Forum:Weapon categorization
Beginning the process of re-working the weapons system in the Wiki starts with designing a categorization system to describe each weapon. And, as per the general wiki habit, as an in-game character reference. This doesn't follow any existing rule set descriptions but tries to build on all of them to have a consistent description for each weapon.
Damage capability: How does the weapon end up affecting the target.
- Kinetic (KEW): uses a solid mass of matter traveling at speed to cause damage to the target:
- Melee : wielded by hand (or other manipulator). Includes blades, clubs, swords, pikes, and variations thereof.
- Thrown : wielded by hand but projected at a distance, based upon the strength of the wielder. Included throwing knives of all sorts, bows, crossbows, boomerangs.
- Explosives: Kinetic damage caused by an explosion: Grenades
- Guns: Slug throwers. May subdivide by motive of propulsion (explosives, rocket, Gauss)
- Directed Energy (DEW): uses a free floating energy source to cause damage.
- Flame: a Flame thrower, energy is heat.
- Laser: Amplified light as the medium. Masers, Xasers, Grasers
- Plasma/Fusion: Next stage of the Flame weapons
- Disintgrator: The high tech destruction weapon
- Gravity: Gravity as a destructive weapon.
- Projector: These are weapons that throw something around, but not considered generally destructive. These generally have some specific unpleasant effect.
- EMP/magnetic: Destroys electronics
- Flash: Blind Sensors (Emmiter?)
- Sonic: Sleep weapons or Hazers
- Gas/liquid/aerosols: poison, tranq, sleep gas, tear gas.
- Radiation: Radiation projectors cause illness or slow damage effects
- Neural: Direct action on nerve interfaces.
Size: There are several ways of categorizing this, but interaction with different sized sophonts make general sizing a pain. Reverting to use the T5 size categories just because. Also indicates general damage ranges. Details within each size are determined by the Bulk (QREBS) rating.
- Hand (size 3): Carried / used in a single manipulator
- Carried (size 4): Carried / used with two (or more) manipulators
- Mounted (size 5): Vehicle / Tripod mounted weapons
- Crew served / ship (Size 6): Artillery pieces, Star Ship weapons
- Spinal mount (size 7): Largest of the weapons, Starship mounted or permanently placed.
Rate of Fire: Indicates the rate at which the weapon can be re-used. Does not include the failure if the Quality check is failed and the weapon breaks.
- Disposable: No reuse: grenades, throwing weapons, some primitive designs,
- Single-shot: Weapon has a single shot and then must be reloaded: bows and other primitive weapons, early guns, some concealable weapons.
- Semi-automatic: Weapon has several rounds, and can be fired (relatively) slowly.
- Automatic: Weapon has several rounds and can be fired quickly. Can use the autofire rules for increasing damage.
- Continuous / High Rate: Weapon fire a continuous stream of damage, or like a Gatling weapon, has a scary rate of fire.
From here the Template:InfoboxWeapon needs to incorporate these three elements as template parameters. And will be making the values of these three into sub-categories of the Category: Weapons.
As soon as you start creating buckets, you just as quickly find things that don't fit into your nice neat categories. And I'm pretty sure I've missed one or two things.