I've been watching some Space anime as well as some WW2 movies and seen something that interests me as both something that would look awesome in a fight and could be rather effective for capital ships.
What inspires me for this weapon is the streams of AA fire coming from ships and ground installations during air raids. Instead of flack some the guns send up a continuous burst of fire creating a line of fire in the sky. Or in the case of space combat long burst of pulse lasers(or whatever the equivalent is in said universe).
Now as to how I think it could work in Freelancer.
Basic specs would be a weapon that fired a burst at the rate of of chain gun (at least 8-16) for 2-4 seconds(once the trigger is pulled the gun would fire for the set time). While the gun was firing you would be able to aim it, making for some potentially great anti fighter. I think that if the entire stream hit the damage would about the same as a battle razor but firing would take about 1.5 times the energy. Making it inefficient if not ineffective against capital ships.
Now most my experience is with gunboats so I use them as reference and with the purposed specs above firing three simultaneously would drain the core of the larger gunboats. This weapon would allow capital ships to have a strong anti fighter weapon while not using up every turret on the ship. As well as an alternative to the solaris turrets, which at the gunboat level are rather pathetic. Also to balance the weapon as it goes up in scale to larger ships, instead of boosting the damage of individual bolts the amount of time the gun fires could be increased.
I also realize that I am not good at guessing balance and if anything ever came of this idea it would probably look nothing like my original idea. But I really don't think that half a battleships turrets devoted to tiny low range anti fighter(cough *solaris*cough) weapons looks good.
Anyway post if you like the idea, dislike it, have better ideas about how it could work, or if something like it is already implemented in the game and I'm to blind to see it.
Be quick,
Be efficient,
Be powerful,
The correct way to pirate
Well those old WWII era ships did actually have multiple flak/machine gun batteries devoted to anti-aircraft fire, and might have had only three big turrets (triple or double barrels on a turret mount depending on size, but you get the idea). The danger was too pressing to ignore, and anti-ship weapons are too devastating to need all that many.
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