Elydo

Ultimately ammo mules should not be necessary for anything other than heavy weapons. I'd want laser cells in particular (I haven't checked the capacity of plasma weapons beyond pistols) to be capable of more shots and really I'd like a couple more belt squares in the inventory to allow for more ammunition to be carried. Or maybe a couple of squares on each thigh or something. Distributed gear capacity is a military specialty after all. What's that saying; have enough rounds that if you run dry you have officially had a bad day and can go home?

There isn't much point for the aliens to try and get humans to nuke their own cities, if they were after massive infrastructure damage they own the orbitals. They can destroy whatever they want. On the other hand, no population in history has ever been bombed into submission, and maybe they're smart enough to know that. So terror missions are an assault on morale instead; keeping people in fear, lowering their productivity and quality of life, sapping their faith in the future since they don't know when an attack will come of it'll succeed or not. If they become commonplace people will become fatalistically inured to them. ^ My justification for terror missions Keep in mind that it is tactical nuclear weapons that are deployed. Battlefield scale, not strategic city-killers. There are quite a few websites around these days that allow you to input a particular yield and drop it on a city of your choice to see the outcome. Hell, I was shown that if you dropped Little Boy (the Hiroshima bomb) on LAX the primary blast area doesn't reach outside the airport. Nukes are not the boogyman on speed.

"Use the enemies strength against him" is a premise of Judo. I thought the premise of Ju Jitsu was "You are going to be pain"

Oh the temperatures are extreme, but the energy transfer happens over such a small amount of time that the target material doesn't 'heat' so much as 'explosively turn into constituent atoms'. Heating of the materiel is what happens further out when the molecular agitation isn't enough to violently break the chemical bonds. The bolt wouldn't actually have a kinetic damage profile, it'd just inflict damage closer to a kinetic weapon than a thermal one. Another paradigm to consider involves hypervelocity projectiles: they travel so fast that upon contact with the target the energy transfer is again so instantaneously large that the target simply explodes. The delivery mechanism is just different. Tests conducted by the U.S. Navy into railgun prototypes have demonstrated that the projectile sheds enough energy into the air through friction to ionise it during travel, creating a particularly impressive plume of plasma in it's wake. The motto of this project is Velocitas Eradico. I laughed. Did you mean defiantly or definitely? [grin] Edit: Antimatter would only be effective in a vacuum, which even space isn't. Otherwise your 'bullet' would annihilate itself before ever reaching the target. Possibly within patricidal range of the firing weapon.

I would direct you to: http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/6662-Jsleezy-s-Real-Armors And would advise you to re-peruse at progressive time intervals ^^

I always preferred saying that the pendulum cuts both ways myself, heh.

Err, I keep running out of money. Whilst hardly swimming in gear. All this does is reinforce my paranoia that the finance fairies irrationally hate me, even in games...

"Sir Issac Newton is the deadliest son of a bitch in space!" A packet of plasma, as far as any physics we so far can imagine goes, is a packet of ionised gas, typically at high temperature as the temperature is what strips the electrons from the atoms and ionises the gas, contained by some sort of projected magnetic field. As the magnetic bottle loses containment the integrity of the bolt would decrease until it effectively evaporated. Good weapon for use in an otherwise constraintless environment. It's also debatable how much recoil a plasma weapon would have, and recoil is something any space-based weapon would have to take into account.

I don't think the cannons have burst fire, but they can fire multiple times a turn. Oddly, I found my only Andron terror mission so far much easier than my first one against Caesans. (I keep wanting to call them cesareans, a truly horrifying image...) And it was at night. I guess I got really lucky. My ragequit mission so far is a landing craft raid against sebs. Lots of sebs, all soldiers and guards at least, all with heavy plasmas except my introduction to plasma cannons, all in cover, all around the freaking chinook. Oh and a couple of reapers too. That seem really friendly; when they aren't just casually walking into the helicopter and hanging out, they're dancing. One kept kneeling down behind a rock, getting up to walk towards the chinook, geting reaction fired by a plasma pistol guy of mine (who never hit) whereupon it'd walk back to the rock and kneeling down again. Repeat over about five turns. Meanwhile the rest of the situation gets progressively worse. I've been getting boned. Really really boned.

Likely incorrect. We don't really know what the physical properties of a plasma bolt would be, but it's more likely the thermal effects would be secondary rather than primary. The energy transfer would be so large the target material would either be penetrated akin to kinetics, or simply explode as its matrix received so much energy it atomised. Thermal effects would come into play after the initial energy transfer, when all the previously focused energy contained within the bolt dissipated throughout the target. I went into this a bit in the pistol and shield thread elsewhere. It's all about energy transfer. Heating a material takes time, heat it too fast and it explodes. Take lasers, a beam laser with sustained output will melt/burn a target. A pulse laser dumping energy in bursts, heightening the energy transfer per time unit, vapourise the surface of the target material instead. Then typically ionise the vapour causing a plasma explosion. That's not to say you don't have to deal with the thermal effects. If you can develop a material that can withstand the initial bolt well enough to serve as armour, THEN you have to deal with all that energy wanting to dissipate and heating up the impact area.

