[Jackriip]

Adds two plasma guns, two frontier laser guns, single-use plasma cartridges, plasma burn wounds, and plasma pirates.

Builds on feature/hitscan-lasers. That branch's commits are included here, so merge it first.

Guns

Gun	Fires	Where it comes from
Kestrel laser pistol	20-damage laser, 20 shots per cell	Outfitter, 900 cr
Hornet laser SMG	the stock hitscan laser, full auto	Black market, 3,500 cr
Cinder plasma pistol	32-burn plasma bolt	Outfitter at yellow rep, 2,000 cr
Furnace plasma rifle	45-burn plasma bolt, two-handed	Black market, 5,000 cr plus a voucher; red-zone loot
Old Furnace	Furnace variant	Rare drop from two red-zone pirate bosses only

How plasma works

• Bolts:
  • fly at 10 tiles/s
  • can't be reflected
  • are stopped by glass, which they damage
  • ignore canisters
• Burns, not fire: a hit never sets anyone alight. Bolts carry a high wound bonus (pistol 10, rifle 20): an unarmoured rifle hit gives at least a moderate burn about three times in four, and repeat hits on one limb reach severe and critical. A bolt still ignites real plasma or other fuel gas it passes through or hits.
• Plasma burns: bolts cause their own burn wounds, a subtype of tg's flesh burns, so every normal burn treatment still works.
  • Slag Spatter Burns, Embedded Slag Burns and Plasma Burn-Through leave molten slag in the wound. Hot slag keeps burning the limb until it's cooled, and the burn can't close while slag is in. Cryo doesn't clear it. A burn-through limps or fumbles.
  • Care is cool, cut, cover: cool the slag with water, an extinguisher or a shower; pick it out with a hemostat (wirecutters or a scalpel in a pinch, slower and rougher) or excise it in surgery ("Excise plasma slag"); then treat and dress the burn as usual. Moderate flecks fall off by themselves once cool. Severe and critical slag comes out as a slag bead.
  • Healed plasma burns leave their own scars.
  • The wound shows on the limb: glowing purple slag while hot, black crust once set, raw skin once it's out. Clothing covers it.
• Limb loss: an arm or leg melts through tg's burn dismemberment (no blood spray, no flying limb) when at least 10 of the bolt's own burn gets through armour, the limb was already hurt (10+ damage) before the bolt, and it is left within 10 (pistol) or 20 (rifle) of its damage cap and at no less than half of it; or, for the rifle, when it already carries a Plasma Burn-Through with slag still in it. No bolt melts a healthy limb in one hit: it takes two rifle bolts on the same limb, two or three pistol bolts. Heads and chests never melt. A robot limb, or one with no flesh (skeletons, golems, plasmamen), comes off the same way but dry: sparks, a slag pool and a hiss, with no drips, no gobbets and no stump.
• Structure damage: bolts break structures and doors faster (pistol x1.5, rifle x2): a shuttle window takes 4 pistol or 2 rifle bolts, an airlock 8 or 4, a table 3 or 2. Grilles and blast doors still shrug them off. Mechs, turrets and other machines take normal damage, and walls take none.
• Ammo:
  • Guns run on plasma cartridges. A cartridge is single-use: it comes full and is never refilled. A full one gives the Cinder 15 shots and the Furnace 12.
  • Press one by hand from the crafting menu (3 plasma sheets + 1 iron sheet, or 6 plasma ore + 1 iron sheet), print one at a lathe once Ballistic Ammunition is researched (3 sheets of plasma and half a sheet of iron), or buy one at the outfitter for 100 cr at yellow rep.
  • Loading a cartridge swaps out the one in the gun: a part-used cartridge comes back to your hand with what's left in it, a spent one drops at your feet. A spent cartridge can't be loaded, and it recycles to iron only.
  • Guns bought from a shop come with a full cartridge. Guns found as loot have a part-used one: at least one shot, at most half full, in whole shots.
  • The gun's chamber can't be charged by anything except a cartridge: rechargers, inducers, APCs, cell-charging slimes and plants are all refused.
• Furnace heat:
  • The rifle heats with each shot and cools from the air around it.
  • In vacuum it overheats: it spits plasma gas onto the shooter's tile and takes damage.
  • Using it in hand vents on purpose once the coil glows; a vent cools it by the plasma it lets out.
  • Vented and spat plasma comes out below its ignition point, so venting can't set the shooter alight.
  • The coil glows in steps as it heats.
• Turrets: plasma guns can't be put in turrets or emitters.
• Pirates: yellow- and red-zone pirate crews can carry the Cinder, and red-zone crews the Furnace. Two red-zone bosses carry Furnaces.

