General Useless Weapons Thread

[Aury]

This thread is dedicated to the discussion of any and all useless weapons- so far determined to include:

QAC - max ammo limit is too low, doesn't deal enough damage (does same amount as lamplighter, but is inferior weapon)
Demolition Cannon - 8 charges and it's weaker than the ares plasma cannon, and it charges 350MW per shot to boot. You can't even get more than 50% its value from sale!
Ares Plasma Cannon - 500MW? that's just too much to be even close to viable for player use. The regular plasma cannon gets 250% the damage per second per megawatt (and still does 150% the raw damage per second anyways).

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Some "useless" weapons may be thought to include things like the "blinder" cannon, but the blinder cannon is actually useful from a balance and diversity perspective to make the heliotropes a more interesting (and dangerous) enemy for the player to fight. Although, yes, it is useless for the player's use.

[Atarlost]

Other useless weapons:

TM7 Multitarget Cannon: Shot travels a short distance then fragments into three independant warheads ... that don't track.

Ion Flame Cannon: short range, low damage, average rate of fire. It's good for shooting down projectiles, but not a lot else.

Neither is used by any enemy in default Transcendence.

Oh, and the lamplighter does twice the damage of the QAC.

[Aury]

I found an ion flame cannon useful only once:

I found it in an unmodded st.k's in .99c in a bushido store.

It totally owned those mauraders and sung ^^.

Of course, it also totally owned my fuel supply (as my reactor could barely sustain its usage)

[Atarlost]

Compare it to a Katana, though. Both are level 8 military Bushido ion weapons. The Katana has more range, more effective damage*, and lower energy consumption.

Actually, the laser array is pushing into the useless category for the same reason. The spread is too wide to score multiple hits against a single target.



* because the Ion Flame is too wide to get more than 3 shots to hit most targets, and targets large enough to hit with the whole spread are usually large enough to be hit multiple times by the Katana's passthrough.

[Aury]

Yeah, the Ion flame cannon is relativly useless for the level and cost

[Aury]

more useless weapons:

light recoiless- there are no AI ships that use this weapon any longer. It's marginally better than the centauri recoiless.

centauri recoiless- yes, it makes them easy, but that's no excuse for why they are utterly harmless with it. This miserable excuse for a weapon can't even punch through a class I shield! (Yet their nice little CLAW cannons can eat through a class II with relative ease, even faster for the heavy CLAW!). This weapon needs a buff. Seriously. Don't want over confident newbies running around in a class II thinking their ship is awesome then getting blasted to bits by Arco's KM500 tracking missiles...

blinder cannon- ok, I know, as I said, it isn't a true useless weapon, but it WOULD be rather nice if it would affect the AI's ships in some way when the player (or even other AI's) are using it. Perhapse when it hits an AI ship do an EMP1 effect instead or something? Maybe perform a chance of the "peaceful constraint" cyberattack's weapon-neutralization effect?

penitent dark acid cannon- its a level 4 weapon that doesn't show up till your running around in a YoroiMX/mammoth100 blasting the bad guys with a hanzo blaster and that nifty hecates cannon you looted. Not only is it useless to the player, but its useless as a weapon even to the order! The only threat the order poses is to people running around on autopilot in a nebula where they end up running straight into that oracus harass dark-acid wave. This weapon needs some serious buffing. (even at 150% enhaced, its still very underwhelming)

IM90- this is seriously the most useless weapon in the history of transcendence: I mean, it blows practically everything away, yet it can't punch through the iocryms shields w/o wasting precious spheres that I need to use for fuel in my slightly less useless QAC, I mean, what's up with that guys? seriously >.<

Lol, I just had to do the IM90! <3 IM90

[Atarlost]

One Penitant cannon may be available at Rigel. Penitant shrines with their penitant cannon wielding guards can start appearing as early as St. K's. They don't become common until level 5 systems, though, so a slight boost might be acceptable.

