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My understanding is the gatling gun was hand cranked, and the minigun powered by an electric motor. The reason it's called a minigun is it fires small bullets. Also the in game fire rate of 1800-2400 bpm is consistent with a minigun.

I think it's kind of like how in popular culture "machine gun" is often used to refer to an "assault rifle". Broadly speaking any automatic weapon can be classified as a "machine gun", but it's not a very precise term. In the same way you can use "gatling gun" to refer to any rotary gun but used in that way it's not very precise and one would reasonably expect that gatling gun refers to the hand cranked gatling gun invented by Richard Gatling, while minigun pretty much unambiguously refers to a modern externally powered rotary-style cannon firing small calibre bullets. I don't know how many video games use the name "minigun", but I know the Grand Theft Auto series does, so the name is pretty familiar to gamers.

Just have to chime in and tell you "thank you" BlakeMW. It bugs me when games don't use the correct name for weapons. Your explanation is right on point.

Isn't 'assault rifle' just as vague and undefined a term as 'machine gun'? I seem to remember this being a very sore point for 2nd Amendment advocates I watch clash with the gun control sorts online from time to time.

the Gatling gun is the hand cranked model developed by Gatling. there are other rotary multi barrel guns with different actions for instance there was a model by hotchkiss where the rations wasn't continuous. the modern ones are full auto and are ether electric(US) or gas (Rus) operated and go up to 30mm AP/HE rounds at 6k rpm or 23mm AP/HE @10k rpm.
The term assault rifle (AR) comes from the German WW2 "Sturmgewähr" STG-42 and means infantry rifle with option for auto fire and magazine feed.
machine guns can be parted in three groups:
Light: usually belt feed, in small rifle caliber (5,56mm NATO for instance) and the ability to fire full auto for longer than a AR. often an AR with heavier barrel.
Medium: belt feed, in medium rifle caliber (7,62mm NATO for instance) usually open bolt action and heavy quick change barrel.
Heavy: belt feed, large caliber (12.7mm NATO for instance) usually open bolt action and heavy quick change barrel full auto only. Only useful mounted on a tri/bipod or vehicle mound.

ukezi wrote: The term assault rifle (AR) comes from the German WW2 "Sturmgewähr" STG-42 and means infantry rifle with option for auto fire and magazine feed.

Just wanted to add the original classification of assault rifle was a full auto capable smg-like rifle but using full rifle caliber.

ukezi wrote: Light: usually belt feed, in small rifle caliber (5,56mm NATO for instance) and the ability to fire full auto for longer than a AR. often an AR with heavier barrel.
Medium: belt feed, in medium rifle caliber (7,62mm NATO for instance) usually open bolt action and heavy quick change barrel.
Heavy: belt feed, large caliber (12.7mm NATO for instance) usually open bolt action and heavy quick change barrel full auto only. Only useful mounted on a tri/bipod or vehicle mound.

Thats the ubiquitous LMG and HMG people see in military games.

This post tickled my mili-otaku bone.

I am not sure if this is anything you have any control over this but ammo-turrets each show up in their own box on the bonus screen, but electric-turrets are grouped together correctly.

It's possible that it's like that because it's specified per turret.

If I have this right, it takes 6 light oil and 6.7 heavy oil to make a single ammo magazine? Please tell me I've got something horribly wrong.

Lets see:

1 nitroglycerin requires 1 light oil
1 petroleum jelly requires 1 heavy oil
5 cordite requires 1 petroleum jelly and 6 nitroglycerin
1 bullet requires 1 cordite
1 magazine requires 5 bullets

Each magazine costs 1 heavy oil, 6 light oil, also 11 metal plates and 6.5 raw wood or 6.5 additional heavy oil
each magazine contains 25 ammo
each ammo requires 0.24 light oil, 0.04 heavy oil, 0.44 metal plates, 0.26 raw wood / heavy oil (total of 0.98 resource)

Compare: Regular ammo requires 0.2 iron per ammo, but the advanced ammo deals 3.75x as much damage. This leaves advanced ammo as 33% more expensive than regular ammo, per damage, valuing all resources equally. Whether oil products are more or less valuable depends on oil abundance and also whether you use greenhouse or clear forests (in the worst case, heavy oil from coal can be considered to be 67% more expensive than metal plates and light oil from coal via cracking 2.2x more expensive than metal plates)

Considering the much higher damage of advanced ammo I'd generally consider it a good deal.

In addition the magazine chain is extremely amenable to productivity modules. Even with cheap prod modules you can slash the price, even if you only use 4x prod1 module in each stage you reduce the light oil cost by 52%

A unit of oil is vastly more expensive than a unit of iron or copper. There's also the sheer cost of machinery, I'm up to 14 tier 2 chemical furnaces and 16 assemblers for nothing except the cordite. For a single assembler worth of ammo.

Requia wrote:A unit of oil is vastly more expensive than a unit of iron or copper. There's also the sheer cost of machinery, I'm up to 14 tier 2 chemical furnaces and 16 assemblers for nothing except the cordite. For a single assembler worth of ammo.

When I used this new ammo I had similar impression as you - this thing costs a ton.
It's really costly to manufacture and while it's damage is superior it's not that useful in the end I think.
You might be better off with snipers with normal piercing ammo with added lasers and/or fire for close range support.

orzelek wrote:

Requia wrote:A unit of oil is vastly more expensive than a unit of iron or copper. There's also the sheer cost of machinery, I'm up to 14 tier 2 chemical furnaces and 16 assemblers for nothing except the cordite. For a single assembler worth of ammo.

