http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1152664-why-do-energy-weapons-svck/page__st__20
Read from page 2 to 5, to get the gist of the topic.
Discuss.
Basically the problem is that the EW ammo system is totally counterintuitive by means of logic. As you only load one cell but somehow fire many of them out of the gun.

Alright, so here are my 2 possible fixes a little more organized

------------------------ Option 1, Energy -------------------------

- MFCs contain 240 energy, SECs contain 120 energy, and ECPs contain 60 energy.

- The energy weapon used detemines how much energy is used in one shot

- For Example: The Plasma Rifle uses 20 energy a shot, making one MFC amount to 12 shots. The Plasma Defender uses 6 energy a shot, allowing it to fire 20 times with one SEC. The Laser RCW uses 1 energy a shot, allowing it to fire 60 times with one ECP

- MFCs, SECs, and ECPs would all be heavier then they are now and be rarer and more expensive (one MFC being equal to 24 MFCs now or something)

- Each Cell remembers how much energy it has left, so if you switch which gun is using that Cell the energy drainage is changed but not the overall energy

- You could mix together Cells to add their remaning energy amounts together (60 energy SEC + 60 energy SEC = a full SEC)

- Converting Ammo would would not be completely switching the ammo, but would require somewhat or fully spent cells. For example you could have one full MFC and one compltely empty SEC. you could fill the SEC to full with 120 MFC energy.

- Over Charge Cells and Max Charge Cells decrease the amount of energy total but make up for it by increasing damage and DT penetration. for example, a Plasma rifle with a normal MF could fire 12 shots, with 240 energy. One using a MFC Max Charge can only fire 6, because the energy amount would be halved, to 120. An MFC Over Charge would be inbetween, at 9 with 180 energy.

- There would be weapon mods that lower energy usage. There could even be some that increase energy usage slightly adding more damage w/out the negative effect Max and Over charge cells have on condition

------------------------ Option 2, renaming ---------------------

- Simply rename the MFCs, SECs, and ECPs as follows

- MFC - Micro Fusion Energy

- SEC - Small Energy

- ECP - Electron Charge

- This way it would be similar to picking up ammo and when you load a weapon it is like loading a cartridge rather than a bunch of cartridges

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

I like the first option better

Yes it's buggy, seeing a full reload from one shot is weird but the same for instant reloads in handguns and assault rifles when you've fired 1 - 5 shots yet don't loose the rest on a mag change or a breach load.
I think it's mostly a easy way for dev's to do it and for FPS' not to get bogged down in exact ammo counts that could make some of the more reactionary gamers rage.

I would like single cells many shots fully implemented, but unless I get off my bum and mod it myself I don't see it happening in games.

Partial cells, from reloading without emptying the cell, would be like a weapon or piece of apparel with a CND bar, the partial energy cells would automaticall stack and the "CND" meter would fill, until it reached 100%, at which point it would be replaced by a regular "full" cell.

This is a carry-over from FO3, and it never made much sense then either. A cell should represent a full load for the gun, so 8 shots from the Plasma Rifle, 6 shots for the Laser Rifle, 1 shot from the Gauss Rifle, etc. (Forgive any wrong ammo counts; I haven't used energy weapons in NV yet.)

The problem comes with reloading (including the fact that guns auto-reload when you switch weapons). The game would have to keep track of how many 1/8ths of a cell you had in the PR, 1/6ths in the LR, etc. I think the solution would be to either not allow reloading until the cell is spent, or else reloading loses whatever remained in the cell.

The again, I guess it's easy enough to keep track of all the partial cells in decimal form and give you whole cells as you accumulate them.

If so it would require more changes that maybe possible, are you also sugesting "repairing" semi spent batteries... I.E powering up one with another.

It seems a complicated way of doing things ( don't get me wrong I made a similar post about EW's being silly in reload function close to september ).

I still think it's a good idea and would like to see it for a future game, but so many issues about weight, maintenence, price, having one battery but three weapons you switch between using it at once.

It seems simple to implement but as the closest we have are recharger / breeder cells maybe it is not that clear cut.

@ lefty666 FO3 never went into decimals much I think spread or damage was one of the few to do so.
NV did however in more places, maybe all it takes is a system change to decimal places in ammo but I don't think anyone has tried or succeded yet.

