providing but a few micro-grams of mass that are then accelerated to near relativistic speeds along with whatever ions, electrons, or whatever, might make up the 'bulk' of the particle stream.
The separate acceleration coils could either each have their own solid state emitter, or else all feed into a central solid state emitter. Such a setup could allow for something like a steady (but low power) beam, a shorter lived beam that has much more punch, or even ultra-short beams as the system rapidly pulses/cycles, which would allow a system with multiple accelerator coils to rapidly spit out shots like some sort of energy based equivalent to a projectile weapon (the actual mass) and lasers (effects of the ions or electrons).

Another variant is much more accelerators of a much smaller size, slaved to a single short central accelerator system that leads to the emitter, with the intent of generating a massive 'pulse' that focuses all the smaller short 'bolt' of accelerated particles, meant to deliver the entire punch of the shot into a fraction of a second, and not 'spread out' over the duration of a beam...


Or we just say things are sufficiently advanced and that there can be guns that can shoot assorted beams or bolts of some sort of particles...
Also, after playing some Homeworld 2... I think we need 'man portable' ion beam/bolt cannons...

If some of the laser weapons are 'removed', might as well reuse the sprites for them to make some other versatile or devastating energy type weapon.

Heck, back onto the subject of solid state emitters, they could have a wide arc of view with no visible turret/weapon, which might make for some interesting defensive applications. Turrets that have no... well, turret or barrel, they just 'shoot' where they need to, making for a weapon that can be heavily armored, with only a very small area unprotected, where the accelerator coils inside connect to the emitter system.

Other than that, I will be quiet for now...

Congrats, you just invented the Coilgun.

And the PPC/Shuriken Pistol.

For the first thing.
I don't mean something like using coils used to drive a projectile.
I mean as in take your typical electromagnetic accelerator system, as in the entire 'barrel', and 'wrap' it so the entire 'barrel' is in the shape of a coil. Or as I put it, several of them in a helix type setup.
The basic idea was based off of the fluff text for the Multi-Beam Frigate from Homeworld Cataclysm, where there was not enough space in a ship to mount more than a single long acceleration unit, so they 'coiled' the entire setup and cram it in a Frigate hull and use it to feed several separate solid state emitters.


For the second thing.
I always figured the PPC (if we are talking the old Battletech style) to just be a 'lightning gun', simply discharging something like a focused steam of electrons rather than any meaningful mass.
My knowledge of WH40k is limited to Dawn of War (and its expansions), but I thought they were more akin to firing mono-filament stuff rather than being a particle acceleration type weapon.
I was thinking of a basically an atomic sandblaster sort of thing... except using atoms/molecules instead of sand, and an EM accelerator instead of compressed air... and focused tightly or loosely based on the target material and the effect desired.

Not... quite.
The amount of flesh blasted off, as I understand it, is much greater than the amount of wound cauterised: so there will be bleeding. So much bleeding.Don't forget to use tungsten or depleted uranium for extra burning, shattering goodness.

I think I would prefer tungsten over depleted uranium, because of problems that could arise due to depleted uranium.
Partly because I have heard there are major health and environmental issues relating to depleted uranium, such as the dangers of depleted uranium 'dust' leftover after such rounds have taken out something like a tank?
Investigating your fallen foe (or disabled tank) and inhaling a little bit of slightly radioactive heavy metal dust does not sound like fun in the long run.

Also, would something like a plasma deposited layer of diamond or Teflon have any bearing on the effectiveness of a high speed projectile?
I ask because I think one 'cyberpunk' setting (Shadowrun, iirc), made mention of overly effective armor piercing rounds that had a diamond film or some such thing applied to them.

Brutally evil idea of the moment... a bullet packing 1 microgram of anti-matter... If I got my numbers right, the energy release upon release would have a blast equivalent of 80 pounds of TNT... or up it to 1 milligram, equivalent of 40 tons of TNT
That would up the overkill of DSTech by a good margin.
Make some sort of nasty 'anti material rifle' that combines the punch of the rail gun with the blast of the rocket launcher that occurs a fraction of a second after impact. Only foreseeable problem is the shooter getting killed by the high velocity remains of the target because the target was 'to soft' and the round went through them and exploded behind them, catapulting the target in the opposite direction, toward the shooter...