Hi, I was thinking about making a ship, but that ship resolves around it's main cannon.
It is a MAC, a magnetic accelerator cannon, which with electro magnetic coils, pushes it's projectile forward at enormous speed. That, of course, causes a tremendous inpact force because the projectile is made of Tungsten/wolfram (Tungsten is a quite funny name for us swedish people, it means translated to english "Heavy Stone", and that's because it's very heavy. We prefer to call it wolfram) and with a Uranium core. That's the story behind that gun.
Well, my idea was to make a missile launcher, which would be fitted to that ship. I would prefer it as a gun, so you would have to buy ammo from shipyards to fire it. It would require more energy to fire than any fighter can possibly wield, so it wouldnt be exploited as fighter equipment. So I guess that would make it neccesary to make the ship a cruiser or a gunboat with lots of energy. I guess if you made a missile go much faster then and make it much broader to fit into the coil of the ship, then it would look like I would like it to.
I'll provide a gif of how the animation looked like in the cinematics.
i've suggested something similar to that already as a junker-specific bomber heavy weapon, using superconductors and electromagnets to accelerate 'spikes' of scrap metal.
Oh, then I wasn't first with this idea... sad face...
But this would be a capship-vs-capship weapon, to improve RP and add ammo based weapons which would be more vital to some ships. I mean, the liberty cruiser can use it forever without running out of ammo, and it depends on it's forward gun, without it, noone would buy it.
Bombers are the closest thing to this gun, but they're for fighter-vs-capship.
What I say is, it improves RP to have ammo to big guns.
while the idea is nice - you know that the liberty cruiser has .... well, some sort of that weapon. its basicly a big tube that fires a huge anti - cap projectile.
of course its not too popular, cause the projectile travels at no useful speed - but i doubt you d get a frontgun into the game that was easy to hit with.
the animation is nice - and i wish that capship weapons actually had such fancy animations - but i daresay the freelancer engine cannot produce such nice effects.
I know of -one- person who was killed, in a fleeing fighter by the Cruiser front cannon. I shall not mention his name for fear of making JihadJoe blush.
Oh wait.
The Lib Cruiser cannon could do with a severe uppage of speed, but the main problem with turret boom cannons having high damage ultrahigh speed slow refire is that they'd be super epic against lil bitty fighters. 'less one could reduce their accuracy and slow their tracking some.
My outcast bomber was killed by a forward cannon once =(
I was chasing after a rheinland gunboat in alpha, all alone, he was about 3k away from me... then boom, i'm dead.
He had engine killed and turned around, I couldnt see that because we were inside the nebula, all of a sudden i had a bunch of forward gun shots and cerberus shots flying at me, I didnt even have time to use bots/bats, i just instantly kersploded.
Those effects are possible in Freelancer Jinx. Take a peek at FLCE's weapons. Their large slug firing capital ships have interesting effects. We also did something similar in another mod with mixed results, namely due to the effects just not fitting the gun.
This would make a very nice addition I think. A rail gun on a larger scale for capital ships. The Liberty Cruiser's forward gun is an energy weapon which is probably more efficient than using ammunition but may not achieve the same impact damage. So a solid slug firing weapon like that would be different as well.
Also let's face it. When you imagine capital ship battles you think of vast fleets churning through each other, weapons fire causing carnage and destruction while fighters and bombers whiz by, occasionally failing to dodge the flak and so resulting in the vessel streaking away and smashing into another ship, with flames erupting everywhere. This is a step in that direction.
Play Freelancer: Back Dawn
They have the MAC and the frigate based around it. It Fires one shot and you have no more energy. But does impressive results to open hull.
They even have Tactical Nukes
But MAC is very hard to hit versus fighters. Its only good versus Caps and to hit, you got to have the target right infront of you.
For the animation. Cant you just use the explosion of a Capital ship missile?