I suspect at some point the system will have to be granulated to work with more and more complicated tools. Seems like you’d need high quality tools to work superalloy. I don’t think Welding Quality is a thing, but I suppose it could be.
Sounds a lot better, yeah.
Well, we can weld superalloy onto cars with just a regular welder, and we can craft with superalloy by making the armor CBMs.[/quote]
Superalloy can be used as a crafting ingredient, yeah. You just can’t create more: find it either of itself, or in use as CBM/armor.
As a simpler approach for the superstrong mutant/cyborg/mutant-cyborg how about a bow that is a solid chunk of spring-steel? Requires 18 strength to use effectively, fires special arrows (normal ones would just shatter), and is solid enough to beat things to death with.
[quote=“Natures Witness, post:39, topic:6635”]On further thought, I might have an idea for a slightly better system. The body of the weapon is in three sections; the central piece with the handles and arrow rest, and two end pieces that are hinged to the main body. The power assembly is connected to the hinges; pulling back the string causes the end pieces to hinge toward you, soaring the kinetic energy in the pivot points, and letting the string go releases it. In melee mode, the hinges lock in place so the ends don’t go flapping around.
Does this sound more reasonable then the entire cable retracting when you pull it.[/quote]
Yea, and furthermore, you can say that the center section has the cable retracting mechanism, the cables go through the arms to the tips, then bridge across to the other arm. When you pull it, it lets out cable, and allows the arms to flex, then when you release, it spools up the cable it released, snapping the arms straight again and launching an arrow. At rest, it would just have the cable fully retracted and the arms held straight, both by cable tension and possibly by internal locking pins. The motion of the arms is not particularly obvious, but I’d be very surprised if there was no way to make such a mechanism work. It’s just that in reality such a high tension cable spooler doesn’t exist 
I just don’t know why someone would make this thing, when they could make a bayonet/crossbow type arrangement. (Substitute pneumatic weapons if desired.) “Because cool” is a fine argument when you’re sitting at your PC, not so grand when your life is going to depend on how well the item works.
Some context, while we generally maintain a focus on realism in this game, this will be on the “because it’s cool” list of items, which you can easily disable if you don’t like that concept.
I’ve pushed back on this kind of thing before on the basis of realism and genre fit, and against lightsaber type things, and magic systems for the same reasons, but we have a robust enough modding system now where we can ease up on enforcing the core game, and add those things as optional extras for people that would like to play that kind of game.
Some of us want to play in a gritty realistic apocalypse simulator, some of us want to play in a more fantasy/movie style setting, as long as we can support both without messing up the core of the game, I’m all for it.
Okay I think we’ve got the Commando Bow pretty well fleshed out, except for how the high-tension cable spooler is going to be made. Should we have some sort of torsion device findable in a lab somewhere? I’m a little hesitant to add such a one-off item to build one recipe. Maybe we can think of other uses for it later? Is there anything already in game we could use? Most labs in Cata so far seem to just be studying boring things like cyborgs and inter dimensional portals, should we have one for studying thermodynamics and molecular physics too? They might build something like this. Perhaps some of the parts for this might need to be made on the synthetic diamond lab machine thing as well, would give that some more face time.
Also, should I build the BowStaff as well? It might be neat to have a lower-tech bow/melee hybrid, and being able to adjust the string to create different draw weights could create an interesting dynamic where you can trade accuracy for range/ damage on the fly.
A spring and some scrap.
So long as there’s room for playing a “believable” movie style between the two. (Stuff like combat rollerblades is bizarre but I can see the advantages.) 
Yea, you could make a whole line of items based on them, possibly have some lab notes with a few recipes spawn with them.
I’m not really a fan of the non-supertech version, it simply wouldn’t work. That having been said, it’d just go on the list of “rule of cool” items.
Woo!