Hehe… rotary railguns is amusing to think about. If there is a power generator big enough to generate… oh hey idea… the class of the power generator in the ship its self could determine the kind of railgun setup and use-case. Or something like that.
Well sure, the larger the ship class the more hardpoints they will have because it has a larger power plant, but you wouldn’t expect to place a railgun on each hardpoint and still have enough energy to sustain firing them.
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Plus it’s more fun to say GAUSS CANONS than just rail gun.
With super-large calibers, say with train-sized slugs, would rail guns even work? (see what I did there? 
)
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Ok, it is a lore and selling gameplay problem.
There are a variety of options:
-> Rail Cannons, Gauss Cannons, Electro-Thermal Machine Guns
Are the rail guns rotary because it just looks more interesting?
I figure that breech-loading rapid-fire coil guns are the way to go for kinetic weapons. (Not that I think high-rate-of-fire kinetics are a good idea in space.) To make the coil guns look interesting, the barrel could be segmented, and if they fired glowy tracer rounds once every few rounds, it would make for some funky visuals. The firing might be more muted, producing a phtt-phtt sound instead of a bang-bang sound. If you’re hit, you’ll definitely get a bang-bang sound.
Yes, it has been suggested that power management would relate directly to weapon performance.
Let’s say that a power plant has a gigawatt power rating. Let’s say that a shot requires some number of megawatt-hours (joules) of energy. If the full power of the plant goes into one weapon, you get a certain number of shots per second.
For example, the Navy fired a 33 megajoule shot out of their railgun. That’s 0.009 megawatt-hours of energy. A 1 gigawatt power flow could provide that energy in 32 milliseconds, yielding a firing rate of 31 rounds per second, ignoring inefficiencies in cycling.
Increase the power and you can increase the energy of the shot or the firing rate of the shots. If the energy goes up, then you can increase the mass of the shot linearly or the velocity by the square root of the increase (kinetic energy = 1/2 mv^2). The firing rate would go up linearly, again ignoring cycling issues.
A weapon would be limited in the power that it could utilize before destroying itself. The power delivery system would also be rated (the wires, conduits, couplings, transformers, whatever). Overload your weapons in an emergency and you might just melt the whole thing down because you pumped too much power through them. Or the weapon destroys itself because the energy of the shot (or shots) was too much for its mechanical structure.
I think that it would be pretty impressive to see my segmented gauss canon barrels glowing brightly as they approach the point of failure, while still making a phtt-phtt firing sound. Though the sound might drift into some stranger sounds due to the imminent failure of the weapon.
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I don’t mean to interrupt brainstorming, but you do realize most of the ideas here are looking quite a lot like Elite Dangerous? Not that’s a bad thing, but if the game is to be differentiated from its cousins, either it has to go even further in some of its aspects, either it has to offer something the others don’t.
I do like the idea of @JB47394 of “overclaoking” a weapon’s power input. That’s playing on something different than power redirection as in ED: do you want to try and finish this guy quickly, at the risk of being a sitting duck if you miss most of your shots and end up overheating?
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EVE has had the overload function for their modules for years now, the module takes damage when overloaded, but is more effective.
My opinion on the greater discussion here is that in space, in the future and this is even seen today on land, air and sea, is that combat would favor long distance semi autonomous weapons. No chance in hell should you ever be able to get into visual range of something in space during combat. So long range missiles and drones with long range missiles would be used for space combat, while ground based conflict would resemble today’s with the exception that weapons would have even longer ranges and be more powerful.
But and it’s a big but, IBS is going for SW type of battles, so it really makes no point of turning down weapons good for this type of gameplay based on their fictional believability, when the starting scenario is fiction based anyway. So machine guns and other pew, pew should be fine for the general audience as long as effects are cool.
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I just wish for I:B to be as distinctively different from the other games out there as possible in the fields that allow that without really impacting freedom of gameplay choices.
Even if I-Novae chooses the exact same kinetic weapon setup as E:D has done. If they just call, show and make them sound differently, they will be different.
I would like to hear @xamino’s reason for the outcry to please call them something different. Was it just because you can’t buy in (believe) in people so far into the future using “guns” (redneck voice) or was it because you are fed up with them being used repeatedly in SciFi?
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I explicitly mentioned in a previous post that I felt they would be similar to Elite, but what’s wrong with that? Just because it’s in another game doesn’t mean it can’t be used, especially if it makes sense in both universes that such technology would exist. That’s also why I suggested they put their own spin on the tech to make it more interesting and unique.
I would love to hear anything from the developers as I’m having flashbacks of the old forums, even if we all agree to some reasonable function and fiction for these weapons, it really means nothing without the developers even nodding.
@inovaekeith @inovaeflavien
please
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I really don’t think it makes sense to expect the developers to read through a long thread about weapon naming conventions and also write a response, the gameplay relevance here is pretty limited. Maybe they will, but ultimately posts in game suggestion forums need to be made with the understanding that a lot of it won’t get transmitted. It certainly doesn’t mean nothing if we don’t get a nod, discussions can be interesting by their own merit.
Yup. I’m fairly certain that somebody mentioned it earlier in this thread.
I’d like to see a bit more to the system, of course, with the player actively commanding the weapon to push its limits. For example, instead of clicking “overload”, the player just keeps firing even after the weapon has reached its thermal limit, or the player increases the rate of fire beyond the established rating, or loads more massive rounds than rated, or amps up the power above spec - or does all of them and others besides. The weapon is employed in an overloaded way, risking the possibility of damage and a reduction of effectiveness. That risk should always be with the systems, but the harder they’re pushed, the more likely it becomes. Probably following some geometric or exponential curve so that there’s a diminishing return on risk v reward in pushing a system.
Perhaps the weapon starts to spray rounds wildly (because the barrels are deforming). Perhaps the weapon starts to sputter, firing at full rate for a little while, then stopping abruptly, then firing again (because the power system is shorting out). Maybe it just jams. And so on.
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You know this is one of those perpetual threads from the old forums, right?
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Its the inevitable result, zombie threads that will live forever, only serving a purpose to those who partake.
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Here’s a great article on why cartridges will exist for a long time to come.
FutureWarStories - Dude! Where’s my Blaster
FutureWarStories - Future of Bullets
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But every warship will need countermeasures against long distance weapons, whatever they are. And this is where I think rapid firing kinetic weapons come into play – as a defensive alternative to lasers. Where exactly / if they really make sense would need to be tested.
A combination of both, I have to say. As I discussed I do believe that kinetic weapons will remain an integral part of future warfare, even in high tech space, but not in the way we do it today with conventional weapons. Plus guns have been done to death in literally thousands of games. I can’t recall a single instance where we got to play with “realistic” alternatives and I think that it would make for an interesting, different experience.
In the end of course gameplay is king and I will enjoy the game either way. But since we can influence the development at an early stage I wanted to air my concerns and hopes, in the hope of furthering discussion and possibly even helping shape a game into something unique even beyond the incredible scale of the arena. 
While well written and likely true, this is for infantry weapons. I was mainly interested in discussing weapons for spaceships which changes the cost benefit ratio somewhat.
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Typically used in attack choppers only honestly. It’s for the high suppression value. Few things make people shit themselves faster then the buuzzzBURRRRRTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT of a Gatling gun. Also on a helicopter explosives are heavy, and should be prioritized against vehicles and heavy fortifications. Meanwhile Gatling gun can take care of light/no armor and infantry. Great support weapon basically.
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The A-10 Warthog would like to have a word with you.
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why warthog sir? it doesn’t look like a pig. i think it looks more like a puma.
;D
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What in sam hell is a puma?!? You’re making that up.
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