RustRaptor/docs/weapon-balance.md

Shipped weapon prices and balance

The three independent weapon mods use the original game's credit scale. Their initial example prices of 6,500, 14,000 and 22,000 made reusable upgrades cheaper than much weaker original equipment. The revised prices preserve their firing, damage, scripts, sounds and artwork.

Mod weapon	Price	Place in the original progression
Pulse Cannon	185,000	Just above the 175,600-credit Micro Missile primary upgrade. It adds similar sustained damage and also adds a spread burst every third volley.
Seeker Swarm	285,000	Above the 250,650-credit Mini Gun. Its three missiles track air and ground enemies and hits fragment into at most two nearby enemies. It remains below the 512,850-credit instant Turret.
Ion Lance	425,000	Below the Turret and the 950,000-credit Death Ray. Its lower damage per target trades against immediate hits and the ability to pierce several enemies in one column.

Pulse Cannon is always equipped and fires alongside other primary guns. Seeker Swarm and Ion Lance occupy the selected special slot and fire with Fire or Special while selected. All three are reusable, consume no ammunition and have a maximum inventory count of one. Each equipment definition includes a shop description stating these controls and its target behavior.

Controlled damage observations

The local benchmark loads the original asset catalog and original registered weapons, plus all six shipped weapon/enemy packages. Every weapon runs through the real World::step simulation and real scripts at difficulty 2. Each scene holds Fire for 700 steps, exactly 30 seconds at 70/3 Hz, against 32×32 fixtures with 1,000,000 health. The pilot remains at the initial position with no other weapons equipped. Ground fixtures use a test-only movement callback to cancel the normal one-pixel terrain scroll after each collision pass.

The numbers below include travel delay and misses during that 30-second window. They measure health lost per second, rather than nominal damage divided by cooldown.

Weapon	Price	Aligned air damage/s	Aligned ground damage/s	Air target 76 pixels to the right damage/s
Original Forward Guns	12,000	23.13	23.13	0
Original Plasma Guns	78,800	4.67	0	0
Original Micro Missile	175,600	23.07	23.07	0
Original Mini Gun	250,650	12.57	12.57	16.27
Original Turret	512,850	19.50	0	19.50
Original Pulse Cannon	725,000	38.50	38.50	0
Original Death Ray	950,000	80.00	80.00	0
Original Forward Laser	1,750,000	266.67	266.67	0
Mod Pulse Cannon	185,000	24.00	24.00	0
Seeker Swarm	285,000	23.40	23.40	23.40
Ion Lance	425,000	26.67	26.67	0

The original forward laser's native beam damage pass reaches ground enemies despite its historical air target metadata; the observations use its actual behavior. The original turret selects airborne enemies. Original weapons retain their native update and collision paths throughout this comparison.

Equipping Pulse Cannon with the starter Forward Guns produced 46.33 damage/s against either aligned target, compared with 46.20 for Forward Guns plus Micro Missile. Pulse therefore belongs beside that original primary upgrade, rather than below the 12,000-credit starter guns. Scripted angled shots also reached a second target in the cluster scene.

Seeker Swarm delivered 23.40 damage/s to an offset airborne or ground target. In a tight three-enemy cluster, it delivered 23.40 to the primary target plus 7.80 to each of two neighbors: 39.00 combined. Its fragmentation is bounded; it does not damage every enemy on screen.

Ion Lance delivered 26.67 damage/s to each of two vertically separated targets in the same column: 53.33 combined. It delivered 80.00 combined across three overlapping column targets. It dealt zero damage to targets outside its launch column. It is a brief aimed beam, rather than a screen-wide attack.

Economy and limits

Controlled first-mission runs starting with 100 energy and zero credits earned 42,775 credits at difficulty 1 and 59,025 at difficulty 2 with starter guns. The in-game registration flow starts with 10,000 credits and 75 energy, matching the original hangar setup. Compared with the latter controlled gross reward, these prices represent approximately 3.13, 4.83 and 7.20 such payouts. Repairs and other purchases increase the saving time; later missions have different rewards. This comparison sets a progression tier and does not promise an exact purchase mission.

Stationary fixtures favor perfect alignment and long-lived targets. They do not establish equal campaign difficulty, measure moving-target accuracy, account for overkill against weak enemies or quantify projectile travel time against fast enemies. The benchmark also isolates weapons; real pilots can combine several primaries with one selected special. These prices are concrete initial balance choices, not an assertion that every loadout is equally strong.

Iron Coast Mission 1 intentionally supplies a free Pulse Cannon loan if the pilot does not already own one. The mission returns the loan at its end while preserving previously owned equipment. The trial therefore helps this mission without granting a permanent shop upgrade or a repeatable resale reward.

Reproduce

Run the local-only test from the repository root with the original catalog:

RAPTOR_BALANCE_REPORT="$PWD/.reference/weapon-balance.json" \
  cargo test --release --manifest-path RustRaptor/Cargo.toml \
  --no-default-features --test weapon_balance -- --ignored --nocapture

RAPTOR_TEST_DATA can override the catalog directory. The optional JSON report records all 96 observations: fifteen weapons in six scenes, plus the three primary upgrades combined with Forward Guns against air and ground. Assertions check all-target homing, column piercing, off-axis beam misses, target survival and unchanged pilot shields. The test uses the Rust engine without SDL or C++. Original data and locally written reference reports stay outside Git.