Samuel_Tow

Strangely, this is exactly what I've been trying to say this whole time.

Come to think of it, weren't 20mm aircraft guns designated as "cannons?" By my hand calculation, a .90 cal weapon would have a bullet diametre of 22.5mm, making it technically larger than a 20mm aircraft cannon. That ought to put the recoil perspective. And this is a weapon that can fire in three-round bursts that can be chained for pretty much full auto AND is a weapon that the protagonist can dual-wield. It holds, I think, 15 rounds per clip, so I've seen 30 rounds fly out of the thing in around a second if you really put your mind to it. Then again, Gideon can dual-wield ROCKET LAUNCHERS, so I think Advent Rising just operates on a whole different scale

Still, provided you had... I don't know, super strength, maybe, and were able to dual-wield such a beast, and provided it didn't blow up or break apart, that might actually make for an actual, decent super power. Granted, handgun barrel length isn't exactly ideal for long-range accuracy, but provided a super-strong shooter can provide a stable enough grip without losing his wrists, that ought to be a pretty frightening weapon. I mean, against people, that's... Pointless? That might be an understatement. But we don't exactly fight against regular people around here. Well, we kind of do, but Family and Warriors aside, most of the enemies are either super powered, heavily armoured or just incredibly dense. After all, the old Raserei Ubermenschen were said to be so tough you'd need anti-tank weaponry to even so much as faze one.

I don't want to search for the tank shell quotes I need, so let me put it this way - On tank shell types and their relations to handguns:

I think we can pretty much exclude the sabot rounds from being "concussive," as that word, at least to me, describes a round that spreads its energy, whereas a sabot flechette tends to concentrate its force and penetrate. On the other hand, the description itself is sort of self-contradicting, as whenever I've seen "concussive rounds" used in a game, they have typically described rounds aimed at causing tissue damage in soft or unarmoured targets, which contradicts them being "armour piercing." I guess some kind of squash head explosive might be the answer, which would both punch through armour and, typically, explode what's behind it, so I don't know.

I really should retry Advent Rising at some point, though. That was a good game

Yeah, I'm aware of that conundrum, and I'm aware that class differentiation needs to occur somewhere. When you give people the ability to be anything they want, they'll all pretty much choose to be the same thing. I'm finding that out the hard way every time I venture into Champions Online. I guess I'm not clamouring against class balance, just class balance in a slightly different architecture. Frankly, I'm not terribly upset at whatever difference there is between, say, a Brite and a Mastermind in terms of solo performance output. Or a Brute and a Scrapper or a Scrapper and a Stalker, or, to be honest, even a Scrapper and a Blaster. I'm a bit miffed that a Blaster is so much more STRESSFUL than a Scrapper, but having taken two Blasters to 50 with a third within spitting distance, and three Scrappers to 50, I can't say I'd drop one for the other.

On the flip side, support-heavy ATs and team-centric ATs I plain cannot play, as I feel like I'm paying a price in the form of a solo performance hit for a benefit I neither need nor want - team-only utility, or design that expects other people. And I'm unlikely to change those, either, as people just love those designs for reason I'll never be able to see. I mean, I understand it, I just don't see it, personally.

Or 8 minions or something

Actually, what I ultimately want is equality. I'm not shooting for anything higher than the arbitrary norm, I'm shooting for something about what other ATs can handle, which right now is nowhere near the case.

Yeah, I kind of figured, but games certainly use them a lot. In fact, the otherwise fairly realistic Half-Life mod "Firearms" had, as one of its options, Uzis akimbo HOD DANG did these things kill fast! But they also basically consumed two full clips of ammunition in no time flat and, being akimbo, took forever to load. Also, their accuracy in that game was so much crap they basically had the same effective range as a shotgun. I didn't use them much, though, because it looked silly for some reason.

