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[OznerpaG]

in TT there is a 60m minimum range for the gauss, but in MWO there is no minimum range for any ballistic, likely because there doesn't seem to be a logical reason for a ballistic weapon to have any minimum range. so instead a crazy button holding and releasing mechanism was introduced to give the gauss a handicap.

but i was reading my defense news today and saw a vid on a US Navy Electromagnetic Railgun which shows the solid projectile it fires has a sabot that has a flat front.

http://youtu.be/qJQfAcBs5vQ

i think this is the perfect excuse to ditch the new gauss firing mechanism and add a minimum range to it - if the sabot doesn't fall away until it hits 60m (or 90m - whatever is deemed suitable), then the flat end of the sabot would hit the enemy mech with the gauss projectile still inside and do much less damage - maybe 3-5 damage instead of the full 15


another addition would be to make it impossible for any mech to fire 2 gauss at once - if you have 2 gauss on alpha, only 1 would ever fire but both would recharge since the gauss takes too much power from the engine to ever let 2 fire in the recharge time



do we want to see more gauss on the battlefield? maybe not lol, but right now most people (including me) won't touch the gauss with a 10ft pole, and that has made some mechs (like the Victor-K) less useful than other variants of the same class unless you want to fumble learning the gauss firing mechanism. personally, i'm more interested in delivering hassle-free munitions fire at the enemy as opposed to playing some sort of 'game within a game' that decreases my ability to deliver said munitions

would it replace dual ac5? never fully - they pretty much weigh the same, you get 5 extra damage at range with a gauss, but much less in the minimum range, especially if you are only ever allowed to fire 1 gauss at a time.

how about the super-hyped pop-tarters? with dual ac5/dual PPC you can deal 10dmg within 90m, and with this new gauss/dual PPC you'd only be able to deal 3-5dmg unless you spent tonnage on other self defense weapons, turning the gauss/dual PPC into a more long range specialty role at the expense of short range defense (like LRMs kinda sorta, but not really lol)

[BourbonFaucet]

Off topic, but wait a minute, isn't there a sabot visible on the Gauss projectile on its ammo icon?