Now, the argument against the new ammo system is twofold. Thus, I will split up my argument into two segments, one for each aspect.
Part 1: Lore argument
TLDR soundbite!: I think there was a technological breakthrough that allowed shields to improve by somewhere between 2 and 4 times how effective they used to be. Escalation happened, and new weaponry technology was invented to combat the advances in shields. These guns hit harder but generate too much heat for the old passively cooling heat sinks, and so required a different kind of heat sink that works much better with the downside of the gun being unable to fire when they burn out.
Now I’ll go more in depth:
A: Why the old kinds of guns were bad enough to necessitate new technology:
I’m going to split this into two parts. In the first we’ll assume insanity is the canon for how guns worked vs defenses. In the second (and the rest of the argument) we’ll assume an easier difficulty was canon.
Insanity: Remember how in ME1 whenever anything popped immunity, you'd just sit there shooting it in the face for what seemed like an eternity and barely do any damage?
Guns kind of sucked vs shields and armor in the harder difficulty modes. Throwing people off things or using explosive ammo was the only way to quickly kill anything.
Explosive ammo caused obnoxious overheating problems, and thus was rarely used, instead we mostly used polonium/snowblind/incendiary so that we could run around without ever running out of ammo.
Now, imagine that a new kind of heat sink was invented that allowed you to use high powered ammunition without long cool down times, but with the downside of changing out heat sinks?
People who had guns like that would have a huge advantage over people who were using the old kinds of guns, and people would switch over en masse.
(It's kind of like how nobody would use a flintlock pistol if they had access to a pistol that loaded from a clip.)
Easier difficulty: In this case, we can use a similar argument but assume that there was a technological breakthrough that allowed shields and armor to become 2 to 4 times stronger. This would effectively increase the difficulty of normal or hardcore mode to insanity levels where people can stand there tanking bullets, and thus the rest of the insanity explanation applies.
B: How explosive type ammo could account for the new ammo system:
I’ll start this off with an old quote because it feeds right into this explanation. Be warned, it’s mostly math from here on!
Quote: Posted 01/04/10 09:05 (GMT) by Wayward Lone
Well for fun lets say the shield technology jumped so that they are twice as effective now then they were two years ago.
Then take the top of the line weapon such as the Crossfire X that could shoot 81 rounds of ammunition before overheating. So given that weapons are easly upgraded they could kick up the damage it inflicts by 2x but at the same time generate twice as much heat. So thats 40.5 rounds before overheating and still being able to retain a active coolant system for that assault rifle.
But perhaps through side quests one can effectively bring the active coolant system back to the game.
Except maybe it's not that simple. Maybe doubling a gun's power actually quintuples it's heat generation. I mentioned explosive rounds earlier in this thread and I think it's the key to how this works.
Explosive rounds have 500% the heat generation for about 40% more damage. (That’s 12.5% more heat for every percent of extra damage you’re doing.) Therefore if we extrapolate based on this, we end up with an explosive ammo heat increase formula of O/D*0.125=S Where O is how many shots an unmodified gun can fire without overheating, D is the percentage increase in damage the mod adds, and S is the amount of shots you can now fire before your gun overheats.
(Lets also assume for the sake of amusement that if your gun drops below .5 S, your gun blows up in your face and you die.)
( Its actually O/[(D*12.5)/10) = S, Because otherwise we multiply a percentage as if it were a whole number, but because of the order of operations I can divide the 12.5 and the 10 to create .125 without breaking the formula.)
Lets input standard explosive rounds to your gun. We’ll round down it’s O to 80 for math simplicity.
We end up with 80/40*0.125. This becomes 80/5 which then becomes 16. I think that sounds about right, but I don’t use explosive ammo or ARs much so I’m not 100% sure.
If we use that same formula, explosive ammo that adds 80% more damage overloads in 8 shots, 120% in 5 shots, and 160% in 4 shots. At 400% it’s 1.6 shots. Now, the formula isn’t linear, so the higher you go, the less impact more damage causes on your shots before overheat, and at around 5% and below you start making the gun fire MORE than 80 shots before it overheats. ( If it added 2%, the gun would fire 320 shots before overheating! And at 1% it adds 640.) In fact, here's a graph. Click to enlarge.
(X is the amount of shots before you overheat, and Y is the percent damage increase from what the gun would be unmodified.)
Random note: If a sniper rifle takes around 3 shots to overheat and it has the same dps as an AR which takes 80, then a single sniper bullet is around 27 times (rounding up) stronger than a single AR bullet. With our formula, if we had explosive ammo that was powerful enough to make each AR bullet hit like it was fired out of a sniper rifle, it would overload in .23 shots and explode.
Anyway, all that aside, because of how the formula works the AR would never blow up in your face, but it would overheat quickly enough to become completely unusuable at anything past 80%.
Lets try it with a sniper rifle! If the sniper rifle could fire 3 shots before overheating unmodified, regular 40% explosive ammo, it would overload in .6 shots, or in practice 1 shot. (This is how it works in practice, which is encouraging.) 80% explosive ammo puts you down to 0.3, which means the sniper explodes in your face and you die. Dangerous stuff indeed!
Lets assume for the rest of this that we used 80% ammo, doubling the power of every bullet. (They could also have harnessed the energy lost in giving the gun 500% more weapon force by channeling it into more damage. So the 80% ammo could potentially do more than 80% more damage. This is convenient because it can explain away any difference between what my formula predicts and how fast people actually die! :D)
Now imagine that a new kind of gun is invented that is designed solely for this kind of super ammo. Instead of trying to fight a losing battle with the heat generation, it just shunts it right into some kind of newfangled mass effect field powered heat sponge. They absorb all the heat and when they can't take any more and melt, the gun shuts down until you kick it out and replace it.
Now instead of having your AR fire 8 shots and then frantically trying to cool down for 5 seconds, it can fire 40 of these super shots at once before having to be changed out. (Keep in mind that changing a heat sink is a very quick and simple process!)
Instead of firing once and KILLING THEMSELVES, a sniper can fire as quickly and efficiently as if they were using regular ammo, provided they have enough clips.
Now, you might ask, "When we run out of heat sinks, why can't we use the old autocooling system?" Because for most guns, firing without a heatsink would blow up the gun. Even with a top of the line AR, you’d be in danger of damaging it if you did that more than a couple times, so it would be prudent to install safeties into the gun that stop it from firing without a heat sink.
The old model guns would likely fall out of favor fairly quickly, as doing half of the damage (or possibly even less!) your enemy is doing is a quick way to get yourself killed. Bringing a knife to a gun fight, as it were.
Anyway, feel free to go over my math and let me know if I did anything wrong! :D
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