Attempting to outline overheating mechanic for firearms
Each firearm could have the additional properties:
- Heat capacity
- Heat emission/release rate
- Heat generation per shot fired
These properties could be blanket values over various firearm categories, so that values wouldn’t have to be assigned one by one for each firearm. Pistols would have low heat capacity with some heat generation, while rifles would have bigger capacties but also bigger heat generation.
Also, heat generation stat could be added to ammunition, assuming various munitions inflict varying heating rates.
We would then tie the heat emission (cool-off) rate to ambient temperature, so that in freezing climates you could keep on shooting for longer, and more frequently with shorter cool-off periods. Alternatively, hot summer days would restrict your shooting options. Also, nearby temporary heat sources would have to be considered somehow.
The firearms would then have the following potential statuses as they pertain to their temperature:
- Cool/Cooled
- Warm
- Overheated
- Severely overheated
Or possibly even more. ‘Warm’ would simply be a warning sign with no effects. An ‘overheated’ firearm would suffer slight accuracy penalties with a slightly increased chance of malfunction. A ‘severely overheated’ would have, well, severe chance of experiencing both. Also, there would be a small chance that the firearm in question is damaged by a malfunction if fired while overheated.
Overheating could be applied to suppressors as well.
Barrels, too, if we assume that by changing the barrel one could shrug the heat. But then again, the swapped out barrel should come off heated. We might then need quick-swap gun barrels for a few select firearms, as to not be too exploit-y, as most CDDA guns accept short barrel and long barrel mods, and one could then continuously swap those mods in and out. Alternatively, increase gun mod installation/removal time to minutes, to discourage doing it in combat.