Had some thoughts on how lasers can be improved from their appearances in FO3/NV, which were fine but could be even cooler. Because lasers are worth it.

First of all, having the weapon damage for laser weaponry be visually reflected by the intensity of the beam you shoot, so a laser rifle looks brighter than a laser pistol. Perhaps different coloured beams by customisation or by damage thresholds. Red for lower damage, blue for higher damage. And as an extra bit of flavour, you could have them produce a weak, undamaging beam when you try to shoot with the battery drained.

Speaking of batteries, they should only be picked up as singular objects that have a varying amount of shots depending on which weapon you stick it in. So you come across 1 microfusion cell in a ammo crate, and that one cell can be loaded into a laser rifle for 24 shots before running dry, but if it gets loaded into gatling laser (assuming they'll also use MFCs as ammo) it would give you 240 shots. And if you use 4 shots from the laser rifle, if you use the same cell for the gatling laser, you'll be down to 200 for that gun, not 236. Fallout New Vegas attempted this with different EW using up different numbers of energy cells but it wasn't conveyed very well and the batteries were still effectively just bullets of a different stripe.

Last but most importantly for the OCD-addled people like myself, make sure ash piles clean up like regular corpses! We don't need save file bloat.

I'm hoping the new modification system will help make energy weapons seem less like ballistic weaponry and more like their own thing, but that's something we'll have to wait for until November. I do wish for there to be both homemade/"low-tech" energy weapons (like that wind-up laser gun straight from Futurama) and the Fallout 3 style hi-tech fancy stuff like we saw in the modification demo. Fallout 3's energy weaponry was a bit lacking, and I personally disliked the look of the new ones in New Vegas. Just what was the LAER about?

I want to make a stealthy character that vaporizes corpses so that NPCs don't get alarmed from seeing one, myself. That's my dream.

Most of all though, I want a laser I can https://youtu.be/Vx-iLArPDPU?t=6sWhich might actually be how the Laser Musket works.

I'd love to see a cutting laser beam that does small but continuous damage as long as it's on target and - for crits - completely dismembers limbs/bisects bodies. Or punch neat little holes into your opponents.

NV had a skill that transformed those goo/ash piles into a random variety of energy ammo. Somewhat stupid, but cleaned up nicely.

I'm all for charged shots.

Energy weapons should also overheat in the case of lasers rather then jam like guns. Hell, with the ability to fix bayonets on your guns it could add extra damage to the bayonet by making it soak up that heat. Kinda like the knives from NV.

but what about the cryo weapons? a laser cryo weapon is already blue.. on top of that i cant imagine something that fires ice getting overheated... your system wouldn't make sense for some of the gun variants.

I suspect the ammo system will be the same as usual and honestly that works the smoothest in the long run.

Pretty sure that's a perk and that came from a mod.

Do me a favor and simply look up what a laser is.

Then overthink the relation between laser and a weapon that cools things down.

agreed with that the energy ammo ''ratio'' should be changed between energy and guns.

Let's say the mucrofusion cells. Since fusion is a far more efficient (in the hundred of million times more efficient) form of energy than the chemical energy of bullets, we should presume that 1 microfusion cell shall be able to do greatly more damage point than a .50MG bullet. In ''fiction theory'', if a microfusion cell would exists, it would probably very rarely needs to be reloaded, but that would not work in a game

That is really not the kind of detail that would be my top-of-the-list, but it would be a nice implementation.

Good ideas the pale lady. I don't use energy weapons much but all of your ideas would add To the game

Thank you, even if you don't plan on using energy weapons you'll at least be shot at by them, and they should make you afraid and not feel like you're at a rave.

my only complaint is that energy weapons are under powered generally. but i would rather have some sort of mechanism, like a shield you can mod into armor that can either disrupt or block some of the energy weapons damage instead of just under powering them for the sake of consistency.

I rarely use energy weapons, but I recently got an Assault Phaser mod (from Star Trek) that looks very interesting, anyway. One neat thing that I assume about energy weapons is that they have no recoil? I wouldn't think they would, anyway. I was just doing some sniping with my Bullet Time mod (to simulate the slowed-time VATS of Fallout-4) and kept having to wait for my barrel to slooowly recover from the recoil. If energy weapons have no recoil (they shouldn't) and I can make a Sniper energy weapon.... oh, and they would probably be silent, or at least quieter than a 0.50 cal sniper rifle's BOOM. So might be something I'd be interested in exploring. Of course, in Fallout-3, energy weapon ammo was considerably more scarce than conventional ammo.... but then, the laser musket they showed in a trailer somewhere seemed to be "wound up" to power it's shots.... which would suggest NO expendable ammo required ---- just wind the crank again. Prolly weak damage, though. And time required to wind-up between shots...

The problem I see with an energy-based sniper weapon, at least a plasma one, is projectile speed. Plasma guns in FO3 shoot such a slow-moving blob of energy, that at sniper rifle distances, your target is likely to move before the projectile arrives. Obviously shouldn't be a problem for laser-based guns, though. Maybe whatever mod you use to make a plasma rifle into a plasma sniper will speed up the shot to make it useful for long range.