When I used this new ammo I had similar impression as you - this thing costs a ton.
It's really costly to manufacture and while it's damage is superior it's not that useful in the end I think.
You might be better off with snipers with normal piercing ammo with added lasers and/or fire for close range support.

I ended up just modifying all of the cordite recipes to not use so much cordite (5 bullets from 5 casings, 5 projectiles, and 1 cordite instead of 1 from 1/1/1, similar on shotgun shells though I haven't messed with those yet.

Requia wrote:A unit of oil is vastly more expensive than a unit of iron or copper. There's also the sheer cost of machinery, I'm up to 14 tier 2 chemical furnaces and 16 assemblers for nothing except the cordite. For a single assembler worth of ammo.

Light Oil from coal is 2.1x more expensive than an iron plate in terms of mining-drill time and it takes 4.1s of chemical plant time, vs 1.75s of electric furnace time for iron plate. More expensive? sure. Vastly? Twice as expensive isn't vastly in my book.
Light Oil from crude oil... well that's trickier because it depends so heavily on the map gen settings, the version of RSO used (or vanilla), and so on. Oil can be something you fill hundreds of tanks with for laughs, or a constant bottleneck. In Bob's you should just get it from coal if there isn't lots of oil. The recipe is very good. So nice thing is, oil products are the cheaper of production from crude oil, or production from coal, no need to be limited by crude oil if it is rare.

When I use greenhouse and abuse productivity modules I certainly don't find Cordite even remotely expensive. But even so, heavy oil is super easy to make from coal, it even comes out of a chemical plant faster than iron plates comes out of an electric furnace, so I'd probably call heavy oil a cheap material, higher mining time, reduced "smelting" time compared with iron. Really I think for what the advanced magazines do, the cost in terms of mining and machine time are very fair.

I don't recall any game where I could say that oil is abundant. And usually you need this ammo to get to said oil so it's not that viable to make it from oil only. I do play with RSO.

orzelek wrote:I don't recall any game where I could say that oil is abundant. And usually you need this ammo to get to said oil so it's not that viable to make it from oil only. I do play with RSO.

Oil can be pretty abundant without RSO now, but I don't think Bob's is playable without because the base game has more and more trouble the concept of having all 4 of the stock ores in the starting area as you add modded ores, you'd end up with gems and titanium and tungsten but no coal.

You shouldn't even get Gems, Titanium or Tungsten in the starting area.
Putting that to one side, one ore should not inhibit another forming unless they're on top of each other, and all my new ores in the starting area should be relatively rare, so shouldn't really be inhibiting the apearance of base game ores.

Anyway, about the ammo, All I see is opinions about it, but there's not anyone directly asking me to change anything, I assume this is good?

bobingabout wrote:You shouldn't even get Gems, Titanium or Tungsten in the starting area.
Putting that to one side, one ore should not inhibit another forming unless they're on top of each other, and all my new ores in the starting area should be relatively rare, so shouldn't really be inhibiting the apearance of base game ores.

Anyway, about the ammo, All I see is opinions about it, but there's not anyone directly asking me to change anything, I assume this is good?

One person here simply changed that for themselves

From what I can see without RSO there is no issue since it's realistic there to grab 50+ oil wells easily and be set for oil.
With RSO new ammo is a nice.. pink elephant. Looks cool, fights cool, it's to costly to mass produce unless you have done huge amount of fightining already and by then you have a grasp on defence without it. I'd rather invest into more power + gems for high end lasers.
Ammo is one of commodities that will be used in huge amounts if you want to defend with it. Expensive one can be used for sniper turrets but mass defence with gun turrets would make you go out of stuff quickly.

orzelek wrote:I don't recall any game where I could say that oil is abundant. And usually you need this ammo to get to said oil so it's not that viable to make it from oil only. I do play with RSO.

Some RSO versions have had over-abundant oil, then it tends to swing to under-abundant.

I got fed up with RSO oil spawning and modded my copy to emulate vanilla oil spawning, so instead of getting 5x 600% oil spawns you get like 20x ~100% oil spawns, so, like in vanilla, most the oil is steady income from depleted wells, not windfall oil from new wells.

But usually I prefer to use the coal -> heavy oil and then cracking to light oil for recipe chains which don't require petroleum because it'll never block and doesn't require petroleum management under any circumstances.

orzelek wrote: With RSO new ammo is a nice.. pink elephant. Looks cool, fights cool, it's to costly to mass produce unless you have done huge amount of fightining already and by then you have a grasp on defence without it. I'd rather invest into more power + gems for high end lasers.

Hmmm, another thing RSO varies greatly on is enemy spawning, but I find in most versions unless you crank the settings up the enemies are really wimpy compared with vanilla so it doesn't really matter what you use to stomp them, the nests are so tiny they politely get out of your way when you want resources.

Personally I like the advanced ammo. The laser rifle / tank laser feels a bit wimpy compared with guns firing advanced ammo. The advanced Tanks minigun is extremely good with advanced ammo.

Unfortunately though, the flamethrower is the only thing you ever need for offense. You can take out elemental spawners in a single pass with an un-upgraded flamethrower (and use only about a third a fuel canister), and also every elemental worm except the fire ones, which require two passes. A single touch from a fireball is lethal to every mobile enemy, you just have to give them time to burn to death. So it kind of makes every other option moot, except those which out-range worms, like the rifle (sometimes) and sniper rifle (always). If I have to fight on a budget I snipe things I can't get close to, and use the flamethrower for crowd control.

Warfare 0.14.1:
* Renamed tank-2 and tank-3 items, entities, recipes and technology to include a bob- prefix, making them unique.
* Added vehicle grid group
* Car also gets a grid (Turned on by default, disable-able in config mod)

Any modules for those groups or using default modular armor ones for now?