I was thinking it might be cool to have MAC, either full size for orbital defense or handheld. In case you don't know what a MAC is, it's basically a railgun that fires charges the size of a Volkswagen at full size. As a follow up question, if you don't think this is a good idea, what about a railgun? It would be handheld, have a slow rate of fire, but have a range that is rivaled by no other, and have a projectile speed over 9000. Thanks for your input!
I wouldn't mind a handheld railgun, but there'd have to be drawbacks too. I suppose a MAC for orbital strikes would be interesting, but once again there'd have to be drawbacks so it isn't overpowered.
Right, otherwise there would be no reason to use anything else. I was thinking they would have extremely low rates of fire and very expensive ammo.
Imagine if the shots from the railgun/MAC caused damage to terrain (Maybe they just push stuff out of the way a little bit, or they cause a small blast.) when they hit the ground.
Would make for an interesting way to just blast a large force of enemies without going in yourself. Just build up to the gun and bombard the enemy base. I imagine it would be quite expensive to create and maintain, probably a moderate cool down after each shot, and if too many shots are fired the whole system needs to cool down else it could explode! The rounds are probably expensive too unless you just want to chuck space rock.
Orbital support in general should only be implemented if it's balanced, having a cooldown as well as a firing delay and you have to supply the ammo/energy for each shot, which should be expensive or like you said, there won't be a point in using anything else.
Agreed, as much as a big space ship gun would be...unless we encounter planets completely fortified by enemy races...I don't see the reason we'd need this...mind you that could be a possibility! Y'never know if there are planets in the game where it is fortified. ======== [Edit] Perhaps if it was a very precise weapon that penetrated the ground? It'd kinda be a Precision Tactical or Industrial Railgun? Like you could use it to blast a hole through a heavily fortified building or use it to dig through a very hard material to get to the ores you're actually after? Perhaps another feature is that because it's such a huge blast that it destroys any fragile objects around the blast for quite some distance. So all plants, trees, containers, and fossils are all obliterated.
Yah that'd probably be a good idea. I would probably not want to use this thing for any kind of gentle access of a location as it'll probably just obliterate anything it hits.
I think orbital would be nice, having it as a stationary turret to defend the base at night would be pretty sweet as well. It should cost a lot of resources though and take ages to reload but damn would it cause a lot of destruction. Like meteor strike in Terraria sized destruction times 2.
Well if you're using it as base defense you're probably going to use a much much smaller version. Cause if something ran up to your front door and you shot it with the cannon? You'd lose half your base...and 2x the meteor destruction and making the gun not really practical unless you want to cover an area in giant craters I would think a miniaturized version would be the size of a motorcycle but maybe 2-3x the length and would have to be mounted on either a large vehicle, a mech, or on top of a base directly attached to your main power source. The damage would still be really up there but the destructive ability would probably be a bit more powerful than a .50 Sniper Rifle...like it'd punch a 2-3 ft hole into a 3-4 ft thick wall?
A projectile of that size and velocity would punch through a whole lot more than a fifty would, especially at terminal velocity. This would be an interesting surface bombardment tool to generate atmosphere, from a terraforming perspective - but it'd be way too powerful to use other than in a specific mission objective.
Yeah I meant an orbital version and a small scale one for base defence, sorry for the confusion. I imagine the orbital one will require a rocket to be launched into space and launch pads aint cheap! The small scale one would be as you described, I was thinking maybe 1.5 characters tall and 2 characters long, layed down. Mounted directly to a bastion on your base, It'll have like a hopper nearby for ammunition and requires a constant supply of power. The only thing is that it takes a while to reload like 2 seconds per shot/
That was kind of my initial idea. I was thinking an extremely high velocity projectile that does little to no AOE damage.