Please research how refrigerators work. Because it requires the input of energy, the net result will always be increased thermal energy.

For those suggesting continuous beam weapons, the possible pitfall there is holding the trigger for a while on an enemy (especially a tough guy) could easily be made unsatisfying if it's just like a little laser pointer. If it's like bzzzzztsh superheating the air like lightning, glowing beam of slicing, dicing death that could work but it shouldn't feel like it's something a cat would chase. It still might not work for big guys unless you could see their skin scorch and their armour peel away. Got to have that good game feel regardless of how real laser weapons work.

^ This. For a cryo-weapon more than any other, overheating would be an issue, since the gun would presumably have to somehow eject the large amounts of heat that it is removing from the 'cold ray' that it projects.

Is cryo-weaponry a confirmed thing or just on people's wishlists? If it is, does that mean we can play as Mr Freeze? We even have a wife called Nora!

We seen two quite clear proofs, one is a cryogenic pistol listed in the inventory during the E3 demo, also during the atom bomb baby segments we se a synth clearly using something that fires a icy blue "beam"

That would be cool - but why use a laser? (the light-show would draw guards in like flames do moths!) I'd love something like the powder from "No one Lives forever"

greetings LAX

Since cat's seem to be gone, the chasing after beams seems less of an issue.

Seeing a laser beam with the naked eye (under normal circumstances) is game logic anyway.

Regarding the continuous beam - pulling the trigger could start a cycle until you trigger again. Keeping on target means applying damage. In VATS this could be smoothed out into neat slicing motions added for visual impact.

So Tesla Armor...

To the OP i wouldnt use Color to denote power with Lasers as we already have color-codes for Laser prior to this. The LAER (from Big MT) is a Laser weapon that uses Electrical energy in some way that typical Laser weaponry does not, giving it a Blue shot. Also the AER Prototype (as well as the Sprtl-Wood Gatling Laser) has a Green shot and is also "unique" and very powerful which would imply that whatever is special about the weapon is connected to the green laser

First (and most important) we need to hope that BGS implemented EVE or something very much like it. There's no excuse this time since modders showed what to do properly for energy weapons.

Second, there are a few types of energy weapons: laser, sonic, and plasma. They operate on different principles using different types of energy forms.

Third, let's forget gaming or sci-fi film (or even some books) for a moment and consider the actual science of lasers, specifically as weapons. The fact is that a weaponized laser will almost certainly not have a beam that is visible to the human eye because the highest energy wavelengths are past blue/violet in the electromagnetic spectrum. If we want a laser with maximum "punch" we'd have a beam that we don't see but that the effects are most definitely apparent. It's possible that such a beam might also have a "partner" effect to make it visible, but that's rather silly for personal weapons since invisible attacks would be far more preferred than visible.

Fourth, lasers may be audible due to ionizing air (see Plasma below) or creating various types of aerial disruption. You wouldn't hear the gun, per se, but you'd definitely hear the beam as it passes through air (or other substances).

All of that is only about lasers, of course, which are optical weapons.

Normally, I would think of pulse weapons as auditory energy (i.e., sound), but that isn't how they are usually portrayed in stories, unfortunately. Sound weapons / energy forms are vastly underused in stories. I really wish that creators would include someone with a background in auditory science and use sound in some of its various capacities to create different effects, including direct damage (e.g., disruptors) as well as indirect effects (e.g., causing unconsciousness or flight away from the audio source, or other indirect effects). Anyway, pulse weapons in Fallout use EMP (electromagnetic pulse) which is why they are excellent against robotics and other forms of electromagnetic devices (e.g., Power Armor). I'd still say that their portrayal is very underused, though, because they could be effective against many other devices (e.g., knocking out terminals).

Plasma weapons use plasma which is some material that has been super-heated, normally gas that has been super-heated via a laser (as mentioned above, plasma is ionized) or some type of strong electromagnetic field. Of course, this process would take solids or liquids through gaseous state, so the plasma itself comes from a gas no matter what the initial substance was. Plasma is also the fourth form of matter along with solid, liquid, and gas. It doesn't normally have a specific form unless it is contained somehow, so the weapon versions we see in Fallout would have to be some type of physical container for the plasma that is fired and then breaks upon impact, or some type of mobile electromagnetic field (I'd say the first option is far more likely).

As a side note, the Making of Fallout 3 video includes discussion with BGS' chief sound designer. For example, the skittering sound of the ants and scorpions that some people players find very creepy / disturbing was actually made from crinkling up plastic wrappers for candy or other food (and processing the result, of course). At any rate, he mentioned that trying to develop sounds for energy weapons is something that is very challenging for him because he doesn't want the weapons to simply be "pew pew".

EVE was pretty - but it made no damned sense for the most part. Shooting someone with a laser should not suddenly make them start flying and then explode.

Game feel and sensible signposting should come above what should really happen, especially since Fallout physics aren't necessarily real world physics. An invisible, recoiless, possibly soundless weapon would be a terrible idea. Not only would it be unsatisfying to use you'd have no idea if you're missing your target, by how much, or if you're even firing anything. Why do you think you can see bullet streaks in video games and films?