2.2 KiB
Lightning Cannon
An independent, reusable heavy lightning special for 825,000 credits. Enable Lightning Cannon in the Mods menu, apply selections at the main menu, then buy it in the supply room. Select it in Inventory or cycle specials; Fire or Special discharges the cannon while selected. It consumes no ammo, and you can own one.
The bolt instantly hits the nearest visible air or ground target ahead of the muzzle, within 180 logical pixels and a 36-pixel horizontal aiming allowance. It deals 32 damage, then jumps from the struck ship to the nearest unhit enemy within 48 pixels, for 20, 12 and 8 damage. A discharge hits at most four different enemies. Chaining can change direction and continues from a destroyed target's last position. An isolated target takes only the initial hit; off-axis targets require an adjacent chain target. Cooldown is 18 ticks, about 0.77 seconds. A missed shot shows a bolt and firing sound without damage.
The 30-second controlled simulation measured 41.60 damage/s on an isolated aligned target and 93.60 combined damage/s across a four-target chain. The price places it above the original Pulse Cannon and below the Death Ray. See the package balance report for the recorded observations.
This package uses the public mod API's scripted weapon behavior, read-only
entity snapshots, damage, arc and play_sound commands. All acquisition,
chaining and damage rules live in scripts/weapon.rhai. It has no dependencies
or overrides. It coexists with the other independent weapons and Iron Coast.
The equipment icon ships in 16×16 SD and 64×64 HD, alongside the transparent source master and deterministic synthesized audio. Connecting bolts use the game's arc renderer at both scales. See provenance for the exact built-in imagegen prompt, asset hashes and reproduction recipes.
From RustRaptor/:
cargo run --locked --no-default-features -- --mods mods --validate-mods lightning_cannon
cargo test --locked --no-default-features --test weapons_mods lightning_cannon
See weapon pricing and measurements, the API and the AI mod checklist.