How do I get a Plasma gun to fire in a 3-round burst

[Wamce]

I'm trying to make a little walker that is a recreation of the Pawn Light Infantry Bot from the game Beyond All Reason. I'm arming it with 2 little Plasma cannons that have 3 charges each, and would like them to fire in 3-round bursts. However, the cannons seldom take note of this setting and instead of going 'pew-pew-pew... pew pew pew', they keep doing this staggered hap-hazard 'pew-pew.... pew... pew.........pew.... pew-pew' when set to a 3-round burst.

How does the burst fire setting on the Plasma Cannons actually work?

[Chrono Atog]

Burst fire means it takes the 3 shots and fires them into one shot.

It combines your 3 shots your cannon has and makes it into one big shot with the damage of firing all three at once.

[Dunhill]

Originally posted by Chrono Atog:

Burst fire means it takes the 3 shots and fires them into one shot.

It combines your 3 shots your cannon has and makes it into one big shot with the damage of firing all three at once.

isn't that charges per shot?

[CEPHY]

Originally posted by Chrono Atog:

Burst fire means it takes the 3 shots and fires them into one shot.

It combines your 3 shots your cannon has and makes it into one big shot with the damage of firing all three at once.

Uh, no.

Burst means several shots in quick succession, followed by a pause.

What you're refering to are charges per shot.

[weiler.vivien]

Burst amount is just the number of shots to fire at the gun's max fire rate when reaching the desired temperature before firing. Plasma bursts thus take into account the hard limit of 1000°C. If your gun reaches that temperature, the burst will wait until temperature goes below 1000°C before continuing.

Here's every way you can counter this :

Reducing the number of charges per shot, or the energy used to propel each charge, will reduce the heat produced by each shot, at the cost of shot damage or speed.

Reducing the temperature to reach before firing can provide more room for heat at the start of the burst, e.g. if you produce 400 heat per shot and start the burst at 800°C, second shot will be held back because the gun will be at 1200°C, but if you start it at 200°C, second shot will be fired because 600°C < 1000°C. This will also ensure your burst is more accurate, especially the first shots if you wanted a longer burst. It comes at the cost of a longer delay between each burst, unless you want to...

Increase the cooling capacity of the cannon (either by lengthening the barrel to add more heatsinks or by pouring more energy into said heatsinks). Note that this works better when your heat generation is constant, as heat dissipation is basically constant too, so it's not exactly ideal for bursts.

Finally, you can limit the fire rate of your cannon, in order to increase the time the gun has to cool down between each shot of the burst. As each shot will be fired at a lower temperature, this will also improve accuracy. I will admit that a slow burst isn't nearly as satisfying as a fast one tho. You're pretty much just taking the slowness from overheating and spreading it out over the entire burst with this solution. I'd say this solution kind of defeats the purpose of firing in bursts.

If none of these solutions work you may not have enough charges in storage to fire the full burst, and that can only happen if you don't have enough *maximum* storage for charges (in your case, 8 or less).
This would be solved by building more of the things you attach generators to. NOT the generators themselves.

...With how much I wrote, I might as well apply to rewrite every tutorial in the game x)
Anyways, if this *book* somehow doesn't fix your guns, do tell so I can write another one ;p