I touched on this somewhere, nobody paid any attention to it, so I'm going to post it in its own thread so people will be forced to tell me to shut up.

Now, bigger weapons.

The devastators are crap energy weapons. Gauss are better than them. But hear the name DEVASTATOR. Doesn't it sound impressive? So wouldn't you love to see something DEVASTATING come out of it?

I thought so.

Bigger is better.

Now imagine a devastator bolt 10m in diameter with a pretty little warp-in-style-ripple effect behind it. Scary? Yup.

Now if its possible to add a slight concussive effect to that blast (as in take the centre of the bolt as the actual projectile and give it a 5m prox) then thats bloody dangerous. By making the concussive effect weak but 40m radius then youll take most of the damage after getting boomed by this bolt of death.

THAT is a scary L port weapon, and something other than an AGT which people would mount.

So why not go nuts with some off-the-rails weaponry, like portable lightning-mine-generators and concussive wave-generators ? Everything is based around 3 types of weaponry. The rocket, missile, and blaster. The screamer is interesting because it mixes rocket with blaster. The railgun is also interesting because it has ammo and is noticeably *different*. But currently we have 3092487 versions of the straightfire energy weapon, some rockets, a ton of crappy missiles and a few useful ones.

Why?

Make a weapon that fires 5 energy shots at once in different directions in a cone-shape. Make mines which act like turrets when dropped. Make an L port charge cannon which you can FEEL RIP UP SPACE-TIME. Recoil! Big huge bassy sounds. The Doom BFG 9000 cranked up to OMFG. Imagine it. *fweeeeeEEEE >>WOMMMM<< owmyface*

Just stuff like that which is completely unexplored. I haven't got a clue how difficult it would be to actually DO, but I doubt there's anyone that thinks THIS is a sucky idea. With bigger ships coming into the game, lets have some better L port stuff to tackle em with!

Hehe, purdy. I like!

Yeah, I'm with UncleDave on this. More variety in weapon types than the generic energy blasters/missiles/rockets we have now would be way cool.

Why not think of it this way, lets go with your idea....

But lets have a huge cannon that runs on the rails of each cap ship giving it a offense. Of course the cannon would take 5 min to reload so use against small targets is inefficient.
Think of the two rails as magnets and they draw in space metal, even ships move towards the magnets if not careful. The metal would look like the tiny dots you get when mining but on a larger scale.
Then a shockwave would emit from the end of the two rails and a magnetic fireball rockets down the rails towards the target.

~Cpt. Overkill~

By the way, the fireball since it's magnetic would grag stuff slightly towards itself.

I think that something based on interstellar hydrogen would make more sense, you won't get much iron from the vacuum.

Make it into a very large plasdev.

EDIT: furthermore, I doubt that these ships are made out of iron, and so they would require a sweeping electromagnetic field (in order to create a dynamo).

adding to this:

An L-port railgun with powerful recoil and devastating power. Something like zzzzzZZZZZZZZZZ *CHOONG!* and suddenly you're facing 90-120 degrees from your original heading and flying slightly backwards. A superheavy ship like the Behemoth (empty), or other large fighters weighed down with cargo, would not feel the effects of the recoil nearly as much as an empty Warthog. Large railing while boosting would actually deal damage to the space frame. Probably one boosting shots from an Atlas, and two boosting shots from a Warthog would be fatal.

Turret Dropper - Drops out a mine-like neutron turret. Fires on targets within 300m. It'll prioritize first on whoever you have targeted, and then any other viable target in the area.

Sensor Dropper - Drops out a sensor-mine that extends your sensor capabilities to 1500m from each sensor (good for pirates).

Energy Web Generator - Interacts with the web generators of at least one other fighter to create an area in which any target inside gets attacked by lightning mine blasts (250m). Two fighters have a small attack area, 10 have a very large attack area.

Flak Missile - Launches out a missile with 50m proximity that only does blast damage for 55m, but sends out glowing yellow shrapnel for 100m (generally random spread, so there's a possibility that one person may catch a lot of flak and the guy next to him might not catch any.

if you add mines, I wanna see them be targettable with the target in front button...

me eyes the devs

I like the plasdev idea, though it is a bit too scary : with 10m bolt and concussion effect, it feels like a 190m/s traveling flare of death with 10m prox and autoaim, and unlimited ammo O.O.

well, 5m/s prox. And I'm not saying the refire time should be as short as it is now. :P