Will we get to see a ship-mounted shotgun type weapon? I'm talking high power in close range and low powered scatter at long range with potential to maim ship components, clear lesser asteroids, take out EVAers like they're clay pigeons.asked by NotSoAccurate

Alright, so I get it on the not so accurate side, with the not so accurate spread weapon there. I think that's a pretty good idea. I know that, to my knowledge, we don't have a shotgun style weapon for a ship on the schedule in the immediate future. I would say that would be an interesting type of ballistic weapon that you could have for short range stuff. Therefore people trying to EVA you it's sort of like an antipersonnel weapon you could deploy, and kind of a wide hitting component damage on a ship up close would be pretty interesting. It's a good idea, so I think we can put that into the hopper.I will say that as we start to finish up all the components, the implementation, and we move towards the persistent universe where things like ammunition whether it's your ballistic weapon ammunition, or missiles, there will be fuel, all things that will be consumables basically, when you're flying around you're going to have to earn money by getting missions. So if you fire all the rounds from your gatling gun, or you fire your missiles, you're going have to spend some UEC, or Alpha UEC in the pre-final SC-Alpha version of the game, to replenish them.What's really going to happen is we're going... the idea would be that the ballistics and the missiles are actually quite effective, probably more effective than an energy weapon. Of course energy weapons don't have the same ammunition... they don't have a finite amount of ammunition, or a finite amount of shots, you can keep on firing them as long as your power plant is active, and you have enough power, and you're not overheating. What should be the case is that the ballistic weapons, and the missiles, are in fact more effective in the future when we will make this adjustment, once they become sort of perishable as you have finite amounts of ammunition.The gameplay should be you sort of juggle between either your energy weapons, or your ballistic weapons, or your missiles, and you use them depending on situations. So if you want to really do some damage quickly, and not get held up by shields for instance, which is one thing you do get with ballistic weapons is that they sort of penetrate through shields. Then you would use ballistics, the downside of using a ballistic is obviously that you have a finite amount of ammunition and you'll have to go and replenish it when you get into the next space station, or land at the next landing area. We want that kind of juggle between them, it'll be kind of cool.Having some cool different ballistic weapons would also be interesting, like a sort of spread shotgun weapon. I think there will be more weapon management by players in the persistent universe going forward. Especially once we have persistence in, consumables in, things like wear and tear, and all the rest of the stuff that we're going to be starting to roll out over the rest of this year that will allow you to manage your components and equipment better and have different strategies depending on the situation you're in. I think that's going to make for a much more interesting long-term game.What you see right now in Arena Commander, or potentially what you see now in SC-Alpha, in terms of weapon management isn't really what it's going to be once more of the features and persistence is in. Of course, the first stage of persistence will be the next release, and over the subsequent releases we'll flesh it out more and more. I think the gameplay will become quite different, and there will be more variations, and it'll be a bit more interesting. So there you go, you have something to look forward to.