Is the Pistol really worthless?

If it's not ZDoom, it goes here.
Clocky
Posts: 54
Joined: Sat Oct 22, 2016 6:16 am
Location: Inside a BFG 10K's Energy Cell magazine (Brazil, Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre)

Re: Is the Pistol really worthless?

Post by Clocky »

Amuscaria wrote:
Vaecrius wrote:Switches are specifically defined by the mapper as to whether they can be shot to be activated. Most hitscans and projectiles should be able to do this.

The Vulcanette multi-mag setup was developed back when I was still hoping to minimize ammo types and maximize interchangeability of ammo, and also I didn't really know how belts worked.

I pretty much assume that all loading mechanisms are somewhere on the underside of the gun, thus conveniently requiring no changes to the HUD sprite.

That said, I have given exactly zero real thought to what all that stuff on the BFG is. Perhaps I shall.

The Chaingun is fantastic on CTF maps for defense. Chaingun-tapping the flag-carrying enemy is pretty useful on many of the more open maps.
Edit: Kindle must really like to make you mad by making you delete a whole sentence just because you wrotw in the wrong place...
Heh, must be kinda unfair for the flag carrier, at least it ain't an insta-kill like the Super Shotgun.
User avatar
Hellser
Global Moderator
Posts: 2705
Joined: Sun Jun 25, 2006 4:43 pm
Preferred Pronouns: He/Him
Operating System Version (Optional): Windows 11
Graphics Processor: ATI/AMD with Vulkan/Metal Support
Location: Citadel Station

Re: Is the Pistol really worthless?

Post by Hellser »

Clocky wrote:Heh, must be kinda unfair for the flag carrier, at least it ain't an insta-kill like the Super Shotgun.
Then that'd just be Instagib CTF. Personally, the vanilla pistol does not have a place in Doom compared to the much beloved Shotgun or Chaingun. In the mods that I edit or create, I narrow the pistol's spread to actually serve as a long distance weapon and remove the ability for the chaingun to tap-snipe.
Clocky
Posts: 54
Joined: Sat Oct 22, 2016 6:16 am
Location: Inside a BFG 10K's Energy Cell magazine (Brazil, Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre)

Re: Is the Pistol really worthless?

Post by Clocky »

Hellser wrote:
Clocky wrote:Heh, must be kinda unfair for the flag carrier, at least it ain't an insta-kill like the Super Shotgun.
Then that'd just be Instagib CTF. Personally, the vanilla pistol does not have a place in Doom compared to the much beloved Shotgun or Chaingun. In the mods that I edit or create, I narrow the pistol's spread to actually serve as a long distance weapon and remove the ability for the chaingun to tap-snipe.
Serious question, what is an instagib match? Ive seen the name but never really ctested the mode out.
I guess the pistol could at least be able to kill someone in a team match, but other than that... Yeah...
That's pretty awesome, I sometimes tend to use a pistol for long range encounters instead of using another type of rapid fire weapon, the chaingun's tapping part is right, never seen a si glr mod that enabled or allowed ar least the first shot to be precise.
User avatar
Matt
Posts: 9696
Joined: Sun Jan 04, 2004 5:37 pm
Preferred Pronouns: They/Them
Operating System Version (Optional): Debian Bullseye
Location: Gotham City SAR, Wyld-Lands of the Lotus People, Dominionist PetroConfederacy of Saudi Canadia
Contact:

Re: Is the Pistol really worthless?

Post by Matt »

Instagib = no weapons except you start with a railgun that has unlimited ammo and is guaranteed to kill on any hit.
Clocky
Posts: 54
Joined: Sat Oct 22, 2016 6:16 am
Location: Inside a BFG 10K's Energy Cell magazine (Brazil, Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre)

Re: Is the Pistol really worthless?

Post by Clocky »

Vaecrius wrote:Instagib = no weapons except you start with a railgun that has unlimited ammo and is guaranteed to kill on any hit.
So it only works in Zandroum, right? So it can't be replicated in G/Zdoom due to the lack of skulltag_actors and skulltag_data, right?
User avatar
twinkieman93
Posts: 1075
Joined: Fri Aug 10, 2007 11:13 pm

Re: Is the Pistol really worthless?

