I'm planning to develop an ammo overhaul mod modifying existing ammo ad adding in new ammo for both guns and energy weapons to result in a system with reasonable, useful, uniform and balanced effects. I'm looking for ideas on this before I do too much.

There are three main effects I'm looking at for normal bullets:
AP - armor piercing
HE - explosive
I - incendiary

AP has obvious effects - negate DT to some degree determined by the cartridge size (IE: .308 AP would negate more than 9mm), but also negate damage as less kinetic energy is transferred to the enemy. So, there's a tradeoff to using AP ammo that makes it more valuable than normal rounds in some situations and less valuable in others. So, this is pretty easy to balance. What I'm more concerned with is HE and I.

HE should increase damage, I would think, but then, why would use anything other than HE? There has to be some kind of drawback for this. Increase in condition damage doesn't make sense - it's not as though the barrel pressure is going to be higher or that some other weird propellant is used. I'm thinking they should just be more costly to build (effort and caps-wise), but not sure how to do that.

Incendiary rounds also have a somewhat obvious effect - they light things on fire. However, if you shoot a person with an incendiary bullet, they aren't going to light on fire, taking some small amount of damage over time. You can't put enough flammable material to light a person on fire, especially a person wearing any kind of armor made of a non-flammable material, like metal or plastic. In real life, incendiary rounds are used for igniting things at distance, like fuel containers or equipment, but certainly not people. So, is there a point in incendiary ammo in FONV? Should there be? What should it do?

For shotguns, since the cartridge is pretty big, there's all sorts of things you could stuff in it. I'd like to think in the future that there would be flechette rounds, so that could negate DT or perhaps inject poison. For slugs, I could do acid, EMP and HE (HE slugs already exist IRL, but it's a bit small), with obvious effects. I could also make 25mm/40mm gas rounds that disperse the effects of the existing poisons on groups of enemies in an area (this may take a bit of scripting).


For energy rounds, I really don't know what kinds of things I should be looking to do. Realistically, the power source shouldn't add any effects to the shot being fired other than to add more energy to each shot (EX: overcharged power cells, etc.), but that's boring compared to all the fun stuff you can do with gun ammo. So, what should there be, and what would you call it? I'd like to see some kind of DT negating effect, because there currently isn't any, but just adding "negates 10 DT" seems too simple. There has to be some kind of explanation to it, even if it's just technobabble. Perhaps it would make more sense to have some kind -DT over time, burning the armor away, so to speak, but this would really only be useful for high ROF energy weapons. There should be some kind of equivalent for low ROF weapons, like the laser/plasma and gauss rifle (which uses 2mm slugs in the lore. What can be done with that?).

Scripted effects are not off the table. All suggestions are welcome.

Sounds like a good idea so far. I''d like to see more expansion on the shotguns ammo for sure, perhaps make coinshot more useful too, it just seems to be the normal 12Ga but made with coins rather than lead, and Beanbags do not do nearly enough fatigue damage, by the time I get something down it's almost dead anyway.

Coinshot has one more projectile.

I suggest letting the bullet do normal damage (maybe slightly less) and adding an additional explosive effect which deals damage based on how much damage was dealt by the bullet. The idea is that if the round is stopped bei heavy armour, it won't do too much damage when exploding but it will be devastating when exploding inside soft tissue.



Maybe add an effect to the ammo that causes enemies to light on fire after hitting them with multiple incendiary rounds?

I don't know the first thing about guns so my ideas might not make any sense. If this is the case, I apologize.

Eh, that's kinda the opposite of how HE rounds work IRL - there needs to be sufficient impact force or friction to ignite the explosive charge. Come to think of it, that might just be the perfect way to balance it. There are no small arms bullets that are just HE, only HEAP. The explosive won't go off unless the target is armored. So, I'd just need to script something that checks DT on impact, and if it is high enough, the explosive is triggered, doing additional damage. But if there's no armor, the explosive probably won't go off (IRL, there's a small chance it will, so maybe make this probabilistic), so the overall damage would end up being much less.

The question then becomes, how do I balance HEAP versus SLAP rounds? SLAP rounds are intended for heavily armored targets, like lightly armored vehicles. So, they'd have to work really well against power armor, but then, why not use HEAP rounds against them? I suppose there would have to be a significant difference in DT mitigation then. Do robots tend to have high DT?




Still need ideas for energy ammo.

In Real Life, HEAP (or any type of HE rounds, really) don't work very well for small arms like 12g shotgun shells, much less .50BMG, 10mm, or anything else like that.

I suppose you've never heard of the Raufoss mk211 (12.7x99mm round) in use by US military snipers. Or FRAG-12 rounds (12g shells).

It's definitely not going to work for 10mm rounds. There's just no way you could fit enough explosives in a 10mm bullet for it to do much of anything. HE is reserved for the big rounds, like 12.7x99mm and shotgun slugs.

I've heard of them. They just aren't actually that awesome - the shotgun rounds should do about half as much damage in the explosion as they do as a slug, and should penetrate even less DT than normal, too. The HEAT version can penetrate lots of armor, but it shouldn't do much actual flesh damage (about half that of a normal slug). The damage for the .50BMG APHEX (armor piercing high explosive) explosion should be much less than a tenth of the damage of the normal round.