Effects

• Hits on people: a hit bursts into molten hot-purple slag. Ordinary hits alternate between a molten splatter and a flash with a spreading ring. A hit that kills or leaves a critical burn plays a burn-through instead, spraying out the far side of the body. Globs stick to the body, move and turn with it, and cool away in about 2.5 s. The flash starts as the bolt reaches the body, with a soft bloom and a small light on the victim.
• Melting limbs: a melted arm or leg heats up, sags and runs off in drips into a growing pool, then the stump bubbles and cools to a seared stump. The pool sets into slag that stays until it's cleaned (one per tile, 150 at most). The jumpsuit sleeve burns away at a melted arm. There's no blood splatter, though tg's blood loss still happens. Held items and shoes melt with the limb, then fall to the floor beside the feet. If the victim moves mid-melt, the limb goes with them and later drips land under them.
• Shields: a held shield blocks bolts at its normal chance and takes the damage. Instead of the yellow block star, the bolt bursts on the shield's own pixels, coats it and drips off as slag, with the shield's own block sound.
• Barrel pinch: each shot swells a ball of plasma at the barrel with a flash on the hands and a small purple light, snaps it small as the bolt leaves, and opens a ring where the ball was. It stays on the barrel if the shooter moves or is knocked over.
• Bolts are purple teardrops of liquid fire and carry a moving purple light.
• Impacts look different on walls, glass and armour.
• Hit spots on walls and floors glow purple, cool to char and leave soot that stays until it's cleaned (soot is capped at 300, glows at 40 per z).
• A bolt that misses fizzles out at the end of its range.
• The Furnace vents with a puff.
• Sounds: each gun has its own fire sound, plus a distant version for listeners 18–40 tiles away. A hit plays one sound only: plasma hits on people, burn-throughs and limb melts have their own new sounds, and tg's dismember sound and burn-wound sizzle don't play on top of them. Wall and glass hits, near misses, the Furnace vent and boil, robot-limb melts, pressing a cartridge, cooling slag and picking it out use existing tg sounds; a shield block plays the shield's own.

Media

Recorded in a real client at real speed.

Bolts and the barrel pinch (Furnace, then Cinder, in all four facings):

Wall and glass hits in the dark:

Hits on people (two ordinary hits, then two burn-throughs):

Plasma burns (a pistol hit, then rifle hits on the same chest; the slag picked out with a hemostat):

Melting limbs (arm with gloves and a held crowbar, leg, lying, walking off mid-melt, a robot arm):

Shield block:

Furnace heat and vent:

Cartridges (pressed from sheets and loaded; full on the table, in hand, and spent):

Assets

The gun and cartridge sprites (recoloured to hot purple) and the plasma, RCW and laser pistol sounds are from Mojave Sun (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0). The bolt, effect, burst, melt and plasma wound sprites, and the plasma hit, burn-through and melt sounds, are new. Each file's source and licence is listed in voidcrew/modules/plasma_weapons/icons/attributions.txt and sound/attributions.txt. There's a new player wiki page at wiki/content/plasma-and-laser-guns.md.

Also in this PR

__byond_var_id_padding.dm (the same file the hyperviolence branches carry) so the CI build stays clear of DM's broken variable id 65535.

Not playtested

It compiles cleanly under the normal and CI define sets, and the plasma unit tests pass. Every effect, burst and melt was recorded in a real client in all four facings. Still needs a human playtest:

• how dodging bolts feels
• how fast the Furnace heats up
• how often limbs melt, and how plasma burns feel to treat
• how far a cartridge goes, and its price
• the near-miss hiss, distant fire, hit, burn-through and melt sounds
• the short client hitch the first time a client sees a melt