# Converting Crew Firearms Back to Primarily Energy

To reinforce the science fictiony elements of our primarary player faction, Nanotrasen, and reverse the overabundance of ballistic weaponry scattered into the game, our crew's primary assortment of available weapons should be converted over to the energy weapon format of rechargable firearms. These weapons would still retain their original counterpart's niche, but not necessarily their functionality (that is, reloading with ammunition).

## The Aims of this Change

The goal of this document is simple;

* Keep energy weapons from being hard countered by the same answers to beam weapons.
* Keep energy and beam weapons as the core identity of NT's armaments.
* Keep energy damage lowish.
* Keep energy armor rare.
* Emphasize teamwork tactics by requiring their weapons be reloaded with a recharger.

Things contrary to this should have very good justification for why.

What we definitely do not want to see going forward, regardless of any justification, is;

* Introducing more field reloadable firearms (tactical reloading or simply loose ammo reloading) openly available to the crew without also adding some noticable upkeep.
* Adding broad immunity options to crew weapons.
* Adding too much energy armor in readily available places, like botany or the standard security vest.

## Immunity and Mitigation
What we primarily want is not to necessarily to remove these immunities, but to more readily provide crew solutions to these immunities or threats that are not ballistic, and narrow their focus. To resolve this, we're going to approach this problem from a simple direction, making fairly minimal changes overall.

## Armory and Cargo Firearms

We should replace our current ballistics with energy weapons that follow the above considerations. Here are the current suggested replacements following this design document's considerations.

### **The Thermal Pistols**


- Fairly average bullet statistics; 10 AP but shooting into Energy armor. 20 damage (Brute for cryo, Burn for inferno). Decent wounding potential, but individually much lower ammo counts than lasers.
- Bought in twinned pairs in a two gun holster (just for normal sized energy guns). They're normal sized.
- Each gun has 8 shots (thereabouts). 16 between two.
- Cryo pistols do a knockdown and extra damage against extremely hot targets. Inferno pistols do an explosion cantered on the target against extremely cold targets.
- The guns are EMP-proof.

## The Riot Blaster Accelerator Shotgun (Sprite WIP)

- Effectively a combat shotgun, but requires energy in order to continue firing.
- You use ammo to reload the weapon. This is a field reloading weapon, but it has drawbacks.
- When the gun fires, it expends battery charge and then is charged for 5 seconds before requiring another expenditure.
- It is EMP vulnerable: It loses battery charge, and ends up losing current empowerment, reseting the weapon.
- The ammo it uses is energy shotgun shells. These are also able to be disrupted (but not destroyed) using EMPs.
- When not charged, the riot blaster does 50% less damage overall.
- There is enough energy to do this at least 5 times.

The riot blaster's shotgun casings include:
* **Lethal Scatter Shells:** Buckshot equivalent laser pellet shels. Do 40 damage and pierce armor. Can't be printed, pretty much only event shells.
* **Nonlethal Scatter Shells:** Rubbershot equivalent shells that do 30 damage total and pierce armor. Can be printed from the security protolathe.
* TRIPnet Shells: These ensnare a target with a bola, and on hitting solid objects, drop a energy trap on the floor. Can be printed from the security protolathe.
* **SNATCHERnet Scatter Shells:** Drops traps that eventually teleport targets to a location set on the teleporter hub. Otherwise, teleport randomly. They also do stamina damage, though less than Nonlethal Scatter. Can be printed from the security protolathe after research.
* **Gravity Pulse Shell:** Launch targets struck backwards dramatically while doing brute damage. Can be printed from the security protolathe.
* **Voidshot Scatter Shells:** Energy scatter shells that deal a small amount of brute damage and easily wound targets. Ignore reflectable items. Purchased from cargo.
* **(Old) Pulse Slug Shells:** As the pulse slug of old, just now an energy shell. 30 damage and delete objects they hit. Crafted.
* **(Old) Scatter Ion Shells:** As the ion shell of old, just now an energy shell. Hits everything with an ion shot. Crafted.
* **(Old) Frag-12 Shells:** As the frag-12 of old, just now an energy shell. Explodes. What more do you want? Crafted.

## The Deltra

- A fully automatic energy machine gun.
- While that descriptor might spook people, the actual full-auto fire mode requires windup after a few shots. It takes a while before it really starts to spew bullets.
- This means the Deltra is more difficult to use in an aggressive manner than a defensive manner, and why the Deltra has another feature to aid with this. The forcefield projector.
- The forcefield can be placed with a right-click, and comes out fast. It blocks ballistic shots and people, but not energy weapons, or the Deltra's shots (despite them being a bit inbetween).
- This means you can place down the projector in a strategic location, get the Deltra spooling up, and then fire down on opponents. The Deltra's bullets pass through glass, but aren't reflected.
- It is extremely expensive, purchased from cargo.
- The spoolup means people can probably just walk out of sight before it gets to full power. But if they can't, or they're on the aggressive, the Deltra can hit full power and really put out damage.