I think BABs point in asking was more to find out what we wanted to see in particular, and a little less to just find out what he could make. Though, given the depth, breath and sheer scope of the variety of suggestions given to him in that thread, we might have expanded his reference pool at least in terms of what TYPES of weapons to include. One only hopes

Oh, and speaking of implausible weapons, I still love the Faust C-41 from Advent Rising. Yeah, yeah, there are other cool weapons in games and fiction, but the description of this one just makes me grin so wide I feel the top of my head will drop off. Just seeing something described as a pistol firing ".90 calibre armour-piercing, concussive rounds" makes my head spin, trying to imagine what such a thing would be like to actually fire. And what the hell is a "concussive round," anyway? Pure fiction?

Picking this because it's easier to quite.

On the subject of Blaster standardization, I kind of expected I'd see a lot of exactly that kind of response, and I can't really fault people for feeling this way. However, it produces problems when things are this inconsistent. It's fairly easy to hit upon a combo that is either a PITA to play, or plays well but is SO SLOW it's not worth it, only to bring it up and be told that another combo is badly overpowered. You have a choice at this point - play what you have and pay the price for someone else's power, or play what's overpowered even if that's not the combo you actually wanted. Neither is good, in my opinion, and there are definitely Blaster combos that are not very good.

Additionally, the sets really ARE very hard to balance with AoEs this big, because power varies so much. As it was back in the day, my AR/Dev Blaster sucked horribly, because the combo I'd picked favoured AoE combat, but the old difficulty settings would often only spawn a single lieutenant, or a lieutenant and a minion, causing me to waste much of my potential while solo. I couldn't force more enemies to show up, therefore I was weak, yet I was paying the price for someone else's fun, because the build was apparently very powerful on a team with Tankers and support and such. By comparison, my Energy/Energy Blaster was fairly proficient solo, because her powersets simply gave her a lot of strong single-target attacks which could melt hard targets fast, but weren't as good against large groups of minions. And I just KNOW someone was paying for my fun by having their many team-mates ***** at them about AoE knockback and demanding they use only single-target attacks, which in a fight with 15 people are practically all but useless.

I don't want homogeny, or indeed even similar playstyles. But I DO want a standard to which I can hold my Blaster and say "Look! He can't do this! He's underpowered! Fix him!" Currently, there isn't one, and all trying to discus this does is cause people to explain how they are doing just fine playing completely different Blasters and/or in completely different situations. When you lack any real standard, trying to discuss what is good and what is bad can be very problematic.

Was about to say the same thing. I'm pretty sure there was talk of an I17 before Going Rogue.

At this point I have to ask where pistol ends and submachine gun begins I wanted to be fancy, but I couldn't find a YouTube video that was decent. Either they had unfolded shoulder stocks or crap screwed onto the barrel which made it a lot more obvious that this was a machine gun, rather than a pistol. That cute little pic I found makes it look like just an ugly pistol. It doesn't even have the mile long magazine

That was kind of a sticking point in the Dual Pistols suggestion thread, though - the weapon had to be able to fire many rounds in rapid succession, but looking at the videos, it doesn't look to be THAT many, or indeed THAT rapidly. Yet still people were suggestion un-pistol-like things as far up the tree as the MP5, and I think I even spotted a short-body AK at one point. The question, I suppose, is just how FAST do we want the weapon to fire, and how far down the "machine pistol" path do we want to go?

Frankly, from looking at the videos, the powerset looks like it assumes a fairly rapid-firing semi-automatic, but it does NOT assume full auto rapid fire. In fact, sticking something like the Uzi in there might actually look weird, the same way ANY minigun EVER made for ANY game feels weird because its rate of fire has been dumbed down so, so much. A minigun should look, sound and feel something like a very large table saw, when instead fiction makes it sound and feel no faster than a heavy machinegun, something like the SAW, if that. Why is it that some weapons get exaggerated in games, like shotguns sending people flying across the room and magnums punching through concrete walls, while other weapons get dumbed down, like machineguns using ammo lighter and weaker than your PISTOL and miniguns that slower than a repeating rifle?