OK so here is my proposal. It is in fact what OmegaDS proposed in his second option but without letting player know. For player, everything would seem to be in good old cells. Only change would be that they would be now displayed as floating point numbers instead of integers.

Program stores and calculates everything in "energy". This means firing, reloading, storing. It will be however displayed to player as "cells":

say 1 MFC stores 240 MFenergy.
Player loads his rifle with one MFC. Program adds 240 MFenergy in to rifle.
Player shoots 3 times. Program compute 3 shoots which cost 120 (40 each) MFenergy from rifle leaving 120 MFenergy inside rifle. Which is 0.5 MFC.
Player have 10 MFCs in his inventory left which program stores as 2400 MFenergy.
Player reloads his rifle. Program adds 120 MFenergy from inventory in to the rifle. Leaving 2280 MFenergy in inventory. But to player it is displayed as 9.5 MFC (2280 / 240). That is what he see. It would appear to him he just reloaded his rifle with half cell.

And of course adding/substracting from inventory would be done in MFenergy x 240 (which will be 1 cell for player).

Similar with other types of cells just ratio of cell/energy would be different.

All would be calculated in energy, it will just be converted in to cells for display to player.

When I think of it, floating point numbers are in fact not necessary. We can manage easily with old integers:

2400 MFenergy equals to 10 MFCs
2280 MFenergy equals to 10 MFCs ...of which one is half depleted. Only drawback would be that player will never know how depleted is that last cell.
2160 MFenergy equals to 9 MFCs
...and so on

Or we can display that last partially depleted cell in separate slot inside inventory as Mako Vlazkov was suggesting using CND bar.

Or, any partial cells could become Misc Items with partial "CND", on which other partial cells will stack until 100% is reached, at which you shall regain a full cell and it resets back to a low "CND" depending if there was extra energy from the 100%
Ninjas... damn...

Hehe

I don't know difficult or simple this kind of change would be, but I dislike the current illogical system with great intensity.

Well, from my free time programming experience, it would not be that hard. Most difficult in fact would be to adapt QUI and GECK editor. Math behind is pretty simple. And you would need to go through list of weapons, shop vendors and adjust values.

It is hard to say, if it would be worth that trouble to team of developers who probably are already working on some different project in order to get their salaries. They can not get stuck inside NV just to keep it improving. We'll be lucky if they will patch it bit more.

Take Fallout 2 for example. It was newer completely patched by developers and 1/3 of content been developed newer appeared in final official version.

I would say, it can be useful for next fallout ...if there will be one.

Has anyone made a mod for this, if they have, the devs could repurpose it into a patch. Eh ?

Mod made from this would be difficult since display conversion from "energy" to "cells" would need to be hardcoded in to GUI. Same with CND bar for that last cell. Unless there is way to use script for that.
What can be done probably is to rename cells to energy and use that instead. Pretty much what OmegaDS proposed in his second point without my modifications. It could be done in GECK.

There would be one problem however. Huge amounts of energy you would need to handle one by one (when moving it between inventories for example). If 1 cell equals say 240 energy, you would need to deal with 48000 energy instead of 200 cells.

Just have it read 200 energy units. As it would be a simple renaming, and in the current, unchanged system, cells=energy units

Well yes, possible. But than we did not solve problem with EW ammo (how ever we call it) weighting too much when compared to gunpowder cartridges. Cell is heavier than cartridge because it stores much more energy (gunpowder is also stored energy which you can use by means of chemical reaction -explosion). We are talking of course about Fallout cells which use fusion power of some sort. Basically minireactors. And fusion energy is MANY times larger than chemical energy. Just compare two bombs of the same weight. One conventional and second atomic. You will see difference. So by this logic, cell should be able to power several shots, instead of one.

So changing name would not be enough, weight and probably also cost should have been revaluated under some system. If done, it could be then moded in GECK I think.

Just to demonstrate what kind of effectiveness difference we are talking about:

Little Boy (first atomic bomb drooped on Hiroshima, means pretty archaic design) had weight of 4 tons and power equivalent of 13-18 000 tons of TNT. Which gives you power ratio of 1:3750!
In other words, nuclear fusion energy is about 4000 times more effective than conventional chemical energy -like that of gunpowder -ton to ton or gram to gram.