### Ammo

We absolutely do not want field reloading being an easy method of continuous fighting without an opponent being able to successfully work around potential weaponized threats. Thus, the thermal pistols need to be reloaded with a recharger, and the riot blaster
loses a significant amount of damage if not at full charge.

The major hurdle of NT's energy weapons should be EMP vulnerability. As a result, the weapons they use should have some interaction with EMPs. Usually for the worse.

The weapons to be replaced are riot shotguns, combat shotguns and WT-550. We could also remove or massively weaken further the mosin nagant. A replacement for the ballistic shotguns, the riot blaster, uses energy-based EMP vulnerable but printable ammo. Since shotguns as they are presently are tied in too much with the syndicate/admin spawn ballistic variety, we should consider moving crew weapons to separate ammo types altogether so as to prevent too much overlap between these two factions.

The only ballistic shotguns after this change are the bartender's double-barreled and the pipegun. If people start overutilizing the pipegun, that too probably needs to get removed (or reworked heavily into meeting these new expectations).

**The expectation for this document is that field reloading weapons with no answer or no consideration for retreat are contrary to this design direction, and recharger-reliant ammunition or recharger-reliant weapons is the intended gameplay for crew weaponry.**

### Damage

Energy projectiles should probably be low in terms of overall damage to respect the lack of energy armor overall. Energy is therefore reliable for the damage it deals into all but a very tiny subset of encounters (or simple mobs). The 20 damage value is actually pretty reasonable for this as a baseline, and any scatter weaponry probably shouldn't be bigger than 50 in overall damage. So weapons should probably fall between these two values.

## Factors and Considerations (Mostly Outdated 06/22)

### Why keep X gun when we're removing Y?

Aesthetic is a good justification for why particular roles are given exclusive ballistic weapons, and therefore, the detective and bartender have ballistics. But enabling security members to be able to operate independently from retreating to rechargers is not a good justification and goes against the outlined expectations of this change.

### What about the alternative functions of the various shotgun ammos?

Those aren't gone, but there is a very small handful of remaining weapons that can use them, so security shouldn't need to be able to print them. The department that has any reason to be able to acquire these niche ammunition types is probably cargo.

The riot blaster still has a good variety of ammo types. But they're geared towards utility over damage. Security has an overwhelming problem with high damage, but not a whole lot in terms of utility. This is hopefully where things change.

### What about rubbershot and beanbags for use as nonlethal takedown weapons for security?

Security have a myriad of nonlethal options already available to them. While disablers are still vulnerable to deflection in this change, any threat actively making themselves immune to the disabler is probably grounds for using something lethal. In addition, the stun baton is still as reliable as ever when combatting foes only immune to ranged threats (like sleeping carp and deswords against beams). It is extremely rare that something is immune to both ranged disablers and melee batons, but security would still have the answer to such a threat all the same.

Lasers work on a large amount of monsters besides lavaland creatures. In which case, there exists weapons like the PKA that have the ammo longevity (see: infinite) and damage (see: at least 40-70 in low pressure, where you normally fight them in) necessary to combat those threats.

The new Deltra covers the big bad threats at a premium cost. Still EMP vulnerable, but dealing brute damage and able to ignore reflectable defenses. If something could not be solved with lasers (somehow) and you have the money, Deltras can fix that problem.

### What if I just take the Deltra and start killing things with that instead?

The Deltra's windup is meant to prevent it being useful as an alpha striking weapon. You can't really get the jump on someone with it very easily. But you can hold a position with it. That should limit its use for actually catching a foe off-guard without them skidaddling the moment they see the Deltra winding up.

### What if I just started doing that with thermal pistols?

You would probably do that with a laser gun. I don't think it would matter. If you intend to kill people, you intend to kill people, irregardless of what means you have available. Killing people tends to actually be the hardest method of bringing someone down comparatively to nonlethal methods from a raw numbers/efficiency/resistance perspective.

### What if everyone starts just building pipeguns, load them with improvised shotgun shells and started using those instead of their disablers?

Pipeguns have a damage reduction with all the available ammunition, and this includes nonlethal ammunition. So beanbags only deal 41 (55 x 75%) stamina and rubbershot in total would deal 49 (66 x 75%), and this being in a weapon that eventually can misfire (hurting you), jam, and holds one shot at a time. It's probably less efficient than simply using a disabler, so overall probably not worth worrying about. It's not a mechanics issue on a case by case basis, but more so what the overrall trend that is being set currently looks like.

### Brute damage is the only way to fight X threat if Y circumstance occurs, and many of these do burn. Isn't this bad? Shouldn't security have a solution to that?

The detective's revolver, the bartender's shotgun (when loaded correctly) and pipeguns are still present as options for the time being. Voidshot only cares about actual armor and not the nonsense that monsters use to determine their defenses, so they do not actually have their damage reduced at all against simple mob threats. Not having the answer the moment something jumps out at you to fight you is intended. Just accept that sometimes you are caught with your pants down and don't worry about it too much.