[WEAPON] [CRAFT] Tyran_nick's mods

[tyran_nick]

You are right, but unfortunately it seems to be a bit more complicated.. I tried to read a bit on it and it seems that you can get the following basic flavours:

• Rail guns: Accelerate a single projectile. We already have this technology militarised, but its not portable or reliable.
• Gauss guns (or coil guns): The same thing, but different arrangement of magnetic fields. Again this techonology is already militarised, but not to a large scale.
• Particle guns: Not so similar, but same principle. You accelerate positive or negative particles with magnetic fields. These must have some mass to cause kinetic damage. The charge is a different discussion altogether. We use particle guns often in physics, its just that we don't call them "guns".
• Mass guns (cannons or accelerators): Can be any of the above, but often used for projectiles of molecular or smaller scale. Neutral charge particle guns are sometimes called mass.

So, to sum up a mass accelerator can be a gauss gun, but in this case it is not, as in the description it says that these guns shoot dense packets of hadrons baryons. I am sure there are other more detailed taxonomies of mass accelerators.

[moriarty]

Hmmm... actually, a gun shooting subatomic particles (like baryons are) is more or less a plasma gun. Protons and electrons can be considered hydrogen plasma. Neutrons probably won't be accelerated by a magnetic field (which appears to be the working principle of your weapons).

Maybe change your projectiles into ferromagnetic pellets instead? Simple iron grains would do. Ditch the part about relativistic speeds, make it a very advanced kinetic weapon instead?

[tyran_nick]

Plasma is counting on the thermal energy as well (which is kinetic energy, but with rather unorganised paths for the molecules).
Although from the shape of the weapons one might get the impression that magnetic fields are in play, I actually avoid mentioning them in the description for exactly this reason! Assuming sufficiently advanced technology, I would prefer to fire neutral particles, as these are more difficult to deflect. What these might be? I guess anything relatively heavy, like classic atoms/molecules from our periodic table or exotic stuff we do not know yet. It might as well shoot elerium molecules... afterall its x-com!

In principle any projectile with enough kinetic energy and mass can cause massive damage, so that's why I went with something as vague as mass accelerators and dense packets of hadrons/baryons. The relativistic speed I use only for the craft cannon. The idea is that to achieve this you need sufficiently enough energy, which even with elerium you cannot get in a portable weapon (as we all know from school). Note that in this case you need to fire something incredibly small, as the mass is affected at relativistic speeds... and you are using this while in the atmosphere... well any physicist would have jumped out of the window by now, so I guess we can be a bit more vague and loose on the exact science! 

Nonetheless, I don't have a strong preference on the fluff side, so I m open to suggestions!

[mercy]

Very nice new weapons!  Excellent job!   Poor aliens :DD

[moriarty]

hmmm... I haven't had the chance to try it yet, so I'll just have to ask: is the mass accelerator tech purely earth-tech-based or do you need any alien tech for it?

because if it's based on alien tech, why not let it fire alien alloy shards? the bigger the "particles" fired, the more damage they'll do. you could then add fluff text about previous alloys not being able to withstand the strain of ultra-acceleration and atmospheric friction, and this weapon technology only becoming feasible with the arrival of alien alloy ammunition...

[tyran_nick]

Thanks mercy! Spot on moriaty. From the ufopedia entry of the mass accelerator technology in the mod:

"By reverse engineering alien artifacts human technology has made great advances. We have been able to weaponise techonologies that up until now seemed to be well outside our reach. Mass acccelerator weapons shoot ultrasonic dense bursts of baryons to the target, with a combined kinetic and thermal energy that matches the destructive potential of alien plasma techonology. With further research we should be able to derive reliable weapons from early prototypes."

I have shorter descriptions in each weapon entry. I will try to revise the text more along the lines of this discussion.

[luke83]

Was that MACE mods finished, just went looking for it???

[tyran_nick]

There is a zip file attached in the first post (EMace.zip). That one is a single weapon mod.

EDIT:
I was never a big fan of the graphics for Firestorm and Lightning, so...
I made a graphics replacement mod for Firestorm. I have used UFO:EU 2012 Firestorm as a basis
Adds new sprites at basebits, inticon and ufopedia and overides Xcom1Ruleset.rul to point to the new sprites.

Download link in the first post

Enjoy!

[moriarty]

ooh, nice. I loved the xcom2012 firestorm, and this is just cool

now all I have to do is change the fuel capacity to make the firestorm actually worth using

[wsmithjr]

Firestorm is very cool.  Thanks.

What do you think about making Plasma weapons unusable by X-Com (if it's even possible)?  Wondering if it would really muck things up too much.

[tyran_nick]

I think it is possible. You would need to script in a ruleset a new item, which you would not be able to find, and add this as a requirement for plasma weapons research. This way it would never show up for research. However, I find the idea scary!

[moriarty]

hmmm... I find the idea intriguing. add your mass accelerator tech for the humans, and you have a suitable replacement... interesting. I would try it.

[tyran_nick]

As suggested, two simple rulesets that will remove plasma weapons from the game:

• NoPlasma.rul: Xcom can no longer research plasma technology. Since we do not understand how to use the weapons their price is reduced to 1/3. Good luck...
• NoPlasmaMass.rul: Same as above, but removes plasma dependencies from mass weapons. Human tech replaces need for plasma, but you will need to use elerium like there is no tomorrow!

Install as standard mods. NoPlasmaMass.rul requires the Mass Accelerator Weapons mod. I guess NoPlasmaMass has to be listed after it in the options.cfg, otherwise the overrides will not work correctly.

And now for something completely different..! I have made a replacement for lightning following the style of firestorm (only base and intercept graphics yet). Opinions? In particular, do you think it is possible to make a map piece that will sort of resemble it? I am not looking for a very close fit, something similar to how the Avenger looks in base and in battlescape (i.e. rather different!). I have not attempted any map modding, so any suggestions or help is welcome!

[Align]

Looks too similar, would be easily confused in the base view.

[xracer]

Firestorm is very cool.  Thanks.

What do you think about making Plasma weapons unusable by X-Com (if it's even possible)?  Wondering if it would really muck things up too much.

THis is somethign i am working on right now

actually my goal is to have to resaerch a plasma pistol which will open up the human plasma weapon research
from there we will get our weapons however since we "can't use" alien plasma weapons we need disassemble alien plasma weapons and build our own with with some of the main component that we are able to "recover" from them.

I was thinking
Fuelcells
Plasma containment unit
and Allien Alloys

as such dismantling an alien plasma pistol will provide
Fuel cells: 1
Small Plasma containment: 1
Alien Alloys: 1

dismantling an alien plasma rifle will provide
Fuel cells: 2
Medium Plasma containment: 1
Alien Alloys: 2

dismantling an alien heavy plasma will provide
Fuel cells: 3
Large Plasma containment: 1
Alien Alloys: 3

then teh requirements for manufacturing human plasma weapons could be just a double of those values or some other values

However i just found out that this would require some actual coding to allow the "dismantling" part