I can kind of see the Assault Rifle Full Auto being what it is, since we ARE firing it out of what is essentially a frankenrifle, but the 5th Column and Longbow minigunners really have no excuse to fire so slowly.

*edit*
Ah, and now I know why a Google search for "Ingram" throws up pictures of "uzis." Searching for Uzi revealed nothing, as apparently the Uzi is a silimar Israeli design, whereas the Mac 11 "Ingram" is an American design that ends up looking a lot like it, anyway. Interesting.

Yeah, I kind of figured something like that was at work, especially when I read about a possible machinegun failure which caused the hook to fail, in turn causing the machinegun to fire without trigger input. The way I figure it, full auto fire is achieved by the mechanism sliding back and reloading, but the firing pin not being retained in waiting for another shot, but just repeating its strike under spring power, until trigger release returns whatever mechanism retains it back in place.

In this case, I have to ask why this isn't done for pistols, but then I would guess it has something to do with recoil, accuracy, mass and "handedness."

Just to add a bit of context here, as far as it goes for me, my interest in the subject is purely academic, as I have no hands-on experience with firearms and, given my monetary situation and screwed-up country, will probably never have any. On the other hand, I enjoy understanding things, and this might actually come in handy if I do decide to write some more detailed written fiction, which I probably will come Going Rogue. Already I have a few specific concepts, being explained to me just what kind of arm strength one would need to fire an unreasonably large weapon one-handed, so that will have an effect on future characters. Well, provided BABs is kind enough to give as a truly oversized gun for women He's had a history of not wanting to go too big with weapons, and the "automatics" for female Masterminds are positively puny, while the larger guns are not colour-tintable. One only hopes that with the process of actually making new guns as opposed to just stripping them off existing enemies.

But again, guns are complicated, fascinating machines that I enjoy on a purely technical aspect, at the very least. I have not, however, ever wanted to fire them at anything alive, going as far as to stop my father from shooting a rat with an air pistol. We eventually let the rat go (after chewing on my door and several bookcases), so it was all good But like watches and, yes, ball-point pens, they're just interesting machines. In fact, I really miss the "How do they do it?" and "How it's made" programmes on Discovery, since my god damn cable provider dropped the channel. Viasat Explorer just doesn't cut it.

That diagram actually helped a lot, to be honest. I can see why it's called a bolt, where it sits and what it does now. Funny how elaborate technical diagrams can kick you in the teeth but a simple (is this MS Paint?) drawing with all the complicated crap stripped away can be much easier for an idiot like me to grasp. Thanks, I think I see what you mean now.

I'd settle for being able to install and remove them, for when guts of mine break any my FRONT DOOR won't close

It was a transparent plastic pen that did it for me, as well. The mechanism in there is ingenious for something so deceptively simple. Recalling off memory, the inside of the case of the pen has a pattern of alternating shallow and deep pits with equal-height peaks all slanted towards the side of rotation, with an internal... Well, bolt fitting against that with a similar patter and stops in it alternating puts. Pressing the button forces the bolt down, taking it out of its current pit, and then releasing it puts it on the slant, which causes it to rotate, landing in the next pit over. As the pits alternate between shallow and deep, the the bolt alternates between going far up or stopping short, and since the ink stick is spring-pressed to it, when the bolt goes up, the stick goes in, and when the bolt goes down, the stick stick out. That's also why it goes farther out before going in when you press the button.

I think the coolest pen I've ever pulled apart had a body and a cap at the end that screwed onto the bolt, with a spring between the body and cap around the bolt to prevent the common problem of the button sinking down when the ball point is out. It also had a two-part body, since the cone at the bottom was actually glued to the body and the ink stick was far too wide to fit through the hole. So you ended up needing to unscrew the top of the cap off everything, slide the cap off, remove a spring, unscrew the top half of the body, remove that, a button, and the bolt, pull out the ink stick and finally another spring at the bottom, then lay it all side by side and have all your classmates give you dumbfounded looks

I'll actually have to look up another pen like this. I love that design

Yeah, I cited that off memory, and apparently my memory was wrong. I keep thinking Blaster large-scale cones were balanced at two and a half targets while smaller Scrapper cones were balanced at something like 1.8, and that AoEs were balanced at around 3.5 or some such, which caused me to call it four. I don't know why I made it up to be 5. Might have been looking at an exception recently, I don't remember. I'll go with your numbers, though.

