Small Launcher (Hardmode)
A long range fire support weapon, the Small Launcher is an indirect fire weapon capable of lobbing alien grenades at great distances. It is the alien derived successor to the Grenade Launcher.
Unlike its vanilla counterpart this weapon is a indirect fire weapon that no longer loads non-lethal ammo by default, but highly lethal explosive elerium bombs. While capable of indirect fire support, it appears the aliens have not mastered this method of warfare and will employ this weapon as a direct fire weapon. This does not diminish the lethality of the weapon in the aliens hands but it at least means X-Com does not have to worry about the possibility of indirect fire coming their way.
Due to the wide array of ammunition that can be loaded into the small launcher, there is a chance the enemy will fire less than lethal fire grenades, or even stun grenades, that while undesirable are unlikely to kill anyone if they strike a target.
The Small Launcher comes with access to four ammo types.
- Elerium Bomb - Function akin to regular explosive grenades in terms of power and blast radius
- Smoke Bomb - Produce a small cloud of smoke at the target akin to a smoke grenade.
- Fire Bomb - Set a target area on fire.
- Stun Bomb - Strong stunning explosive for non-lethal captures.
X-COM operation guide
In the hands of X-Com the small launcher is essentially a upgrade to the Grenade Launcher. It confers to its operator a higher level of accuracy but with far more powerful explosive ordinance. However one great strength of the small launcher is its access to non-lethal stun bombs which allow the ability to non-lethally capture aliens from extreme ranges, representing the best form of stunning method available to X-Com.
While the strength of the weapons explosives somewhat falls off against some of the very late game enemies, but it will always represent an effective pinpoint indirect fire weapon, and its stunning abilities will remain viable for the entire game. The weapon is also likely the first alien weapon X-Com will research and deploy, requiring only the researching of an Alien Data Slate from an alien base to unlock the capability of researching the weapon.
Statistics
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Ammo
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Firing Time Unit Notes
The following lists how many times a soldier can fire the gun by shot type continuously in any given round and the remaining percentage of any left over TUs that cannot be spent as a shot.
- Aimed 1 shots, 25% remaining TUs
- Snap: Dependent on amount of time units soldier has, fixed cost of 15 TU's to reload mean soldier with high TU could fire, reload and fire again.