Post by twinkieman93 »

Kinda going back to something said at the start of the topic but I've actually thought a lot about why the pistol and the chaingun both use the same ammo, outside of simple gameplay abstraction, and there is a pretty good way to rationalize it.

See, the player and his compatriots are space marines, right? Meaning that they primarily operate in spaceships, space stations, bases on planets without breathable atmospheres, so on and so forth. These are places where shooting through walls would be a very, very, very bad idea because hull breaches aren't fun. Aside from that, you could maybe hit important stuff that keeps the whole facility running/everyone inside the facility breathing. Hideous Destructor addresses this by stating that the 4.26mm caseless ammo fired by the mod's standard issue rifle are frangible, i.e. they're designed to fragment when hitting harder stuff like walls.

Another way one could conceivably space marine-proof a weapon system is to simply use ammunition that just isn't as prone to tearing through walls. As it happens, pistol rounds and buckshot are pretty good types of ammo to turn to if that's what you're looking to do, hence why submachine guns were in use by police forces long after they went out of style for military applications; they're more often fighting in areas with innocents potentially behind walls. So, yeah, that's why everyone seems to be armed with pistol-caliber carbines, shotguns, and weird lightweight low RoF rotary guns...

Which on that note, that too makes sense when you consider that guns overheat ridiculously fast in a vacuum with no air around them to air-cool them. Multiple barrels, whether rotating clusters of them or quick-swapping ones, have long been the terrestrial response to overheating issues in guns; I see no reason why they wouldn't carry on this tradition in space. Advances in metallurgy allow them to make such a weapon that's light enough to not just be man-portable but even wielded in one hand(see: chaingunners), and it's a good answer to the problem of needing reliable automatic firepower that functions in a vacuum.

TL;DR - The pistol and chaingun share ammo for safety purposes because space marines are in space and poking holes in walls is bad.

As for the actual question posed in the topic, I've always felt the pistol exists to hold you over until you find something nicer, and that's perfectly fine by me. It's a thankless job but it's one that has to be done, and I for one salute the pistol for doing it. :thumb:
Clocky
Posts: 54
Joined: Sat Oct 22, 2016 6:16 am
Location: Inside a BFG 10K's Energy Cell magazine (Brazil, Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre)

Re: Is the Pistol really worthless?

Post by Clocky »

twinkieman93 wrote:Kinda going back to something said at the start of the topic but I've actually thought a lot about why the pistol and the chaingun both use the same ammo, outside of simple gameplay abstraction, and there is a pretty good way to rationalize it.

See, the player and his compatriots are space marines, right? Meaning that they primarily operate in spaceships, space stations, bases on planets without breathable atmospheres, so on and so forth. These are places where shooting through walls would be a very, very, very bad idea because hull breaches aren't fun. Aside from that, you could maybe hit important stuff that keeps the whole facility running/everyone inside the facility breathing. Hideous Destructor addresses this by stating that the 4.26mm caseless ammo fired by the mod's standard issue rifle are frangible, i.e. they're designed to fragment when hitting harder stuff like walls.

Another way one could conceivably space marine-proof a weapon system is to simply use ammunition that just isn't as prone to tearing through walls. As it happens, pistol rounds and buckshot are pretty good types of ammo to turn to if that's what you're looking to do, hence why submachine guns were in use by police forces long after they went out of style for military applications; they're more often fighting in areas with innocents potentially behind walls. So, yeah, that's why everyone seems to be armed with pistol-caliber carbines, shotguns, and weird lightweight low RoF rotary guns...

Which on that note, that too makes sense when you consider that guns overheat ridiculously fast in a vacuum with no air around them to air-cool them. Multiple barrels, whether rotating clusters of them or quick-swapping ones, have long been the terrestrial response to overheating issues in guns; I see no reason why they wouldn't carry on this tradition in space. Advances in metallurgy allow them to make such a weapon that's light enough to not just be man-portable but even wielded in one hand(see: chaingunners), and it's a good answer to the problem of needing reliable automatic firepower that functions in a vacuum.