My experiences with it led me to treat it more as a grenade launcher. Less damaging than a cannon (repeated shots did nothing to my guys in wolf) but I'm assuming it added to suppression and armour mitigation, and certainly drew attention to itself, I didn't feel comfortable leaving it alone just in case it suddenly became more effective. More in line with a support weapon than a damage-dealer like our rocket launcher. I kinda liked the contrast actually, given that we don't get grenade launchers for some (I know, balance) reason. Edit: I'm talking about the alien cannon, rather than the heavy plasma rifle.

Yup, currently listed as being destroyed on the recovery screen at the end. Every time, bar the first when they're sent to research. It took me a while to realise it was automatic, rather than me somehow blowing the thing apart when I was taking ever-increasing risks to try to not even scratch the damn paint...

Could always tie subsequent datacores to flavour research; topics that provide a bit of optional lore/exposition. Have an additional two or three topics per ufo type, but give the recovered datacores only a chance of unlocking them, each subsequent topic being a lower chance. I'm sure the community could skyball some ideas; the OG had the entertainment devices, the abduction rooms etc. Adds a compulsive element to trying to complete everything there is to know, whilst not penalising the player if they opt out. If it'd be a lot of work for the team though, it's not an option.

For the cells to be compatible, presumably the power levels would have to be comparable. Or else it'd be like slapping an explosive into your weapon. Aren't the human plasmas lower-powered than the aliens'? That doesn't solve the laser issue either.

But reducing the number of low-end flights imposes a limit on the ability to train rooks. We could do that, and have a mid-to-late game research that increases the stat gain of soldiers below a certain rank. In effect they'd level faster, thus needing fewer missions, and no other alterations required. Just a thought. In Apoc they had perpetual passive training with the appropriate facility, you could just recruit and park rooks at the base before you ran out of squaddies and they'd slowly become less likely to instadie. No provision for that mechanic here though.

In the OG smoke did cause stun damage, but environmental stun was only inflicted at the end of turns. You could run through smoke fine, but stay in it and the little white bar begins to grow. Aliens in xenonauts refuse to stay in stun gas if they have other options, I don't know if there's a threshold for it but if not, making smoke do minute amounts of stun would both be somewhat realistic and have the desired effect.

I'm not certain it needs to be an actual weapon. Just stating they have one and the appropriate research techs upgrade how much damage dealt should be enough. Though if we do get an image for it, I am so going to want a mod to provide every type of tropey sci-fantasy weapon out there. Heat axes, crowbars, elven knives, those klingon flickblade things, tiny little lightsabers. Sporks. Hell, straight up spoons for any aussies.

Oh how I wish flashbangs did a fucking thing.

I mentioned the rather surprising accuracy of these lovely deathgivers as well. Getting tagged by burst fire from these from beyond visual range can brighten any mission. And by brighten, I am referring to the sheer number of incoming plasma bolts.

Remember, drop the pin, throw the grenade.

Shit, I should have said below the ankle. Proofing fail. I have not training with ballistic shields so I've about reached the limited of my informed knowledge. We have a few milspec guys around though, I'd by no means want to step on their toes. At the very least though, for gameplay balance crouching should give full coverage for a frontal arc (I would think) whilst standing/moving should give majority coverage, but below 100%. I'd question above 90% or below 80%. If 100% coverage was to be implemented whilst standing, there would need to be a tradeoff, either in terms of weight (which is likely to change anyway) or slower movement speed, which would translate as a tu penalty.

Depends what type of shield is under discussion. Some riot police do indeed use round shields these days, though I understand that's not what is being considered here. The type of shield in xenonauts, and remember that we're 30 years in the past here, seems to leave the foot above the ankle, the very top of the head and an amount of the upper arm-to-shoulder exposed when moving, perhaps slightly less when standing still. When crouched it should really cover far more, but I don't know if that is an enabled mechanic in-game. To use another medieval comparison, ballistic shields of this type are smaller than a Tower Shield, probably about the same size as a scutum. If tower shield isn't too imprecise a definition.

I actually like the look of lasers a bit more than the plasmas. I am known for being inadvertently contrary.

An enduring memory of a game of Apocalypse was a Mothership raid; having reached the upper (bridge?) level, my troopers fully equipped with disruptor armour, I think devastator cannons as main weapons (I eventually kept them as sidearms late game. Good for tunnelling through walls. And hills) and a fair amount of experience. Spread out across the central area, no contacts. Then several of the bastards became apparent lurking in the rooms off the far side. End turn with one soldier roughly a third of the way across the open area and the rest going around the sides keeping out of LoS as much as possible. That one soldier got hit with so much concentrated devastator cannon fire every single piece of her armour was vapourised. And she survived! Until the next turn whereupon she died of wounds. BUT STILL! To be left standing after having all of your armour destroyed literally around you. That's stayed with me.

Cheesy, yes. Awesome, yes. I'd love a (good) remake of The Last Starfighter. It deserves to be better known.