Oh, my bad. Heh, HyperBlaster

Ok, Damn, I was mistaken. It is the HyperBlaster in Q2, also known as RailGun in Q3. I got the two mixed up. {Shut up, I dont know where cannon came in at...} Oh well, sotty, heh...

That's a railgun....

A railgun shoots out a metallic object like a long thin bar out of the barrel by magnetic acceleration. The bar is inside the barrel, stuck to the side, and a burst of electricity reverses the polarity, causing the object to be repelled at huge ass speed. Wtf are you talking about?

That's pretty sad? Been in the last two Quakes, has it?
http://www.planetquake.com/quake2/q2guide/weapons.shtml
http://www.planetquake.com/quake3/q3aguide/weapons.shtml

No it hasn't. In both the manuals and in-game, Q2 & Q3 both refer to that weapon as the "Railgun". Shadow Warrior also refers to it as the "Railgun". "Eraser" also refers to it as a "Railgun". Not "Railcannon".

A metallic gun? Aren't all guns metallic?

Three barrels? Look at this picture:
http://www.planetquake.com/quake2/q2guide/images/rail_gun.jpg
What three barrels? I see a stock and a handle but I don't see 3 barrels. Even if it had 3 barrels, each one would be as wide as the rest of the gun and that would make it too heavy to aim properly.

It doesn't shoot a particle beam. It fires a depleted uranium slug at a magnetically hyperaccellerated rate. The slug fires at near the speed of light, which is why in the movie "Eraser" people were flying backwards when it hit them. Also, the spiral (that wasn't even in Q3A) doesn't hurt the enemy that's just a nifty special effect that wouldn't even be there in real life.

Sir Galahad clearly is intelligent. He's not the only one, though. Nightmare and Psyonisis are another couple of the goodguys in here.

I'm not being argumentative. You're being vague, indescript, and in the case of "Railcannon", just making things up and assuming we know what you're talking about.

I make points trying to get you to put some detail into your posts. Unless you're on fire you have no reason to make such short posts; put some detail in there so we don't have to ask these questions.

As for the "Railcannon", you're just wrong. It's not the end of the world. I see how you made your mistake. Accept it, you've got nothing to gain by being vehement.

I know that a real "Railgun" that exists today is a large artillery piece that has to be mounted to rails like on the deck of a battleship or inside a helicopter. No iD game has ever had them, though, but they've had the "Railgun" from the Schwartzeneggar movie.

Are you sure you aren't confused with Ghostbusters?

Why, im flattered.

Well, as I have not actually heard the term "railcannon" used in these games I will try to make an analysis of it:

"Rail" implies that it uses the magnetic acceleration technology used by "railguns".
"Cannon" suggests that this is a very large weapon - larger than normal types in the same technological base.

Based upon my suspicion that "normal" railguns shoot projectiles of a caliber approaching 7mm, I would have to assume that a rail-cannon shoots projectiles with a diameter of about 20mm (in Q2 and Q3 the barrel ooked to be at least 20mm).

Railguns do not solely use particle beams or they would be a form of "plasma gun". If they used particle beams in conjunction with rail-bolts they would be far deadlier than they are now (approaching damage done by bf9000 in doom).

Instead railguns shoot out a bullet or projectile of some sort that reaches speeds in excess of 2500 meters/sec, whereas normal rifle bullets usually only manage to break 750 meters/sec - this is why they are so deadly, the acceleration of tissues away from the impact site is tremendous and expands rapidly (thus the "splat" effect).

If you don't think velocity makes this much differernce then look at a test video comparing an m-16 to a 9mm pistol shooting a block of gelatain or barrel of water. The 9mm will put a hole through it, the m-16 will make it almost explode. They shoot these videos in slow motion so you can see the bullet "disrupt" the area it goes through.

This is the primary reason that designing truely bulletproof armor is so difficult, nowadays you have to make it thicker since you can't make it tougher!

Or maybe a "railcannon" is actually like a normal rail-gun except it shoots in a fully-automatic fasion, like a glorified minigun of sorts.

If a rail-gun blot was accelerated to near the speed of light, it would cause the equivalent of a nuclear explosion on impact just because of all the energy involved, and any guys you might hit would send fragments of themselfs at not to much slower speeds to that (you die if you shoot them, their blood splatter will kill you... lol).

You can build yourown rail-gun if you have a light working knowledge of electronics (not to mention the instructions and materials).

By no means think that you will be able to walk out on the street and act like a god becauseit wont throw objects fast enough to hurt you (ie, gently set the object in one side, and it shoots out the other side landing about 5 feet from the energy-sucking contraption... or is that concraption).

deadnail said:

The slug fires at near the speed of light, which is why in the movie "Eraser" people were flying backwards when it hit them.

You make very good points and I always like reading what you have to say Deadnail. I just have a question for you. If the slugs are moving at almost the speed of light, why in the world did "Eraser" have the people flying backwards? It would have went straight through them in the blink of an eye! They would have probably even had enough time to check out the wound before they died. To make them move backwards would take a force of about 200 to 300 miles per hour, which may have been slow enough to not go through the body and have enough force to still carry them a good ways. Even still, they wouldn't have flown as far as they did, but it "is" only a movie.

Actually, Your trying to talk about a RailGun, yet there is a RailCannon, it just could never be in a FPS, cuz it's about 30 feet tall, it's slugs are the size of tanks, and it can only fire three times before cooling down, which takes like 5 hours

The Railgun in Q3A is almost the same linear accelerator as in Q2, same (?) high damage, same accuracy, same low rate of fire. It is neither to mix up with a laser gun nor with a hyperblaster.

By the way: does anybody know how a hyperblaster works (in theory)?