Ammo Magazine

Weapons should not simply pull ammunition from any cargo container on the grid. Instead, we should have dedicated ammo magazine blocks that can store only ammunition, and weapons should draw ammo directly from these magazines.

The magazine and weapon should be connected with a conveyor tube, but the connection should be direct. No other cargo containers or other blocks should be allowed between the weapon and the magazine, not even another magazine. The weapon needs a direct conveyor connection to an ammo magazine in order to pull ammunition from it.

The empty magazines should be already a pretty heavy blocks. This is intentional. If you put too many magazines you have more ammo ready to be fired but a much heavier ship. You can still keep additional ammo reserves in regular cargo containers, but weapons won't automatically pull ammo from them.

This creates an important distinction between having ammo on your ship and having ammo ready to fire.

There could be 2 ways to load magazines. The fast way is to manually move ammo into them through the inventory UI. The other option would be using sorters, if we eventually get them. Sorters would be useful for automatically restocking magazines, but they should be relatively slow when moving ammunition.

This means that during a battle, relying on automated restocking from your cargo reserves would be slower than the firing rate of the weapon. Putting more sorters might help but sorters are not cheap PCU-wise, the same PCU you could have used for other things like weapons themselves. So it is possible to have fully automated ammo restocking but for the cost of additional PCU.

For bigger ships, especially capital ships, this could also give additional crew a real purpose. You might have dedicated crew members responsible for ammunition logistics, manually moving ammo from the reserves into the magazines and keeping different weapons supplied during combat. And we certainly need even more reasons for having additional crew on big ships, real players or NPC. (I have already in mind other ideas).

Right now, when weapons can simply pull ammo from generic cargo containers, ammunition is barely a consideration during combat or ship design. You can just fill a cargo container with ammo and forget about it. Additional mass from ammo magazines and related logistics changes this equation and becomes an additional dimension for the combat system.

We need some limitations and restrictions here so there is actually an engineering problem to solve. The basic solution is simple: put ammo into your weapon or magazine. Smart ship design can make it better. You might need to decide how many magazines to install, where to place them, how much ammo to keep in reserves, how to connect them to weapons, and how much additional mass you are willing to carry, whether to use sorters and how many. You still have a full flexibility for the creativity of the ship design, the line between weapon and magazine can be shorter or longer and take whatever shape, or you can decide to have exposed magazines, they will look cool. They have much bigger mass than regular cargo containers but they are also much harder to be destroyed.

The goal isn't to make ammo management annoying. It is to make ammo logistics matter. It makes ship design more interesting and challenging but you have ways to improve things by applying your engineering skills. A well-thought ammo logistics and additional crew members will now have a real impact on the combat.

There is one more game system that has to be tweaked for all the same reasons as described here - it is block repairing. But this will be its own topic ;)

Thx for reading, leave your thoughts below.