Thanks! Though I don't have such a weapon... yet.
Here's another Assault Laser that I think looks interesting (made from the portable lascannon). Suggests it has a laser dot thats why its accurate one handed.
I also added another palette tweak on range 7 which is normally a duplicated goldenrod color. I gave it a Flesh Tone. Now the problem is some gfx may look a little off considering that Range 2 and Range 7 were so similar and had probably shared a bunch of colors. This doesn't change the result much for midtones but the brighter ones may stick out slightly. Im talking about both modern sprites and the original tiles. (
The screenshot image is only a preview, its not 8bit, but you could sample off of it. It also contains the other modifications for gray, red.)
This allows having flesh tones that aren't like The Simpsons and also some explosion graphics with proper oranges.
also about PS7... I believe it can be found at archive dot org
I think your sprites look great. I made a quick submod out of them so I can carry it over between Piratez updates easily. Maybe you should consider making one yourself and sharing it for convenience?
I think modders for X-P should consider starting to make mods which affect X-P itself rather than trying to tack a mod onto a mod. It can work but its very clunky.
If you put a rules file in there with a title that starts alphanumerically earlier than any of the others (eg, "AlphaOmegaFoxtrot.rul") it will actually be read and parsed AFTER all the others allowing you to override, delete, change things directly within the mod rather than skirting around it. This is important for example if you want to reuse existing sprite and sound assets... and its also becoming important due to Memory concerns.
This way you can basically make a zip file that unloads into the Ruleset folder... has a MyModResources folder that pops in there, and is called from an extraSprites reference in your .rul file.
Granted it has to be put in manually and cant be enable/disable from the standard mod menu. But that decision is forced by OpenXcom architecture not allowing resource sharing between mods.