What are some good limitations for infinite ammo guns?

What are some good limitations for infinite ammo guns?

I'm thinking that the complexity of such a weapon would prevent one from easily maintaining it in the field so if it gets damaged you can't take it apart and fix it yourself (easily).

Another set back would be a cool down between exhausting and refilling it's ammo. If you completely deplete the ammo it takes time to fill it back to full where the time to do this would be shorter if there were still shots left.

Finally would be it's tactical flexibility, you can't change ammo types with this sort of weapon so when you get is what you got

That said, you still have a gun with nearly infinite ammo.

What are the abuses of infinite ammo guns that makes it so they have to be limited in the first place?

If you look at things like belt-fed machine guns, the main limiting factor on extended periods of firing is the barrel overheating. If you keep continuously shooting one for too long, the barrel starts to melt and will be permanently ruined.

From a mechanical standpoint or a lore one?

I imagine at least from a mechanical point is so that there isn't a hyper focus on just these sorts of weapons. They have their use but it would suck to have other potential options be objectively bad when you have one good option with no downsides at all.

It can be a neat idea but one that has to be carefully controlled.

Lore wise it makes sense for infinite ammo weapons to be useful and popular. Maybe EVERYTHING has infinite ammo, or maybe infinite ammo is restricted to lazer beams, while rockets and projectiles still need ammo. If you want mechanical variety you could differentiate weapons by rate of fire, damage dealt... you know, things that will matter in combat.

Unless you're trying to run survival horror where every bullet counts and one second reloading could be your doom, I guess I don't see why infinite ammo is that big of a deal. The issue in most fights isn't running out of ammo it's 'not getting shot' or 'not being able to shoot the other guy.'

I like the Mass Effect 1 idea, just make it so if you keep firing in succession like a madman the gun will overheat and you need to wait for it to cool down.

Mass effect 1 guns are a great way to handle it from a flavor perspective. You technically have unlimited super-dense metal shards to hyper-accelerate towards enemies, but you have to let it cool between shots or else you'll just slag it and need a new barrel.

They kind of killed that in the later games by having cooling cartridges though. That only makes sense when you're in a vacuum so there's nowhere for the heat to disperse.

They don't make sense in vac either, just bolt radiators to the fucking gun.
Or use some of your absurd power output to throw heat around.

wasn't there a video of some marine explaining why the change to heat cartridges was stupid?

You'd need to fire thousands of rounds to get to that point in a proper machine gun though and even then you have quick change barrels

The idea behind it in ME1 was that every gun was essentially a rail gun. It was overheating because it was firing the round so incredibly fast.

You can regenerate ammo with it then switch to another gun and get full ammo.

I imagine one way would be to restrict it to certain types of guns.

Maybe only rifle type guns have the size to handle the machinery/magic bullshit that makes it work.

Or maybe it can only be a pistol type weapon that can be good but not killing tanks good.

It's a ray gun that can zap as often as you please. As long as it's plugged in. Enjoy looking for sockets and fumbling with extension cords.

The "Infinite ammo" weapons might be lower-powered than weapons that require some sort of replacable ammo.

Compare a Bolter and Lasgun in 40K. While Lasguns are far from bad, even in universe, a Bolter is superior in virtually every possible way - except Lasguns are stupidly cheap and run on energy, which can be acquired from practically any energy source including sunlight and even a fire pit. As such, Bolters are typically made for specialist units (like Space Marines and high-ranking Guard or other pet Orders Militant) while Guardsman Joe gets the Lasgun, because it works pretty well and is a logisticians wet dream.

In addition, as mentioned earlier, your infinite ammo weapons will be more complex by default, as there's obviously some sort of reactor or something that is a part of the weapon itself to keep producing projectiles.

They give the user radiation poisoning.

The new, experimental weapon is a prototype from R&D.
You have been assigned to test this prototype.
The prototype is likely to explode, kill the user, kill the user's allies, kill the user's enemies, melt, fragment, break, announce your secrets, figure out your mutant power, fail to function, or even function perfectly.
Damaging the assigned prototype is treason. Treason is punishable by death.
Failing to properly test your assigned equipment is treason. Treason is punishable by death.

Now, which one of you picks up the gun?

Yeah, good luck in the jungle when your tacticool gear will break and you have no way to fix it. Then again that could make for a good survival horror scenario where you have to scrounge power packs for your weapons to stay alive

The first reply is asking the right questions. There's a few things for you to consider before you can get a real answer on this.

First, why do you want infinite ammo guns in the first place? Are guns just like that in your setting? If so, maybe they don't need a drawback. There are plenty of systems out there already that don't bother to track ammo, just pick (or adapt) one of them and you're good to go. Infinite ammo weapons, no nerfs necessary.

Even if they are going to be interacting with weapons of the non-infinite variety, if you stick to one of those systems that don't bother with ammo anyway you can probably manage it with just some hand waving. Infinite ammo guns are cool, but in a system that doesn't track ammo anyway they don't necessarily need a mechanical difference.

If you do plan to have both infinite and non-infinite ammo weapons in your game, it's worth considering how important ammo is actually going to be to your players. Depending on both system and the style of game you're going to run, it could be as important and surviving a last stand on an alien world with the last bullet in the chamber, or it could just be an adventurer's tax that they have to pay to stock up on bullets before every dive into a derelict space ship. If it's the latter, consider not limiting them at all--in a game like that, infinite ammo is more of a creature comfort than an actual balance issue.

