Overview
A little guide describing how to build some of my personal favorite weapon systems: Railguns and multiple-use-torpedo launchers.
Basics & Overview
Thought some folks might be interested in the actual mechanics behind building my original Railgun Prototype, so I’ll try and share some insights. I’ve added the links to the ships at the end of the guide, if you wanna try them out or get a closer look at the setup.
What is a Railgun? Basically, just a barrel using electromagnetic fields to propel a bullet at high speeds at a target. Even if we don’t have magnets, the basic principle works more or less fine in The Last Leviathan.
For a preview, check the following video:
Whole range of equipment on the prototype:
The idea of the railgun developed after designing the Revolver. The basic premise of the Revolver is obviously it’s central chamber, loaded with explosive charges that can be fired by aligning the top chamber with the barrel at the front of the ship.
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The idea is simple enough: put two stepper motors oppisite each other, invert the hotkeys, build a stable enough base (ship) for the thing to be suspended on, add a barrel that is wide enough to minimize risk of shots blowing up prematurely when fired and distribute enough hotkeys for each shot. That can get confusing, since you have to know which round is chambered or you’ll just fire a shot straight into your own hull – that’s what you get without safeties! To make things easier, I highlighted the first shot with brighter blocks as well as the two torches to give an idea of which shot to fire.
OK, simple enough. Next thing I thought was ‘why not build a minigun?’ – that turned out a bit more difficult, since adding more shots means adding more blocks in an ever increasing radius around the center, leading to an irresponsible increase in size overall.
That’s when I had the idea of building a railgun.
This is a shot of the first blueprint:
[link]
Again, go with an easy design at first. From the screen, you can see a lot of similiarities to the Revolver: spinning chamber in the center; this time only two longer chambers for rounds, but each housing several shots. It’s not a real railgun, of course (to the devs: can we have magnets, please? 😉 ). You basically just have a long barrel and need the shots to be fired with enough speed so they’ll pass through it without hitting the walls (which is still a bit tricky as of the current build). Shooting is easy enough – simply use the spring detonator. Problem is, after firiing the first shot, you’ll have the used detonator sitting in the way of the next shot and you’ll blow yourself up. So you’ll need an ejection system. Which is actually pretty simple as well, if you increase the horizontal width of the construction by one block and add another detonator at a right angle to the first. We’ll come back to that later.
Why didn’t I use the design in the screenshot? Two reasons:
1. It was a bit too close to the Revolver for my taste.
2. The whole construction proved to be way too heavy for the motors to hold. After deploying, the whole chamber would simply crash right through the hull, revealing some interesting issues with clipping. Firing worked, though, so that wasn’t an issue. 😉
So I thought, scrap it, we don’t need the actual revolving chamber part, if we just design the gun along the length of the ship. The final design looks like this:
[link]
Railgun – Setup
This is all you can see from outside. The vertical slots in the hull are used to eject the spent detonator cores (which is how we’ll call them from now on, since it sounds more cool 😉 ). You actually don’t need the last one, but it feels way more fun like that.
Inside:
[link]
This is the whole setup with the roof removed. 3 charges, 6 detonators. They are set to fire in sequence, cause I wanted to use less hotkeys (and I wanted a bit of a one-shot-weapon). As soon as the firing key is pressed, the first shot will be fired, then the detonator next to it goes off to eject the spent core with a slight delay and clears the path for the next shot.
Here a few more details of the setup:
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You’ll need a few seconds for the mechanism to clear the path completely, so 0.50 should be fine.
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In practice, the system proved very effective at crippling if not outright destroying ships. Aiming takes a bit getting used to – that’s why I used the extended railing to give some impression of iron sights.
However, the system has one major downside (besides the limited number of shots), and that’s the capacity to misfire. Sometimes, the second or third shot will come off wrong and blow up the nose of the ship. Doesn’t happend that often and mostly due to waves, since the game is not yet designed to support such mechanics. It’s also related to the relatively low ejection speed of the charges. Why didn’t I set em higher? I used floating mines as shots, so it’s intended that they bounce at a low angle across the waves. Increasing the speed even just a bit means a huge difference in terms of height – just a small wave or bobbing of the ship due to acceleration leads to you missing your target by half a mile, all the while shooting the charge three times across the map. 😉
I built another version of the ship with more oomph behind the wham, just for more railgun feeling, but aiming her is way harder (actually, it’s easiest by reversing the engines just a bit). For normal use, I recommend the standard variant.
Setup – Torpedo Launcher
But wait, there is more!
Just for giggles (and the shape of the hull somehow tempted me) I added a pretty nifty twin torpedo system to the ship. It works out really nicely, too.
[link]
Since the torpedoes release from the attached point when activated, all you need is just the rotating beam connecting the motors and you’re set!
It’s more or less a simplified version of the mechanism used in the Revolver, but it works realls well and is actually kinda easy to use in other designs. Only issue is again that you have to remember what torpedo is currently loaded. To minimize risk, I’ve set the ramp-up-time of the torpedoes to about 2 seconds, so there should be a bit of distance before they become dangerous to your own ship.
For reference: Original Prototype ship
Now you can’t wait to get your hands dirty, can ya? 😉
The original:
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The M-variant with more boom:
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If you like the designs and/or the guide, be so kind and show some love by hitting the like button. 😉
And if you have some cool design of your own you want me to know about, feel free and leave me a message or post in the comments!