TL;DR - The pistol and chaingun share ammo for safety purposes because space marines are in space and poking holes in walls is bad.

As for the actual question posed in the topic, I've always felt the pistol exists to hold you over until you find something nicer, and that's perfectly fine by me. It's a thankless job but it's one that has to be done, and I for one salute the pistol for doing it. :thumb:
I see now, and I kind of had that thought during gameplay - the red muzzle flashes don't exist in real blife (correct me if I'm wrong), and I assume that the energy weapons wouled behave tremendously different back on Earth, the Plasma projectiles would either drop or just splat on the ground and the weapons could overheat to boiling water-like temperatures, but about the Space Marine talk, then why is the Doom Marine's arms and stomach exposed? the other marine doesnt have an exposed stomach, but what makes it so the Marines dont get any bad things by being exposed to space? the helmets the Marines wear must have some sort of converter that converts the air into oxygen that allows the user to breathe infinitely, the energy weapons that the UAC developed must have been made in Mars or Phobos, so they would only work properly either in Phobos or Mars, suggesting that on other planets they mighut just be broken, but on earth they might be near unusable. The Chaingunner is very buff, but he must use another type of Chaingun instead of the vanilla pickup one, but I get your point, and would the bullet belt he has on his arm kind of hurt his arm or take some stray hairs out of it? The Chaingun firesz quite fast, but since he is possessed, I can only guess he must'ntf mind a bit aboutf that.

About the pistol, yeah, happy to hear that too, but once in Hard Doom, it had a Shotgun start,kind of impying that youre kinda forced to use it instead of the pistol.
User avatar
phantombeta
Posts: 2084
Joined: Thu May 02, 2013 1:27 am
Operating System Version (Optional): Windows 10
Graphics Processor: nVidia with Vulkan support
Location: Brazil

Re: Is the Pistol really worthless?

Post by phantombeta »

twinkieman93 wrote:Kinda going back to something said at the start of the topic but I've actually thought a lot about why the pistol and the chaingun both use the same ammo, outside of simple gameplay abstraction, and there is a pretty good way to rationalize it.

See, the player and his compatriots are space marines, right? Meaning that they primarily operate in spaceships, space stations, bases on planets without breathable atmospheres, so on and so forth. These are places where shooting through walls would be a very, very, very bad idea because hull breaches aren't fun. Aside from that, you could maybe hit important stuff that keeps the whole facility running/everyone inside the facility breathing. Hideous Destructor addresses this by stating that the 4.26mm caseless ammo fired by the mod's standard issue rifle are frangible, i.e. they're designed to fragment when hitting harder stuff like walls.

Another way one could conceivably space marine-proof a weapon system is to simply use ammunition that just isn't as prone to tearing through walls. As it happens, pistol rounds and buckshot are pretty good types of ammo to turn to if that's what you're looking to do, hence why submachine guns were in use by police forces long after they went out of style for military applications; they're more often fighting in areas with innocents potentially behind walls. So, yeah, that's why everyone seems to be armed with pistol-caliber carbines, shotguns, and weird lightweight low RoF rotary guns...

Which on that note, that too makes sense when you consider that guns overheat ridiculously fast in a vacuum with no air around them to air-cool them. Multiple barrels, whether rotating clusters of them or quick-swapping ones, have long been the terrestrial response to overheating issues in guns; I see no reason why they wouldn't carry on this tradition in space. Advances in metallurgy allow them to make such a weapon that's light enough to not just be man-portable but even wielded in one hand(see: chaingunners), and it's a good answer to the problem of needing reliable automatic firepower that functions in a vacuum.

TL;DR - The pistol and chaingun share ammo for safety purposes because space marines are in space and poking holes in walls is bad.

