Okay so in the xcom clone I was designing, I didnt want a big rocket launcher for the aliens, there was a focus on different-is-better rather than bigger-is-better. But I still wanted to give them a weapon of mass destruction like the Blaster Launcher (because its so dam cool).
So the answer was, they just have big grenades, which automatically launch themselves and guide to target when you toss them. An attached lanyard was used to toss it up in the air, and it would then speed off to the target with its own antigravity motor going up to 150kph, up to 10 km away (just imagine the possibilities).
Haha and then to my surprise in the future sequences on the movie Cloud Atlas one of the characters tosses grenades that act just like it.
So its a Blaster Launcher, minus the launcher.
Which would be made possible by making a weapon utterly disposable and non-reloadable. As in it disappears from your inventory as soon as you fire it or the number of shots is expended from it. Which might also suggest weapons which have an ammunition counter all to themselves (internalCapacity: xx). And possibly an additional boolean to destroyWhenEmpty.
Disposable weapons with an internal capacity would also be great for low manpower hours construction items - disposable laser pistols (welcome to the land of chinese industry). But at least if they get brought back to the base they get reloaded (or possibly not with treatedAsMagazine so that if it has lost any shots at all, it is discarded upon mission end)
Leading to a scenario that if you do fire the last shot in it "this message will self destruct in 30 seconds mr phelps" because you dont want tech just laying around on the ground even if the battery is dead. (though this of course is just flavor text)