If you limit yourself to using only as many attacks as can get you an continuous attack chain, but not so many that you have attacks waiting to be used a lot, then DPS actually plays a decent role. The problem is that DPS is a measure of performance based on the expectations that powers will play out their intended cycles and their intended cycles only, which they typically don't, ESPECIALLY on a blaster with eleventy billion attacks anyway. While I AM a fan of DPA as a useful metric, I've never been able to create a specific repeatable chain with a specific repeatable damage that I can just cycle over and over, primarily because I tend to match attacks to the opportunity, rather to the schedule, so DPA doesn't give me a good measure of performance over time. I'm still trying to get a good grasp of that.

You can't always get an infinitely repeatable single-target attack chain with all Blasters either, though. That's actually the problem with too much AoE sometimes. Assault Rifle, for instance, has so many AoE attacks that it only has two real single-target attacks. And no, I don't count Sniper Rifle. And not only that, but both are very slow to recharge, owing to the fact that they hit pretty hard. As such, Assault Rifle may be closer to having an AoE attack chain, especially if paired up with something like Mental Manipulation, than it is to having a smooth single-target attack chain. A lot of recharge might solve that, but it would have to be a LOT of that to make a dent with just two attacks. That's kind of the problem with Blasters - their powers are spread so thin over so many fronts. AoEs are massive if you have masses to kill, but against a single, hard target, they are next to useless, costing huge and doing dick. On the flip side, even strong single-target attacks, lethal against hard targets, fall really short when fighting large groups of enemies, as they tend to overwhelm you before you can pot-shot them all.

Now, I will admit, I've come close to one-offing a large group of minions. Aim + Build Up let me do that, with Blaze taking out one, Fire Sword taking out another and Fire Blast + Flares taking out another still, but beyond that, I run out of steam, so I have to hover up and bunch up together so I can Fireball them to death.

Scrappers tend to lack much AoE, not all sets really having more than one AoE, and a lot having cones balanced like single-target attacks. By and large, a Scrapper will tend to have four or five single-target attacks usable in any lazy attack chain. A Blaster would be happy with three, and would often have to make do with just two. That's... Really awkward for a single-target specialist. And, yeah, melee attacks CAN sort of make up for that, but they are both dangerous and, more importantly, NOT ALL SETS HAVE THEM.

But that's kind of the problem as I see it, which feeds into what you're saying. Give a Blaster too much AoE and he's overpowered most of the time, SOL against elite bosses solo because of how AoEs are balanced. Give a Blaster too much single-target and he's a glorified Scrapper with about half the survivability. If I could have decent AoEs usable against fewer targets that could still make a dent in large groups, then that might help, but with the current balance, that's not going to happen. AoEs usable against single targets are MURDER on large groups, and AoEs balanced against large groups suck against single targets. And, worst of all, Blaster single-target damage is not actually all that impressive, especially on some combos, which more or less drives them into AoE to have a point on a team, and to survive solo.

I know I'm going to take a LOT of heat for this for the usual reasons - wanting to make everything the same - but I do believe Blaster primaries, and indeed secondaries, would have benefited from the same level of standardization that Mastermind primaries see. Masterminds have three summons, three attacks, two upgrades and "something else," always in the same order, always in this framework. Blaster primaries, generally, look like they were intended to follow a model, themselves, with Energy Blast being pretty much the mould - three single-target attacks, a cone, an AoE, a nuke, Aim, a snipe and a utility power. But then Assault Rifle trades its nuke for a mini-nuke, as well as its third attack and Aim for a second cone and ranged Burn patch. And then Ice Blast traded its snipe for some kind of ******* child of a snipe, an attack and a hold, as well as its AoE for a rain. And Psi Blast traded... I don't even know where to start. And there are more and more eccentricities like that, and power order is jumbled between them all like the sets came out of a tumble dryer. And secondaries are practically all over the place, with some offering control, some offering buffs, some offering attacks, some offering debuffs and some offering just more AoE.

