Alan

Basic physics, all the kinetic weapons should have a recoil penalty that scales with damage output (is damage just a straight momentum transfer calculation, or does a very high speed but light weight gauss projectile do more damage than an equivalent projectile with the same momentum?), but laser or plasma weapons don't rely on the kinetic energy to do damage. A soldier with a high enough strength to counteract the recoil penalty should be able to walk multiple shots onto the target, for an accuracy bonus for firing more shots? Obviously this would make the laser machine gun hugely OP. Is there space for a short range laser cannon like the MARS one, but without overlapping too much with the sniper rifle? If you want to suppress someone, bring along a kinetic machine gun as well? Or keep a laser machine gun, but rebalance higher accuracy and lower damage, and maybe 3/6 or 2/5 instead of 3/10? Then the next question is how the laser shotgun actually works?

When a UFO passes out of radar range, the options should include the option to continue on the current intercept course, either as well or instead of the current option to fly to where the UFO was (which changes the direction). If the UFO doesn't change direction or speed, the fighters would find it again.

I noticed that the alien base has a nice holographic globe

Guessing it would detract from all the notifications of events showing up on the map if half of them are on the other side of a globe, but yes, even if we don't get a globe as a map, make the radar projections distort correctly, and have everyone fly great circle routes over the poles

Ok, I thought it was just an overkill mechanic than pure explosion damage. So possibly he took 100 damage straight from the pickup (like the snowmobile bug), but more likely he took a plasma gun hit in the move that triggered the overwatch fire. Not seeing a source for the stats on the plasma gun, but being reduced to 30HP / 30 armour or 35HP / 25 armour then gets him gibbed by the explosion. Then the other observation is that the pickup explosion damage isn't scaled down for being on the very edge of the explosion radius, so he should have been standing next to it for the cover bonus or one square further away to be out the blast zone.

So on Soldier, I unlocked exo-armour, gave a new suit to a zero mission 61HP Sgt with a shield, then watched in surprise as he got gibbed by an exploding pickup truck from 4 squares away. Did I just completely miss him getting hit by a plasma bolt? Was the truck just carrying C4? Obviously what makes it more embarrassing is that the pickup truck exploded after being hit several times by an overwatching laser machine gun colonel. But I'm curious how much damage an exploding truck is supposed to do, whether it scales in any way with the amount of damage that it took, then how much damage it takes to gib someone. Because it doesn't feel like it should be an end game hazard on low difficulty levels.

Makes sense to block the alien weapons being used in mission, by virtue of an electronic trigger lock or something. But the text currently says that can be circumvented in the lab, so logically we can expect there to be an option to remanufacture alien weapons into our own. Then the interesting problem might be the ammo supply. Rather than having ammo supply limited only by the weight capacity of our troops, maybe we need a certain level of engineering resource devoted to keeping our stolen weapons full of ammo. Maybe we want to break the captured ammo down for alenium to feed something else instead of using it in battle. Maybe our government sponsors just take everything that we salvage once we have completed the initial research into it, and give us a cash bounty. Also saves it from clogging up all our storage space just in case we might be able to use it later.