Additionally, even if ammo *is* important in your game, there's always the option of just having those guns be better. I mean, infinite ammo right? Of course they're better. Make them rare or expensive if you want.

If you think your game is going to make counting ammo important, and you want infinite ammo and regular weapons to both be featured, and you want them to be equivalent power-wise, then a lot of the suggestions in this thread are great. Take a minute to consider whether they're necessary, though.

Without knowing about the setting or style of game, there's a few things you can do:
Make it able to fire without reloading but can overheat and must cool for a time that would be significantly longer than a simple reload.
Make it heavy, unwieldy, hard to stow, or outright incompatible with other weapon technology (such as attachment systems or optics, if in a more modern setting).
Have it be unreliable, maybe not in the 1-in-20-chance-to-explode kind of way, but things such as not being able to deal with averse conditions that other conventional weapons would not be hurt by at all.
Make it fire less effective rounds, or overall make it less powerful than other weapons in direct performance to balance the lack of reloading.
Make it unable to use different kinds of ammo (if you're playing a particularly /k/ game) so you can't switch to +p or hollow points depending on what you're fighting.

When all else fails, make it turn the shooter gay or something.

The infinite ammo gun is a product of the technology of the setting but in my mind I'm thinking of the various ways one can approach combat both from a mechanical and lore perspective.

Imagine if you had a high tech bow and arrow sort of like Hawk Eyes where you can have different arrows for every occasion. That said, let's say you get dropped in the middle of a forest and your special ammo is gone. At the very least you can still make regular shitty arrows out of wood and stone. It may not be good for fighting guys in high tech armor but you're in survival mode.

That said, in my mind infinte ammo weapons require infrastructure that won't always be available so the presence of regular guns that you have to carry ammo for is needed to fill the gap as having a less advanced but easier to repair and maintain gun would be better in some situations then a infinite ammo gun that requires special tools for regular maintenence.

alien worshipers pls go

g

How's that boot taste, Terran scum?

>Being under the heel of trump tier fascist or corporate cock lickers

I'll take Vanu booty for 500 alex.

Vanu women flout their bodies because they have no care for the human figure. They'd trade their skin for alien scales in a heartbeat.

NC women, on the other hand, are industrious and understand that you better come to war dressed for the job.

>special issue spectres only assault rifle
>all of the cooling attachments
>borderline maxim tier cooling
>biggest baddest sniper
>keep slapping more extendo rails
>retarded damage but every shot overheats it past its limit every time

Fucking loved ME1 playing as soldier.

Yes but do you have The Crown?

Wasn't the Vickers, for example, torture tested by having it fired for something like a day straight? I seem to remember it being able to basically fire forever as long as you kept if cooled.

IIRC, I think it was the Maxim, but they're pretty much the same, and it was more than a day. Water cooled guns can fire for a loooooong fucking time.

Maybe the guns can operate as long as they are in a field that supplies energy.

In the first Xenosaga game the AGWS mechs operate like this. They don't have internal power supplies of their own but get it from the ship they are attached to so they have to stay within a range of the energy bubble as it were but otherwise as long as they were inside they could operate damn near forever

Found what I was thinking of. From the Wiki

>The weapon had a reputation for great solidity and reliability. Ian V. Hogg, in Weapons & War Machines, describes an action that took place in August 1916, during which the British 100th Company of the Machine Gun Corps fired their ten Vickers guns continuously for twelve hours. Using 100 barrels, they fired a million rounds without a failure. "It was this absolute foolproof reliability which endeared the Vickers to every British soldier who ever fired one."

I heard that sometime after the war some place ran a test there they took a Vickers, cleaned and inspected it, then proceeded to dump some 5 million rounds through it in a week or so, stopping only to reload and exchange the barrels (which had to be exchanged after 25.000 rounds due to wear). After that they stripped it again and inspected it, and noted that no real damage was done to the gun.

Overheating

In 40k roleplay there are two types of infinite-ammo weapons:
Integrated are grafted into wielders cybernetics and reaw power from it, and if you shoot them for prolonged period of time they start to drain you adding tirednesss pennalties and even causing you to pass out from exhaustion
Daemon weapons generate their ammo through the warp but they try to mindfuck you all the time and redouble their attempts you you try to use them in ways they don't like (like using Khornate daemon axe for torture)

The laws of thermodynamics.

bump

Attacking and defending the crown was some of the best times I had in PS2 before they moved one of the control points down. Yeah it's better design, but I like my sieges damnit.

>barrel overheating.
That's what I was thinking.

Water cooling is better, but then for prolonged use you need water (not a huge problem since your entire army needs water). The bigger draw back it's that it makes the gun heavier and not really useful for anything but a static implacement.

The alternative was having barrels you could swap in when it starts to over heat. Lighter than carrying gallons of water around. Generally better as long as you swap barrels before they get to the warping point.

Surely you should start with "how do the guns have infinite ammo?" and then base any limitations from that.

A gun that works by generating miniature warpholes within the enemy would have different limitations to a laser which would have different limitations to a gun that focuses the wielder's hatred into a psychic blast and so on.