Railguns with possible alterative uses

Duncan McEwen shared this feedback 5 years ago
Submitted

I know there are several topics about aiding weapon systems, but I wanted to make a suggestion that might be more than just a new weapon.

At the heart of this suggestion is that the game is really lacking diversity in weapons for fighting. One standard weapon of space sci-fi is the rail gun. So my first suggestion is a high penetration, high speed rail gun that can be used on at least large ships. It should need a lot of power and do focused penetrating damage. It would give a very different weapon from anything we have now. I further suggest no turret and a very large block (like refinery sized), so it is a spinal type fixed mount.


Better than a single block railgun system is having some sort of magnetic accelerator blocks. With a block that can exert a magnetic acceleration field you can do a LOT more. You could build a rail gun with it obviously. Make it as big as you want and it would really throw blocks at things. (That would totally rock!) If done right, it could even be a propulsion resource. (Mass reaction drive.)

By making a type of blocks that you can combine in various ways, you could so something like build a rail gun launcher to space. Imagine putting cargo pods on a planetary rail gun and shooting them into orbit. NASA has looked at this in real life as well.

Third, depending on the mechanics, magnetic blocks could be used to build a mag-lev style train. I know people have some suggestions to add rails and trains, well this would potentially solve that in a very sci-fi way. (not sure how you handle curves...)

Finally having magnetic levitation blocks would potentially allow all kinds of other things, such as pseudo Anti-grav vehicles (at least over a field of magnetic blocks), floating creations, maybe even particle accelerators of a sort. The possibilities seem pretty limitless.

I figure any kind of block like these would require superconductors so they would be high end blocks in the game, but it would open up a lot of ideas. I also would assume the design effort would be high as well. Regardless, I believe it would add a lot of playability and functionality to the game.


Thank you for your consideration.

Replies (1)

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Given the built in speed limits, this would be fairly impossible. You can create gravity guns with gravity generators and artificial masses. You can create gravity drives with the same blocks. You can't achieve escape velocity when limited to 100m/s. The speed limit exists so the game can load objects into your path in time. It would suck to fly through space at 500m/s and suddenly blow up on an asteroid that didn't load in time for you to see and avoid.

A system could be implemented to give an object accelerating at 100m/s the ability to store excess energy and lose that energy before dropping below 100m/s. That could give way for penetration and escape velocity but that would be a lot of extra calculations. I don't think Keen will ever do that. This entire idea would only apply to a small amount of players.

The mag-lev idea sounds cool but it would have a lot of room for error and your ship crashing into the blocks your are just barely levitating above.

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