What's it stopped the Tri-Tach plot? (Guns!)
What was it that ol' Ludd forgot? (Guns!)
Wha've we got that they have not? (Big, big, guns!)
One of my first impressions of Starsector was that most guns seem to be of the automatic and/or pea shooter kind.
That has not really changed over time. Recently I played a bit of Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts and... the difference in weapon look&feel
is quite remarkable, if I may say so.
We do have some nice and big guns in the game, the Gauss Cannon and the Gigacannon - but even they, when they shoot, go "pew!", and with a lowercase 'p' because it's just so underwhelming. The Gauss Cannon in particular combines its comically understated effects with a comically high rate of fire. "pew-pew-pew!" If not for the stats, it would seem but a toy.
(Which, for something called a "Gauss Cannon", is probably fair. This is not a call to change this particular weapon.)
We also have mortars, including the Hellbore Cannon. The latter is the only gun in the game that feels really... "satisfying". But it is a mortar itself, many frigates can actually outrun its shots.
The two mortars actually called mortar are again pea shooters with a comically high rate of fire
especially for something called "mortar". (Fair point, again: Warzone 2100 also has repeating mortars, so it is save to assume that Starsector mortars are themselves automatic weapons.)
It would be nice to have some low-cadence, high-impact, non-specialised semi-automatic guns in the game, especially in the Medium and Heavy Ballistic segments. Bigger, meaner Arbalests, no "pew-pew-pew", no "rat-at-at".
Incidentally the Arbalest's Codex entry already does hint that similar guns
must exist: It is the "Arbalest Mk.I weapons platform", so there is probably at least one more version out there.
(It's not necessarily of the same line as the Mk.IX Autocannon, but if it were, that means there is room for seven more versions, not counting possible side-grades like 'Mk.IIb'.)
In terms of design space, it has often been remarked that there is a gap between Heavy Mortar and Heavy Mauler - this gap may be not-quite-filled, given that those are both burst-firing weapons, with a semi-automatic gun having the obvious downside, that its single flying round can easily be sniped by a shield flicker with much-reduced threat of overloading from supporting kinetics.
In terms of lore, it is an oddity of sorts that Ballistic weapons are an older technology than shields in the Starsector universe, yet most Ballistic Weapons currently available deal Kinetic damage, good against shields but poor against armour.
It is then also an oddity that an axiom in the design of the Conquest battlecruiser is stated as "[...] new weapon systems would always outperform armor and shields [...]". In the current game, the Invictus so-old-they-could-not-add-shields battleship is a viable tank. It is a viable tank. How!?
An easy answer is of course, that intermediate generations of weapons went out of style in accordance to changing threat models. We now have many Ballistics with Kinetic damage,
because now most ships have shields. Many Ballistics with High Explosive damage are automatic or burst-fire weapons,
because now most ships have shields (and may catch some of the shots by flickering, letting neighboring Kinetic rounds pass through to hit the armour).
Time to raid a few of these Explorarium drones... or another museum. (Both Invictus and Vanguard are officially stolen from museums already - strange that they only have full-sized ships in their collections, not ship systems. In the real world, individual systems are far more frequent exhibits than complete vehicles, for a great number of really quite obvious reasons.)
