Lightning Shield
An independent, reusable proximity weapon for 155,000 credits. Enable Lightning Shield in the Mods menu, apply selections at the main menu, then buy it in the supply room. It is always equipped while owned and fires alongside the other primary guns when you hold Fire. It needs no special selection, consumes no ammo, and you can own one.
Each pulse deals 2 damage to up to four close airborne ships in any direction. Range is 28 logical pixels from your ship's center to the nearest point of the enemy hull: approximately 12 pixels beyond your 32-pixel hull. It picks the nearest ships first, with a stable tie break. Ground structures are excluded. The 8-tick cooldown gives about 2.92 pulses per second and 5.87 measured damage per second against a stationary close ship. The price places this short-range supplement below the Micro Missile primary upgrade. See the balance report for the 30-second controlled observations, including ground exclusions and combined loadouts.
It runs only while Fire is held, and makes no sound when nothing is in range. It supplements close combat; it does not absorb collision damage, restore energy or block bullets. It continues working when you select a different special.
Firing charges a flickering electric ring just outside the hull. The short zaps start from the edge facing each target, with a blue glow around the ship. The ring follows your movement and fades within one recharge after releasing Fire; it remains silent when no aircraft are close. The ring and its forks are cosmetic.
This package uses the public mod API's scripted weapon behavior, read-only
entity snapshots with ground, and damage, arc and play_sound commands.
All targeting and damage rules live in scripts/weapon.rhai. It has no
dependencies or overrides, and coexists with the other 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. The halo and
connecting bolts use anchored arc commands and the game's 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_shield
cargo test --locked --no-default-features --test weapons_mods lightning_shield
See weapon pricing and measurements, the API and the AI mod checklist.