[Fossaman]

The penitent cannon is probably something of a relic, as well. I'd like to see what happens if it's bumped back up to the settings it had in its glory days, when it would punch right through shields as if they weren't there. Later it just stripped shields away entirely in a few shots. Not it's just kind of wimpy.

[digdug]

The penitent cannon is probably something of a relic, as well. I'd like to see what happens if it's bumped back up to the settings it had in its glory days, when it would punch right through shields as if they weren't there.

yeah, I remember that. It was skipping the shields completely.
It would be nice to have that feature resurrected as an attribute like
skipshields = "true"

[Aeonic]

Having shield piercing weapons is a great idea. I'm surprised its not already in.

[Bobby]

as of now, shield piercing weapons could be implemented by the absorb adjust in all shields.. skipshields="true" would be awesome, especially if it took a percent as well as "true"

[Song]

Ressurecting this so the Beginner weapons thing can go back to being about beginner weapons.

Changes:

Ares Plasma cannon seems better, but still looks better when it fires than it actually is. It's more likely to be the Phobos USING it better that's made me notice it more.

QAC has longer range. Still underpowered for the trouble you go to to get it.

TM7 cannon now works....sorta. Still not a very good weapon though.

Other bad weapons (taken from the beginner weapons thread):

-Shield-buster MAG (shields have been nerfed, so a shield-buster is kinda useless ATM)

-3K seige MAG (Very expensive, very slow, useless range (12LS!!!)...even if you DID want to use this against a big station,you'd be a little close for comfort.)

-MAGs in general (Poor range, not good enough to compensate for it. The Cluster MAG is the only half-way DECENT one)
As Atarlost said about MAGs:

There is absolutely no place for a shield busting missile in RC1 or RC2. I hope shields become significant again in RC3.

That said I don't like the MAG launcher. It's apallingly short ranged. People say bad things about the Ballista who have never looked at the MAG launcher.

The much maligned AK505 Ballista is missilespeed=35, lifetime=60. (42 range)

The siege mag is missilespeed=15, lifetime=40. (12 range)
The high flux mag is missilespeed=20, lifetime=40. (16 range)
The All other mags are missilespeed=30, lifetime=40. (24 range)

The Strelkas are missilespeed=60, lifetime=60. (72 range)
The dumbfire NAMI missiles have missilespeed=45, lifetime=120. (108 range)
The tracking NAMI missiles have missilespeed=40, lifetime=120. (96 range)

There are no long range or even medium range MAGs. They hardly even qualify as short range. The Moskva 21 and 33 are considered close combat weapons. They have more range than any MAG, and double the range of the high flux MAG. The morningstar, also considered a close combat weapon, has double the range of the longer ranged MAGs.

-AK505 Ballista cannon (It's a dedicated base-buster....with a slow projectile, and lower DPS and range than a Flenser. Eh? Still, as Atarlost said..it IS better than the MAG launcher. Apparently this has been fixed for 1.0RC3...let's hope it is.As it is, the howitzer loader, which MIGHT save this weapon, doesn't work on it.)

-Iocrym Fracture cannon ( Uses all that power I want for my APC/QAC! And the range is awful! Waaa! )

(Anyone who thinks the last one is serious....uh...it isn't )

[Atarlost]

If you think the TM7 is still weak you've never used it in its new incarnation. The way multitarget works now, and with tracking, it does 12d12+12 damage 3.7 times a second to a single target. That's within 2% of the DPS of the M2 Medusa, and the TM7 can take enhancers.

[Aury]

i cant believe that the gaian demolitiom cannon didnt get mentioned; it does less damage than the tm7 - 12d12 of thermo - at a lesser rate of fire, for a ridiculous amount of energy, with a max of 8 shots, thus its nothing more than a source for rins. i mean, at least the ares plasma cannon does plasma damage.

[Aury]

oh, and yes, the ak505 ballista gets a buff in rc3