There is simply no standardization to Blasters, such that the whole AT feels like a mish-mash of different ATs without any coherent structure to define their intent, abilities and framework. Some Blasters play a lot like Controllers, some play a lot like Defenders and some pretty much have to play like Scrappers. What Blaster plays like a Blaster, though, aside from Fire/Fire? How the hell does a "Blaster" even play?

OK, the exploded view finally showed me what a "bolt" is, and it isn't at all like what I thought it was. Basically, if I'm reading the picture right, it, err... Looks like a small flute Basically, it is a inner pipe with a capped end and several holes in the side, one of which I assume is for the round to load into, and the other for the round to eject out of. I'm assuming this rotating bolt somehow screws inside the barrel, possibly inside the slide, hence why it is a rotating bolt. From the looks of it, it doesn't rotate much, no more than probably a quarter turn just to align holes with the barrel and the slide opening and eject the spent shell casing.

But at this point it's coming to my own bed time, as well, so I'll look more into this tomorrow. Though, I have to admit, this kind of mechanics is actually pretty interesting stuff. Maybe I missed out that I didn't pull things apart when I was a kid. But hey, now I can buy stuff for this precise reason Not guns, obviously, but smaller, more mundane stuff. I really need to figure out what goes into a door lock one of these days, just so I'm not afraid to unbolt one for fear I'll never put it back together again.

*edit*
Oh, and I can see how it would turn and how it would lock. People who actually know this stuff will laugh at me, but that actually kind of looks like the mechanism inside a retractile ball-point pen Which, by the way, is a deceptively ingenious invention in itself. I've pulled a few apart in my life, and the more complicated ones can be amazing. I think I found one with three springs in it once

Actually, the reason Stalkers lag behind in teams is simple - it's all down to how AoE is balanced. Having run the numbers on a LOT of powersets, I can give you what I've perceived to be a general rule of thumb. Cone efficiency is balanced to break even with single-target attacks at somewhere between two and three targets, and AoE efficiency breaks even at around 4-5 targets. Mini-nukes tend to break even at a little more than ONE target. That's overall efficiency, too - DPE, DPS. After you go five targets or more, AoEs will ALWAYS outperform single-target attacks, sometimes even in burst damage chains. And a decent-sized team will guarantee you 10 enemies or more. At this point, single-target attacks are POINTLESS when you have Fireball and Fire Breath, because at 15 people, you're dealing more damage and spending less endurance than if you were pot-shotting them all one at a time.

That, I believe, is the big problem Arcana has with them - AoEs as they are currently implemented are hard to impossible to balance to a neutral state, and are currently unbalanced in our favour. The biggest limit to them is effective area size, which tends to limit melee most of all, but the size of Blaster AoEs just means they're catching lots of enemies all the time. That's what necessitated target caps, because before, a Blaster could be AoE-ing 20-30 people, and that's without any aberrant behaviour. That's just sick. In essence, their large AoEs give them the POTENTIAL to break the game, and for that potential, they lose the chance to shine practically anywhere else, including single-target damage aside from a select few sets.

I don't dislike them as they are, but, quite frankly, I like massive AoE for the simple fact that I NEED massive AoE to survive lacking very much everything else. I'm not sure I would protest too loudly about giving up some of that AoE for some of the tools needed for not needing it. It's unlikely to happen to an AT set in stone for years, but a new AT in a similar vein COULD benefit from lessons learned.