As for the actual question posed in the topic, I've always felt the pistol exists to hold you over until you find something nicer, and that's perfectly fine by me. It's a thankless job but it's one that has to be done, and I for one salute the pistol for doing it. :thumb:
This a few problems.
First, bullets might not pose much of a problem. Just by being in orbit a spacecraft hull is hit by (tiny) pieces of debris all the time, a lot of it moving much faster than a bullet could ever hope to. Considering the spaceship's hull has to survive these, I don't see how a simple bullet could penetrate a spaceship's hull.
Second, spinning barrels wouldn't help that much without air either. And they'd also fuck up your aim, what with them making you spin opposite the direction they're spinning in.
User avatar
Matt
Posts: 9696
Joined: Sun Jan 04, 2004 5:37 pm
Preferred Pronouns: They/Them
Operating System Version (Optional): Debian Bullseye
Location: Gotham City SAR, Wyld-Lands of the Lotus People, Dominionist PetroConfederacy of Saudi Canadia
Contact:

Re: Is the Pistol really worthless?

Post by Matt »

But what if you made the barrel really short to conserve weight, and made it spin so slowly that it had a lower firing rate than most SMGs today... and everyone said you had to stop spinning and tap two-shot bursts to stay on target...
Last edited by Matt on Tue Sep 19, 2017 9:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.
User avatar
Amuscaria
Posts: 6628
Joined: Mon Jul 26, 2004 12:59 pm
Location: Growing from mycelium near you.

Re: Is the Pistol really worthless?

Post by Amuscaria »

Vaecrius wrote:But what if you made the barrel really short to conserve weight, and made it spin so slowly that it has a lower firing rate than most SMGs today...
I always envisioned Doomguy having to crank the Chaingun like the original Gatling gun.
User avatar
phantombeta
Posts: 2084
Joined: Thu May 02, 2013 1:27 am
Operating System Version (Optional): Windows 10
Graphics Processor: nVidia with Vulkan support
Location: Brazil

Re: Is the Pistol really worthless?

Post by phantombeta »

That wouldn't make much difference. It'd still overheat, and you would still start spinning. (And you'd keep spinning until you applied enough force to stop spinning)
And I think you'll be spinning anyway even if the barrels don't spin, since you're not likely to be holding the gun right in front of your centre of mass.
Oh, and just firing the gun will make you go flying backwards, I believe.

Edit: About your edit, one would have to spin opposite the direction the chaingun was spinning in with enough force to stop spinning.
Honestly, conventional weapons are a bad idea in a spaceship, simply because they won't work well.
Clocky
Posts: 54
Joined: Sat Oct 22, 2016 6:16 am
Location: Inside a BFG 10K's Energy Cell magazine (Brazil, Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre)

Re: Is the Pistol really worthless?

Post by Clocky »

phantombeta wrote:That wouldn't make much difference. It'd still overheat, and you would still start spinning. (And you'd keep spinning until you applied enough force to stop spinning)
And I think you'll be spinning anyway even if the barrels don't spin, since you're not likely to be holding the gun right in front of your centre of mass.
Oh, and just firing the gun will make you go ftlying backwards, I believe.

Edit: About your edit, one would have to spin opposite the direction the chaingun was spinning in with enough force to stop spinning.
Honestly, conventional weapons are a bad idea in a spaceship, simply because they won't work well.
I think that Doom takes place in a base, but in some wads, I guess it wouldn't do that bad to a spacwsgip's wall considering ir has lots of layers oc armor, but aeapo ns like the Plasma Rifle and the BFG 9000 would definetely wreck the walls or anything at all, the projectiles melting the surface, in a spaceship itd be a deathwish to use energy weapons in, only if meant to be used against tbhe spaceship, also, Hell might have its own gravity? Considering that some decorations and walls are made out ofcflesh and souls, i guess sme serious crap would happen to thosr entities.
brb charge kindle
User avatar
Trance
Posts: 1089
Joined: Mon Jan 17, 2005 6:28 am
Location: 1, Rotation: 0

Re: Is the Pistol really worthless?

