DRL > Discussion
An Idea of mine.... the BPD....
RepoRipper:
umm yeah, it has a LONG recharge time. and you're not carrying the power of the sun, thats just a phrase. though, taken litterally, the BFG, Plasma Rifle, and Railgun really DO, since they use "Plasma". it doesnt look like a syringe, it looks like a minigun-sized tube with high tech "doohickeys" all over, tapering sharply in the front with a semi-short needle about as thick around as a sewing needle is at the fat end, with handholds almost exactly the same as a minigun. in other words, one handhold at the back end, 1 slightly less than halfway down the barrel. as for limitations, its pretty heavy, so u could require 1 or 2 levels of Brute. you don't need special knowledge to operate... however the reactor and containment unit are pretty audible. i wouldnt say loud, but its a little louder than an old computer thats left fully on with noone using it for a while. its easily dismissable as background noise after a while. but, it is a weird sound..... the thing would easily alert monsters anywhere nearby! as for a virus made of plasma, i have a book called Dragon's Egg, where life had been born on the surface of a neutron star. and there was a shitload of science to prove it possible, if not likely. REAL science. the author talked to guys at Nasa and everything. Plasma is still a form of matter, and where there is matter, there is the possibility of some kind of life, and where there is life, there are eventually invasive lifeforms. and the technology sounds right in tune with "Doomish" plasma science... if you can fire a plasma blast, you can inject it.
Xael:
Read the topic and felt i should reply. Well, to my mind running around with a machinegun-like injector and an evil grin, while cool, would indeed be "undoomish". With a little refinement, though, the idea will work. I once played this game, X-com 2(a faint ghost of what X-com 1 was with all that Ctulhu mimickry and a strange tech tree, but still a good game).Yeah, so in that game a weapon named thermic lance existed:
http://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=Thermic_Lance
http://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=Heavy_Thermic_Lance
The concepts are pretty close, and i feel thermic lance is doomish enough. So maybe making some tweakings to the initial idea of BPD would do the trick of making it more doomish.
And while i'm here, i just can't resist but to do some nitpicking:
1) Railgun is supposed to fire slugs, not plasma. I think in DoomRL it fires energy cells because any other existing ammunition does not fit.
2) While i have never heard of a potential plasma-based life, i've heard something about a possible life being based on Silicon and a couple of other elements. Some elements show similarities with Carbon (and all life we know is carbon-based), Si being one of them. So in theory, silicon life is possible (as Pamela Anderson goes to show). But it will require a much higher temperature to survive, somewhere around 800-1000 C.
RepoRipper:
Xael. the BPD is to a machinegun as an ICBM is to a pistol. they have NOTHING to do with each other. the BPD has NO capability of fast fire.... unless your idea of "fast" is intergalactic snail mail....
1. there are 3 kinds of railguns. one is seen on Stargate: Altlantis ; ultra-fast firing weapon that shoots some kind of slug. this is the "real" Railgun, or at least this is what the military calls a railgun. 2nd, the kind used in Doom, and also in Quake 3 Arena, and a few other games i can't recall, which is basically a handheld particle accelerator that fires a blast of plasma at insane speeds, allowing the weapon to penetrate anything. i am reffering to the DoomRL version of this form. 3rd and finally, the most common science fiction Railgun, the magnetic accelerator. this is the one you are talking about, which uses electromagnetic "rails" to accelerate a metal slug when a current is passed through the rails, pulling the bullet with an intense magnetic force, accelerating it to such speeds as to allow the slug to punch through walls and other obstacles with ease. there is a 4th, extremely rare version of the railgun that is precisely what the name suggests ; it fires a heavy metal rail somehow, which can penetrate and stay stuck, with its length making it like trying to pull a metal pipe out of a person, if you have ever seen Terminator 2, you know what that looks like. as i said, this 4th one is very rare. i cant remember where i saw it, but i don't think i saw it more than that one time.
2. not plasma-based. neutron-based.... and yes, it DOES require that kind of temperature. which is EASILY found on a neutron star!! and yes, a neutron star is made up of neutrons only, as in no atoms. so the whole thing about life based on elements is pointless ; there are no elements on a neutron star, except those ultra-exotic ones that are nothing but scientific mumbo-jumbo for "we don't have a clue as to what we are talking about but we have to look good so we will make up some fancy names and hope we can impress you enough so that you don't ask us any hard questions"
Xael:
This is going off-topic, but anyway:
1)The railgun i was talking about is actually the "real" railgun, which is an electricity-based gun which fires metal rails (or slugs). And it was actually tested by US navy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railgun
The gun which fires magnetic projectiles is called a coilgun. And yeah, in Quake III railgun ammo is called "slugs".
2) I won't argue on this one, since it's my policy to keep quite on subjects i know next to nothing about. But i have to agree that scientists do like to make up silly names. I mean, really: all those talks about "dark energy"
and "dark matter" sound like those guys got drunk, read a lot of terrible science fiction and decided to make up theories.
Also, when i talked about the gun beeing machinegun-like, i meant that had a shape similar to a machinegun. And no rapid fire.
And i also have a suggestion: How about making BPD a melle weapon that is better than the chainsaw, but consumes energy cells. It will than have an ability to overcharge it (like the plasmagun), maing it an one hit kill weapon, but losing it in the process. We really need more non-unique melle weapons. DoomRL has only 3 now, two of which only spawn on special levels.
Titt:
--- Quote from: RepoRipper on July 05, 2008, 00:53 ---2. not plasma-based. neutron-based.... and yes, it DOES require that kind of temperature. which is EASILY found on a neutron star!! and yes, a neutron star is made up of neutrons only, as in no atoms. so the whole thing about life based on elements is pointless ; there are no elements on a neutron star, except those ultra-exotic ones that are nothing but scientific mumbo-jumbo for "we don't have a clue as to what we are talking about but we have to look good so we will make up some fancy names and hope we can impress you enough so that you don't ask us any hard questions"
--- End quote ---
I think you are confusing things you have read in science fiction for actual science. The Wikipedia page on this may be helpful, although Wikipedia is far from perfect. There are no complete atoms inside the "crust" of a neutron star but there is certainly much more than only neutrons. In the outer layers of a neutron star, the gravitational forces are so strong (due to the star being very very massive but very very compact) that they overcome the electromagnetic force binding electrons to nuclei, so electrons are not attached to nuclei; in the inner layers of a neutron star, the gravitational forces are even stronger, and they overcome the strong nuclear force, so that the protons and neutrons are no longer bound into atomic nuclei. Gravity of that magnitude also overcomes the weak nuclear force, and that prevents (sometimes?) the neutrons from undergoing beta decay, like a neutron "in the wild" ordinarily would. So in the outer layers you could speak of "elements" as each free nucleus has a certain number of protons, so it has an atomic number and hence an element that it would be (an isotope of) if it were able to escape the star and attract electrons, but in the core of a neutron star, protons and neutrons do not bind into nuclei so there are no elements (exotic or otherwise) to speak of.
Also I think you have some misconceptions about how science works, given your "we don't have a clue" bit! I have a feeling this also may have come from reading too much science fiction while being exposed to too little actual science.
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