Now lets try to put it in to Fallout in theory:
MF cell which weights 0.1 should give output 12000 times larger than that of .357 magnum round which weights 0.035. Lets ignore casting and bullet and any protection in cell for sake of simplicity.
Well gunpowder is not TNT and means of projecting that power output are different in guns and energy weapons but even if not exact it should give you idea of sheer scale of difference.

And now lets look at what happens in Fallout in practice:
1 MF cell fired from laser rifle does 22 points of damage.
.357 magnum round fired from cowboy repeater does 32 points of damage.
Hehe ...see?

Of course Fallout is just game. And not very realistic at that. But energy ammo been heavier than gunpowder ammo damagevise is simply wrong. It should have been other way around. Even if that would not be difference of 4000 to 1.

Well if the MFCs are renamed into MFEs, then the weight should be changed

we would probably just pick a random weight for 1 energy, it would probably be similar to the weight of one bullet, to be balanced.


If we did the first option, then it would be sort of similar, each energy being a certain weight, like .01, so a full MFC would weigh 2.4 lbs (which actually seems too heavy

I don't like the fact that so many energy weapons take multiple ammo per shot, especially given the weight of ammo in HC mode. EW ammo should have a lighter weight per shot compared to firing lead bullets and it doesn't. The AM rifle fires a a quarter pound bullet, the Gaus Rifle uses half a pound of energy ammo per shot. The unique laser pistol Pew Pew uses over a pound of ammo per shot.

I love the idea of a clip system, and have loved it since Ghost Recon Island Thunder....
This has been done before, the game developers just need to pay attention to what other games have done in the past.
Ghost Recon, Rainbow Six, Brothers in Arms...

My suggestion - make a "clip/charge" system for both guns/e-weapons, and only use it on hardcoe mode.
Let's let the casual gamers not have to micro-manage their inventories.

I like the idea of MF, ECP, & SEC all having a charge number - i.e 50 charge or something.
I also like the idea of recycling cells at the workbench to full charge.

For all clip loading conventional firearms - use a clip system, and have clips as inventory items (separate from bullets);
also each MF/ECP/SEC cell would act as a "clip"

And make clips available for purchase/scavenging.

One more thing - plug a trickle charger into a wall outlet in your suite...lol

One more on-topic thought... If we go to a clip system for e-weapons, each MF cell for example with approx. 240 energy - should only weigh as much as 1 MF cell currently.
I'm not an engineer but I don't think energy actually has weight (or it is such a small weight it is negligible), only the container it is stored in has weight.

personally, i think each type of weapon style should have its own DT in an armor
EX:
NCR trooper armor-
guns-9DT
Energy Weapons- 5
Explosive-12
Melee-2
unarmed-5

personally i think this would smooth out the DT routine and make it so that a weapon isnt nerfed because of another class, and so it adds variety and planning to your armament

I do not expect game in which you can magically "equip" power armour in a second (well in fact instantly) to bother with something as "complex" as magazine. In terms of weapon realism, Fallout is on level of arcade shooter. Take for example reload times which are completely unrealistic. Headshots across max view distance at minimum skill. Ironsights which are totally off. Recoil does not throw your aim off. Maintaining weapon by destroying other weapon (imagine platoon of soldiers equipped with rifles ...after few firefights they would have to use wooden sticks since they would have but one or two rifles left) and so on.


Energy is "stored" inside materials and those have weight. In case of fusion energy, it is stored in structure of atoms. You are breaking them in order to get that energy. Weapons use enriched uranium while reactors use low grade uranium. Other materials are used. However that material makes very little of the mass. Little Boy contained only 64 kg of uranium out of its mass of 4000 kg. And out of that 64 only small part actually underwent reaction.

Conventional batteries also contain material, usually alcaline or lead.

So cells which store energy do have weight and it is not just container.

Errr.....no, with chemical battery we stuck with it is pretty Newtonian; i.e. no mass is loss.

Recharger batteries would have little additional weight due to electrons gain; but they are still grains compare to pounds with the batteries.

With control nuclear reaction, the weight change is in atomic scale; 1g is huge amount of energy gone off.

Anyways, within the current framework, it is best either reduce the weight of Cells PC carry and they are use to charge up the "Clip Cell" for given weapon to make them less of a burden; or PC needs certain amount of Cell containers for give amount of "Cell Energy".