NX-17 Charge Rifle...why was it removed?

Out of all the things that were removed from the game, this makes the least sense of them all to me, simply because it seems to perfectly meld with the game mechanics. I couldn’t find any documentation on why this was removed. Could someone enlighten me?

EDIT: For those who don’t know what this, it was a chargeable laser that was removed way back in the last Stable, before my time.

I would personally like to know for a similar thing with the plasma engine.



Plasma engine:

The Plasma Engine could be salvaged by saying you could craft “Hydrogen Fuel” on your own, while saying that Hydrogen Canisters are in fact Metallic Hydrogen that’s used in CVD machines and Superconductors (if there’s ever a need for those). Just my opinion.

Plasma Weapons are totally useless by the same logic. I say make them run off Fusion Packs. It’d explain why FPs happen to be lying around in Armories. Anyone else share this sentiment?

Charge Rifle makes sense. That’s all I wanted to know.

That was one of my ideas for a personal mod that would allow the crafting of an electrolysis machine to split spare water into a relatively low grade hydrogen fuel/ammo and oxygen with a special tool to refill air canisters or make homemade versions.

I stand by removing the charge rifle, it was an extremely complicated and hacky feature that only ever supported one weapon that itself made no sense. You can see from the PR removing it that it had a ton of support code scattered all over the place.

Dropping Plasma engines on the other hand allowed for this massive code cleanup: https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/pull/19356/files

I have no idea what they were thinking there, it was just another engine type, removing it didn’t make anything significantly simpler, and you certainly don’t start a refactor off by removing use cases, that’s just asking for your code to end up inflexible after you’re done.

The competition for hydrogen cells argument doesn’t make any sense. If your engine is impractical to use post-cataclysm because there’s no infrastructure for refueling it, that’s fine. It’s totally something we expect to happen, so of course there’s going to be a ton of useless stuff lying around.