There's a lot of truth to that, and I've mentioned the Stealth problem many times. There's no real purpose to adding in sneak objectives if "sneaking" in the game consists of turning on one power and hoping you're not fighting a faction that can see you anyway. There's no actual hiding or sneaking involved, and even if there were, the game isn't built to allow it, or indeed reward it. You're always going to get more reward for the time spent just killing things than you will for not killing things, hence "sneaking" is not a viable option for anything other than pure convenience.

Blasters are kind of in the same boat - they're given the ability to spawn-wipe enemies as their "thing," but they can't be given too much of that ability or they're overpowerd. Give them little enough for them to not be overpowered and they're underpowered, just scraping by. I actually have to agree with you on the single-target aspect - if they didn't have the ability to do such massive spawn-wipe and had to pop things one by one, would they not have been balanced to be stronger overall as a result?

Ah, OK, that explain is. So it does have a slide, only it's not exactly like other guns. What slides back is the... Back 1/3 of the gun's length, plus the BOTTOM of the gun, which... Honestly looks kind of really odd I see what you mean, though, and I take my comment back.

That still, however, leaves the question of what, exactly, a "bolt" is and what it does on the Desert Eagle. I went through several ideas of what it might be, and each has been shot down as total nonsense (which they were), so I don't know where to go. Let's simplify the question and see if that'll get through to me. What is the little plate that closes the gap on the side of the barrel where shell casings are expelled called? I'm assuming it isn't the bolt, so it must have a name of its own.

Afterwards, back to formula, am I correct to say that the "bolt" is the thing that plugs the barrel and, in a semi-automatic handgun, is attached to the slide, and that a rotating bolt is merely one that locks so it stays in position longer before recoiling back?

And what the hell would possess someone to even develop a weapon like the Desert Eagle? I mean, I can see why people by they, I can even see why some people fire them, and I can DEFINITELY see why they're so common in games and movies, but for something this seemingly impractical to be developed by a military force? How did that happen?

Interesting... Sidetracking into movies a bit, it seems that there are usually two ways action heroes fire automatics. One is the case when the hero is clearly shooting blanks and seeing no recoil, which allows him to basically squeeze out more rounds out than a minigun, shooting one-handed while suspended upside down. The other is the more "realistic" shooting of the gun with both hands, obviously firing live rounds, that have the gun rotate at least 45 degrees in the shooter's hands on each shot, causing the shooter to fire really slowly.

I'm assuming complete fantasy is the former example and "limp wristing" is the latter, with actual proper use somewhere in-between? Because, honestly, the former looks too cool to be real, and the latter looks too silly to be practical.

Well, of course I'm just looking at basic movie clices and what I've seen, and movies are notoriously bad about keeping authentic physics authentic. Though, I have to say, those clips are... Spectacular, put it like this

Possibly a case of this. A lot of movies I've seen this in are the kind where someone would hold another person at gun point by casually holding a gun to his chest, easily within an arm's reach. No great shock is felt when the other guy grabs the gun and they wrestle like entangled tumbleweeds. Those same movies have shooters fire their (really small) revolvers by frantically squeezing them, often at the cost of the gun drifting off to the side as their hand spasms. Those guns also have an interesting tendency to shoot out sparks, so I'm sure they're not realistic, but the handgun's function DOES explain why the actors do that with their props. If each shot requires a lot of pull strength, an untrained actor would look a lot like this.

I actually had a small metal revolver toy that just popped percussion caps and made a small bang. It had a drum, but no mechanism to rotate it that I can remember, and it had a striker to pop them. It was heavy, made of cast iron and had a HIDEOUSLY hard trigger, especially considering I was, like, 5 at the time. Whenever I could manage to fire it one-handed at all, this is exactly how I looked - more squeezing for all my worth than actually aiming to fire. The gun didn't actually FIRE anything, so there wasn't any point, anyway, but I can definitely relate.

