How do I upgrade the batteries of UT equipment?

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Rendu

I don't have access to a lot of my older gaming stuff, but I vaguely recall an article (possibly in Roleplayer?) suggesting "power slugs" (essentially batteries optimized for the the kind of brief, high power usage that energy weapons require) as an alternative to standard power cells. They were heavier and more expensive, but using standard cells in weapons built to take slugs risked damaging the weapon, the cell, and possibly the user. Perhaps introducing slug-powered weaponry with beefed-up performance?

This sounds like an idea I had in the past - single-use, all-or-nothing, rapid-discharge power cells, which make an energy weapon function somewhat-akin to a weapon using cased ammunition, needing to rack and eject what essentially amounts to ammunition as its used. To make it workable, you either have to posit that normal power cells cannot safely execute such a rapid discharge, or you need such to be lighter than normal power cells. I'd lean toward the latter - if a "power slug" is half the weight of a comparable non-rechargeable power cell (which is in turn half the weight of a comparable rechargeable power cell), you can potentially cut down weight markedly by carrying magazines of power slugs rather than spare power cells, and it has a neat visual effect of essentially ejecting spent casings. The feed and eject mechanism (which would eat up some of the power slug's charge - there's no recoil to harvest into cycling the action - but probably not enough to make a difference) may introduce some wobble for automatic and semi-automatic fire, however, which would reduce accuracy for such weapons. Of course, that may not be necessary, if the slugs can just stay in their magazine and feed power to the weapon as needed... but then you miss out on the awesome visual effect.