(Preview) Chaingun Rework

[solid brook]

Chainguns have many issues that they suffer from in high level play, restricting their use and building very strictly. These issues blend into casual play making them boring and uninteresting to use in my opinion:

• Inflexibility (layout)
• Inaccuracy
• Modules set in stone
• OC damage pool

Chainguns lack flexibility and versatility, which relegates them to use as a core weapon exclusively on rammers. This is because of the combination of multiple design choices.

• Magazines requiring long strips of space means they encourage design of compact cores within the vessel over use as a surface weapon. The strict requirement of a certain number of magazines to output respectable damage with the prohibitive size and weight of magazines means usage as a surface weapon, which demands compactness and relatively low weight, is infeasible.

• Inaccuracy is a core aspect of Chainguns' balance in the meta. As a high DPS hitscan weapon, their effectiveness at killing ships is delicately balanced almost entirely by their inaccuracy. However, this ultimately directly restricts their usage case to as close range as possible. It's not like they are useless at medium ranges; they are relatively effective with a core designed for a good focal point. However, their most effective range will always be short by design.

• Chainguns inhabit a strange niche of sustained burst damage. Their rampup and long reload times mean they have a short period where they deal massive damage output, and deal none or very little outside of that period they are firing. This further encourages ramming as you really require a guarantee that you can actually get full value of your chainguns against the enemy.

• Their shell is an odd bit of confused design. They seem to be trying to assist chainguns as a surface weapon, but its a microscopic benefit that doesn't really do much in any real high-performance context.

• The way chainguns are designed is quite set in stone in general. 2 crew per 4 mags with a 2x2 storage, and 6 crew for a 3x2 storage with the gun itself and 2 spare magazines. Any more is often unnecessarily expensive and any less reloads a bit too slow, and so design has been set almost entirely in stone. Of course factories are entirely unnecessary.

• The new chaingun overclock largely fails to address these issues. Inaccuracy is further increased. The damage output is greatly increased, but your damage pool per volley is unchanged, further incentivizing ramming above all else. Even longer mags are similarly encouraged to take advantage of the greater damage output and consequently quicker emptying of mags.

REWORK 1:
ALT. FIRING MODE: BURST
Fires tight bursts of shells at a low, fixed rate of fire. Accuracy is slightly increased.

• Slightly increased accuracy
• Burst fire (roughly 12 per burst, scaling slightly with magazine count)
  Lower damage output
  No rampup
  (Fire mode cannot be changed while firing or before the gun is fully reloaded.)

OVERCLOCK: AUTO-LOADING
Shells can be consecutively loaded into the gun or magazines while firing. Heat generation ramps up over sustained fire.
+50% shell and turret gimbal speed
+~15% maximum fire rate
+Ramping heat generation per bullet delivered while firing
+Heat generation per shot

I believe this combination of reworks would be a good way to easily improve CG's versatility without a deep mechanical rework of chainguns as a whole. Burst fire provides a less powerful but more versatile firing option that would retain efficacy at medium ranges, providing a more focused and controlled fire mode. Bursts of damage would be more wieldy and a bit easier to keep damage on target than a constant stream. It would also be easier to use on non-overclocked smaller guns that are currently very difficult to use with low magazine counts.

The auto-loading overclock will allow magazine-agnostic designs to shine, but at a large cost of heat generation. As long as you consecutively reload the gun, you do not need a single magazine. However, every shell delivered to the gun mid firing produces slightly more heat than the last, requiring cooling and a heat buffer. You could run zero magazines for a compact and cheap chaingun setup at the cost of massive heat generation, or run a strip of magazines along with the overclock to reduce the heat generation while providing an emergency reserve of output and reaping the benefits of the overclock.

REWORK 2:
Overclock: Burst Fire
Fires tight bursts of shells at a slow, ramping rate.
+Turret gimbal speed
+Shell retraction speed
+Burst fire (12 or so shells, slightly scaling with magazines)
+Small accuracy increase
Heat generation per shot

Hardly a rework, but it should provide an easier-to-implement overclock that is better than what we have now. Would reward lower mag setups offering high burst damage and being quicker on the uptake, and work at medium ranges to encourage ships like cruisers to run chainguns. Responsiveness pointing forward encourages use as a surface weapon even perhaps with no/very few mags

@cyan raft

(FWIW, in the PVP community I am one of the only Chaingun rammer mains, and pushed them to being relevant in the meta for multiple updates. I have a lot of experience using them in PvP.)

[terse meteor]

great writeup, I especially like the autoloading rework idea

[dusky terrace]

Auto-loading is potentially interesting.

Another idea I had was to allow OC chainguns to spin up while closed/retracted at the cost of generating heat.

[molten zinc]

Got an Idea
A new ability that is activated on OC (similar to what tractor beam got)
The ability will make the CG stop shooting, and it will start spreading up very fast and after like 5 to 10 sec it will shoot all the ammo in VERY QUICKLY (like 10 mags in 1 sec) but it will generate more heat per shot so esentialy its a abitlity that will blow up the CG if you dont think about it but if you do its super powerfull

[frosty adder]

but they already spin while closed, or at least they wind down

basically in current version you can build a chaingun that reloads faster than it cools off, and when it starts to fire again you can see it still has some spin left

in a proper design you can have like half the spin remaining

[cyan raft]

there's no way to spin the chaingun up before it even starts to fire, though

[frosty adder]

On a first pass, yes, but you can keep it spinning thru the reloads. Basically all you'd have to do is to preempt one time, and you'd have half way in after that.

[cyan raft]

you need to reload very fast to do that, which restricts the available designs quite heavily, and that only helps if a fight goes on for a while while walt's idea would let you pre-spin before a fight

[frosty adder]

yeah that's true, you'd need like 7 magz for that, which I suppose is a lot.

[dull valley]

it might not be ramping up before firing, but you can hold the high ramp up of the chaingun after it's ramped up to keep it at high ramp up, while not firing