Yeah, that seems to be a fairly common slight. Though it also seems to be a little less common, as both media and critics seem to be picking up on it, and even unlearned gits like myself have heard of it. It's still an easy trick to spot which movie had an expert advising the actors and which just had the director hand them guns and instruct them to act cool. I personally learned about it watching a documentary about the bank robber known as Hollywood, as police used this to assume he had police training. Turns out he didn't, but the little tidbit has been with me since.

Now, in City of Heroes we don't have FINGERS, but less an index finger for us to care where we place it, so chances are we'll just keep holding our firearms in a squeezing fist, but even games that DO have fingers rarely actually use this trick, and you'll often see supposedly elite soldiers constantly keeping their fingers on the trigger. It's a good thing video game characters don't trip

It was a typo, guys. I meant to say "slide"

A "de-roostering lever." Man I love this forum

Wait... So bolt and slide are mutually exclusive? OK, that might explain a few things. First of all, slide-operated weapons don't have an actual "bolt," so much a just having the slide covering the hole in the barrel where the cartridge is ejected out of, do I have that right? Which would mean that "bolt," then, is the plate which covers the same hole in weapons with a more static barrel that don't have a slide to move back and reveal it. Which would mean the Desert Eagle 50 doesn't actually have a slide at all... That kind of makes sense, since pictures I've seen of the thing make it look like one solid lump of metal with the "barrel" being basically a hole in the end, whereas slider-operated handguns tend to have a hole in the slide up from that the actual barrel comes out of.

OK, that explains why the Desert Eagle looks like a cast-iron stove plated in chrome, and it also explains why it would have a rotating bolt and why that is meaningful. Lacking a slide (which would explain why it also lacks washboard pattern which I assume is there for grip on the slide), it instead has a bolt like an assault rifle because of how powerful the cartridge it uses is. Weapons both in games and movies fire too fast for me to actually see what the heck is going on, so I kind of assumed the Desert Eagle had a top slide like all the others, but it doesn't does it? That really would explain a LOT.

Thanks, that explains what that is for. My toy replica has that, but being that it's plastic, it's just a bump on the surface. Now I know.

Something tells me he wouldn't exactly NEED a gun But then, I'm getting the impression from everything I've read that the Desert Eagle isn't exactly a gun for those weak in the hand, so I guess it's kind of fitting.

They didn't hold any more bullets than a regular revolver. The design they used had a groove that ran in a zig-zag pattern around the cylinder that acted like a track for a pin in the bottom of the frame. Dirt and wear could degrade the pin or the track tin such a way that the gun didn't work very well.

That jives with the video I saw of the semi-automatic revolver before. The whole drum and barrel assembly looks like it's on a rail to recoil backwards of the grip, and with that pattern and a static pin welded to the stock, I can definitely see how that back-and-forth motion could rotate the drum automatically, and I assume drum rotation is what, err... "Roosters" the hammer. OK, I get that, too. Cool

OK, that was a lot of fun to watch. I think this little animation is as good as it's going to get without actually disassembling one by hand, which is not an option, as I don't live in South Florida There was still some ambiguity around how the safety works, how the hammer gets primed between changing magazines and a whole load of little metal plates that actually look a whole lot like the insides of a door lock o.O. Beyond that, though, I saw the operations being discussed.

As per the animation, the whole barrel pivots back and down, which I assume means the hole for it in the front is either very big or oblong. It slips out of grooves made to hold it to the slide, and the slide moves backwards, completely seriously just forcing the hammer down by pushing against it. I would not have called that. It felt like too... Brutish an approach for it to be true, but apparently it is. I can't imagine that would be good for material wear.

Also, I kept thinking the recoil spring would be somewhere at the back. You know, BEHIND the thing being forced back. Turns out iti's in the very front, explaining the width around the barrel, and explaining why an automatic with a forward magazine would need a significant redesign.

Cool, that actually explains a lot. It's a lot finer, more intricate machinery than I thought. Explains why it took so long after the invention of firearms to get to that.

