Ideas and suggestions for the Hiigaran Thread - R.E.A.R.M. - The Unofficial Classic HW 2 Expansion mod for Homeworld 2

One thing I've been thinking about today:
Shouldn't Ion weapons do some secondary EMP damage? It's stream of particles with an electrical charge, so I think it should, right? I'm not sure at the moment how hard or easy would it be to do it, but it might be interresting. Also there may be weapons with the different damage/EMP damage ratio.
Correct me if I'm wrong.

Well, actually that does make sense. Any electrical current does emit an electro-magnetic field. And honestly, the more "intense" the beam, the stronger the EMP field it would emit would be. IE, more Ions (charged atoms) equals more electro-magnetivity. I do not think you should go the "different weapons" route. The charge/EM ratio is pretty proportionate. But hey, it is your choice. Actually, I take back the weapons thing. Different weapons could be based on different elements. So there could actually be a damage/emp ratio difference. For example, H+ carries a light charge (+1) and would require more mass to generate more EMP meanwhile the H+ atoms would be more reactive, considering that a bare proton will react with whatever it comes in contact with. I could definitely see a H+ based Ion Beam Weapon as a high-damage, low emp weapon. To be honest though, I cannot think of anything that would be low damage/high EMP weapon. I suppose an artificial Silicon Ion could be synthesized in the future, being that Silicon has a low density, so would have less volume to mass ratios, and be artificially stripped of most of its valence shell... That would, of course, make it behave like an alkalai metal, or alkalai earth metal... But the Ion would be more "charged" (Si-2 or Si-3)...

Hrm, this requires alot of thought indeed...

Another thing to look into, is Ferrous and Ferric Ions... Considering their high density, and high charge... they'd make for GREAT hi damage/hi EMP weapons... But it'd be more like a Ion Slug Beam... or something like that... An Ion beam (negativly charged) accelerating a Ferric or Ferrous (positive charge) slug at rediculously high velocities... There's an idea! Shit... I don't know if that would be Vagyr, or Hiigaran though... Well, I'll just post the idea here, and let you take it where you want...

All right, take the Ion Ferric (ferrous?) cannon, and yes I came up with a name already, and pretty much build an entire ship around it. Could maybe be a dedicated gunship class ship that specializes in punching through heavy armour? Like BS armour, maybe? The ship would be bulky, in my imagination. It'd require ammo reserves for the Ferric (ferrous) slugs, and some sort of magnetic emission system with a "barrel" traveling down the center. This would also require a tremendous amount of energy, so speed would suffer... Actually, I got it figured out perfectly and logically now! It fits perfect into a Hiigaran Gunship idea, i think.

Let's put the Ion Ferric Cannon and put it in the center of the ship, with the muzzle extruding from the nose of the gunship. Now put the fusion core directly behind the weapon, allowing power to be fed directly into the gun. The slug ammo housing and ionization chamber would be above and below (respectively) the weapon, protected by thick armor plating to prevent any sort of accidental Ionic reactions, normally as a result of weapon impacts. The engines would run alongside the weapon, but I would think they should be smaller, allowing more energy be directed towards the weapon. The bridge would be on top of, and directly behind the muzzle of the weapon, as the whole ship must be aimed, considering that this weapon would be too big for a turret... I would think anyways.

Er, I know I went a little overboard with this. What can I say? I like science, and I grew up in the military?

Anyways, feel free to reject/accept/critisize/compliment/be inspired by this idea that grew from your idea. I hope this helps!

Another thing to take into consideration would be the range of such an object. This could very easily be the Hiigaran artillery unit.

You may have problems with the ion cannon EMP Pouk, since the ion beam deals damage over time. The EMP damage may also occur over time (which would be good, just set the damage value to be low), but the EMP damage may instead want to occur all at once, and so the EMP damage may occur at the start of the firing of the ion beam, at the end, or refuse to work at all. Look into it though, I think it would be pretty cool to have at least a small amt of EMP damage when ion cannons (and pulsars) fire. Definitely a Hiig only thing though, since lasers won't emit EM fields.

The Ion Slug Beam... If I'm not mistaken, technically, the pulsar is more like this than you might think at first. The only difference is that the pulsar uses the same ionic atoms as an Ion cannon, instead of ferrous ions. So, I see no problem taking the pulsar animation effect, making it linger a little longer, and adding a very fast traveling "lighter" section move from the firing position to the ending position, thus simulating a hyper-velocity ferrous ion slug being discharged.

When it comes to implication in-game, I'd like to see it on a Gunboat (Gunship, as you call it Meander...) as well (and not Corvette or Fighter, for example). Basically same idea, it's a fixed foreward weapon that the entire ship is dedicated to, fires slowly, has high EMP damage and high normal damage, and considerable range (I have no problem with it being artillery ranged). I would also like to see it on an Ion Frigate chassis (as a new frigate by itself). The dedicated frigate MIGHT be able to house two of these weapons (in larger scale and damage), or just have one (in massively larger scale and damage, to the point where one shot would be able to put a destroyer (maybe cruiser?) into total EMP). I could also see a large turret version (modified ion cannon turret, or a totally new one), that would do slighly less damage than the Gunboat version. Lastly, I'd like to see a modular frigate version of this weapon as well, and since we have yet to see how the modular figates for the hiigarans are to work, I can't really suggest an appropriate damage amount for this version of the weapon.

Here, I will advocate allowing the player to replace the ion cannon turrets on the Battlecruiser with Hypervelocity Cannons (I think I'll call call them this, rolls off the tounge better). When the BC is produced, it would automatically have the normal Ion Cannon turrets on it, but the player would be able to retire these Ion Cannons, and replace them with Hypervelocity Cannons if they wish.

I think the normal damage to EMP damage ratio should be the same for pulsars, and all the sizes of ion cannons, and the different ratio for normal vs EMP damage on Hypervelocity Cannons is also shared among all the sized of these weapons. For example, all pulsars and ion cannons may have an EMP to damage ratio of 1:15, and all HV cannons may have an EMP to damage ratio of 1:3. The Hypervelocity Cannons seem to be very similar to normal artillery, just with the addition of EMP damage. So I think that the damage for the HV cannons should be slightly less than the damage for the real artillery (and all subsequent artillery sizes as well... Artillery Gunboats?).

I did try the EMP damage yesterday and making the weapons do do the EMP damage was very easy. What is harder is testing if it works or not, even I had several EMP corvettes together with the ships with ion weapons in the starting fleets. But there must be some bug or mismatch of the blue emp shield bar with the actual emp damage value, because even I do disable the ship with the emp ions, the ship doesn't react and the blue shield bar jumps back to 100%. But it does work when I set the EMP damage to much higher (which is still a tiny fraction of the actual damage, like 30 EMP and 15000 damage). I guess it would be possible to make it work properly, but the blue bar wouldn't show the actual value, because it would jump to zero... It's hard to explain and it's hard to test, but basically what it shows and what it does isn't most likelly the same thing.

Solution would be to set some other somehow synchronized invisible EMP weapon, which wouldn't do the damage over time like the ion weapon does.