Post by Trance »

Clocky wrote:I think that Doom takes place in a base, but in some wads, I guess it wouldn't do that bad to a spacwsgip's wall considering ir has lots of layers oc armor
You'd need to armor the inside walls as well as the outside ones if you wanted kinetic penetrators to be a practical choice onboard a spacecraft, and if you're doing that, you're kind of defeating their usefulness anyway. Any bulletproof material lightweight enough to see widespread use on a spaceship (since mass reduction is one of the top priorities in spacecraft design) would be lightweight enough to wear as personal armor, so you'd need kinetic penetrators massive or fast enough to pierce that material, and then you'd be back to square one.

So assuming the bullets were effective due to being able to defeat the ship's interior armor, even if the bullets didn't manage to rip their way into outer space, they'd still cause all kinds of damage to the infrastructure of a ship, probably starting fires, and the spacecraft would also need to have artificial gravity if you didn't want there to be a thick cloud of dust, debris and shrapnel kicked up by all that action, making it hard to see and necessitating the use of a self-contained air supply so filters didn't get clogged.
Clocky
Posts: 54
Joined: Sat Oct 22, 2016 6:16 am
Location: Inside a BFG 10K's Energy Cell magazine (Brazil, Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre)

Re: Is the Pistol really worthless?

Post by Clocky »

Trance wrote:
Clocky wrote:I think that Doom takes place in a base, but in some wads, I guess it wouldn't do that bad to a spacwsgip's wall considering ir has lots of layers oc armor
You'd need to armor the inside walls as well as the outside ones if you wanted kinetic penetrators to be a practical choice onboard a spacecraft, and if you're doing that, you're kind of defeating their usefulness anyway. Any bulletproof material lightweight enough to see widespread use on a spaceship (since mass reduction is one of the top priorities in spacecraft design) would be lightweight enough to wear as personal armor, so you'd need kinetic penetrators massive or fast enough to pierce that material, and then you'd be back to square one.

So assuming the bullets were effective due to being able to defeat the ship's interior armor, even if the bullets didn't manage to rip their way into outer space, they'd still cause all kinds of damage to the infrastructure of a ship, probably starting fires, and the spacecraft would also need to have artificial gravity if you didn't want there to be a thick cloud of dust, debris and shrapnel kicked up by all that action, making it hard to see and necessitating the use of a self-contained air supply so filters didn't get clogged.
Nor sure if any of the UAC bases had any bulletproof or canything of that kind of resistant material to protect the bases, if you think about it, the Security forces are well armed, including the Chaingunner, are meant to stop an intruder dead on his tracks, if thrte were any other armed enemies, they would've probably been guarding classified projects. Such as the Teleporters and many of Hell's arifacts, the BFG 9000, the Plasma Rifle, Computr Area maps and possibly the Unmaker, but I might be suprised considering the hellish forces of Hell did not wreck the UAC bases up, but instead preserved them and planned to stay thete, probably to plan the invasion on Earth, exterminating possibly all mankind. About the type of wall material and hulls, if the UAC had the time and budget to create the Teleporters, Energy Cells, BFG 9000s(but possibly very few of them), Plasma Rifles, securiry personnel, countless panels and comlpuers to track the status and other things, they might just have had the money to improve the security of the researchers, scientists and all other important members and entities on the bases, they couldve done at least a bit for the safety of the bases.
Artificial gravity might be included in both bspaceship and basec if they want the employees to work safely, and since the weapons you carry havecred muzzle flashes, it mifht be symbolisi ng that there might just be arrificial gravity.
User avatar
The Ultimate DooMer
Posts: 2109
Joined: Tue Jul 15, 2003 5:29 pm
Location: Industrial Zone

Re: Is the Pistol really worthless?

Post by The Ultimate DooMer »

Vaecrius wrote:And yes ssg is op... would be nice to play dm where the SSG were replaced with a random one of shotgun, chaingun and RL and to keep things reasonably paced all health were halved.
Half the problem is the fact it's a treated as a low-value weapon and placed everywhere (usually on spawn)...if it was treated like the high-value weapon it is, and placed in hard-to-reach spots (like plasma/BFG usually are) you'd see something that didn't resemble a one-weapon shootout. (although on a bad map you'd end up with a race-and-camp-fest involving that spot, given the one-weapon culture of DM)
Post Reply

Return to “Off-Topic”