P.S. Also, ZOMG BABS POST! I... Guess invoking him worked I'm really happy to see the man in charge of making all the cool Dual Handguns take interesting in that little discussion. Sweet!

That's the big problem with the whole thing, really - no-one seems to know, or at least has ever cared to share, exactly what Blasters are supposed to do. They "kill things" is about as close as we've gotten, which can just as easily describe... Pretty much everyone. They're supposed to be the damage specialists, but they aren't. Not even now, actually. And before the Defiance changes, this very premise was so untrue as to be both laughable and insulting at the same time. But they aren't damage specialists, because their "damage" is so wildly inconsistent between powersets, and especially between powerset combos. An Energy/Energy Blaster will be well-equiped for single-target damage, but an AR/Dev Blaster will really only be good against large masses of enemies.

Compare Blasters to Scrappers. Each Scrapper primary is guaranteed at least one big hitter, an at least a few smaller ones. All a Blaster primary is guaranteed is a Snipe. Everything else varies. Some sets have a big hitter, some don't. Some sets have a lot of AoE, some don't. Some sets have a true nuke, some don't. Some sets have a lot of melee attacks, some don't. Some have a lot of AoE attacks, some don't. We all know what Blasters are supposed to do - kill. There is, however, not a single clear definition as to HOW they are supposed to do this. The whole Archetype is a grab bag of a whole slew of tools and abilities, none of which, honestly speaking, really fit in one overriding category that can be described as "Blaster powers," and let's be frank here - a lot of them seem to have been tacked on for lack of anything else to put in there, and serve little to no use for the actual archetype and how it plays.

I'm not sure I'm a fan of the proposed alternate AoE systems, but I CAN see just how hideously powerful certain larger AoEs can be, especially with Aim and Build Up, and especially when you need to clear a room in a hurry. I can't say I'm objective here, not after having played the game for five years and growing used to what we have now, but if Arcana feels that this would be grounds for giving the AT a little more... Purpose, then I can't say I'm against it entirely. I guess getting rid of their "crutch" might necessitate they get some actual protection to do what they do.

To a large extent, I do agree that Blasters ought to be single-target specialists, as being offensive characters, there really should be "no villain a Blaster can't take down." By comparison, something like a Defender, who isn't a killing specialist, should be good at dealing with lots of less threatening villains. It makes sense, really, though again - it' feels like it's a bit too late in the game for something like this. I wonder if we'll get any new ATs with Going Rogue.

Yeah, I didn't realise it until I saw your post, but I got hit with it a few times, myself

So, basically, what you're saying is that the external hammer is a backup mechanism to **** the gun for those who lack the upper body strength to pull the slide all the way back? OK, I can kind of see that, but then how does pulling the slide load the striker, then? I highly doubt it just pushes the hammer back manually as it comes out

As best I can utterly guess, there's an internal mechanism for loading the striker pin spring that doesn't require completely compressing the slide's heavy recoil springs, which is why an external hammer exists, which can be used to **** the striker manually on the first shot, and then let gas blowback force the slide back and reset the striker on each successive shot. Does that sound even remotely right? So I'm guessing there are no semi-automatics with a striker but no slide, since these would have no way to eject shell casings, unless they used some kind of bolt mechanism, which I have honestly never seen on a handgun of any size.

That still leaves the question of why some handguns end with the slide back on the last round of their magazine, though. I believe I read something about this in the "single action vs. double action" article, but it was never quite clearly what caused this at why, not to me at the very least.

*side note*
I've never held a real gun, so I can't imagine how much pull strength it would take to **** it, but I HAVE had the aforementioned air pistols, and I remember how it was murder on my arms just to pull the slide back on those, and that's just a plastic toy, by my guess forcing a piston to compress a low-pressure air tank to provide shooting power. I plain old couldn't do it when I was a kid, and it's not a light pull for me even now, so I can imagine what a recoil spring meant to absorb the blowback from a .45 cartridge would be like to compress.