Link Gun

The Pulse Gun is a weapon in Unreal Tournament. The Pulse Gun is replaced by the similar Link Gun in UT2003, UT2004 and UT3. In Unreal Championship, it is called The Link. All of the weapons have their unique appearances.

The Pulse Gun's primary fire launches plasma projectiles at a rapid rate, and its secondary fire shoots a constant beam of plasma, though this beam is of limited length. The Link Gun is different from the Pulse Gun only in that a player may "link up" with a teammate who also has the Link Gun, by firing the beam at the teammate, boosting the teammate's firepower; the new name reflects this feature. Multiple players can link up to create a chain or any other (acyclic) arrangement of links for a greater boost.

Unreal Tournament
Classification: Plasma Rifle

Primary fire
The Pulse Gun's primary fire projectiles are fast-moving green orbs of plasma. It can be quite dangerous in close range fights, long range spamming or when retreating around corners, due to its fast fire rate compare to other projectiles weapon in UT.

Secondary fire
A bolt of green plasma lightning is expelled with limited length. However, it is much more effective at medium range than the primary fire, owing to its hitscan nature and lockdown effect, which prevents players from being able to dodge nor jump away.

The "Saw Effect"
The beam is divided into 10 segments of 81uu length. Each of them does a fixed damage of 10 health on first contact with the player. So if you move towards an opponent and back away from him you are doing a bit more damage than usually. (imagine you got a saw in your hands, which you have to move forward and back all the time)

Note that the segments 'forget' their last target as soon as you switch to another segment, so the 10 damage on 1st contact always refreshes. That`s why the best method is to switch fast between 2 segments, but you'd have to know the exact segment borders which are difficult to see. But theoretically you could do an insane amount of damage with this method.

Primary fire
The Link Gun's primary fire projectiles are normally green, and while their initial speed is slower than that of a rocket, they speed up to four times that in under a second. The usefulness of the primary fire is generally limited to close-to-medium range, since their slow initial speed makes them easy to react to at longer range. However, with a fire rate of 5.5 shots per second with 30 damage per shot, at close range and especially against unmoving targets the Link Gun primary fire is one of the deadliest weapons considering its raw damage rate (165 damage per second).

Secondary fire
The secondary fire tends to be more used than the primary fire. Though the green wiggly beam is of limited length, since the beam is hitscan it is far more reliable within its range. 5.5 times a second the beam checks for a hit, and will do 15 damage to a target, which comes out to be 82.5 damage per second. While it can be hard to master, in the right hands the beam is more deadly than the primary fire, especially considering its lockdown effect: whenever the beam hits, it pushes the target slightly, making it difficult for the target to dodge out of the way, effectively locking the player down.

Linking
If a teammate is linked up to you, the teammate's link beam assumes the color of the team, and both the primary and secondary fire of your Link Gun become yellow and do extra damage. If there are n people linked up to you, the damage on the primary fire is multiplied by 1 + n, and the damage on the secondary fire is multiplied by 1 + (0.5 &times; n). For example, if two people are linked up to you, primary fire will do 90 damage per shot, and secondary fire will do 30 damage per hit for 165 damage per second. The primary projectile speed also increases with the number of links.

Unreal Tournament 2004
"Riordan Dynamic Weapon Systems combines the best of weapon design in the Advanced Plasma Rifle v23, commonly known as the Link Gun, or simply the Link. While the primary firing mode of the Link remains the same as its plasma-firing predecessor, the secondary cutting torch has been replaced with an active-scanning, switchable energy matrix. This matrix enables the weapon to register friend or foe upon contact with the swirling green beam and change properties accordingly. When the beam comes into contact with an opponent it can inflict serious injury and death within seconds. Upon contacting a teammate, it reverts to a harmless carrier stream. The carrier stream offloads energy from the onboard cells, boosting the output of any targeted player who is also using the Link. Two players may Link to one another at any time, boosting the power output of the weapon significantly, but it should be noted that while players are boosting a teammate, they are unable to defend themselves from attack."

- UT2004 manual

As with most UT2003 weapons, the UT2004 version of the Link Gun has remained largely the same, though it has received several subtle changes. The Link Gun's appearance has been altered. The primary fire now consumes 2 ammo per shot, and the secondary fire has a greater fire rate of over 9 hits per second, although the damage per hit has been decreased to 9 such that its rate of damage has been unchanged. In compensation for the increased ammo consumption rate, the ammo capacity of the UT2004 Link Gun has been increased.

In UT2004, players can also repair vehicles and Power Nodes with the alternate fire, greatly increasing the utility of this weapon in Onslaught, Vehicle CTF, and certain Assault maps. The heal amount and speed of most vehicles and turrets can be configured by Level Designers, but due to the default settings, generally the speed is quite low for the automatic floor and ceiling sentinel turrets in Assault maps.

Note that linking up is much more efficient than in UT2003. With n links your primary fire still has a damage multiplier of 1 + n, but the beam damage or healing scales up by 1 + (1.5 × n). This basically means you can build/heal nodes much faster if you link together instead of separately aiming directly at the node. An example: Two players separately aiming at the node heal it by 2 × 82.5 = 165 points per second. If one of the players linked to the other instead, the combined healing would be (1 + 1.5) × 82.5 = 206.25 points per second. The same example applies to healing vehicles or firing the beam at enemies.

Unreal Tournament 3
Fires white, hot plasma projectiles. The rate of fire appears to have been significantly increased, however it does a little less than half the damage to compensate. Fires a beam. This beam is team-colored when healing vehicles or power nodes. When attempting to heal a fully intact vehicle or node, no ammo is consumed. Note that the vehicle healing rate in the info box is a theoretical value. Due to rounding errors after down-scaling individual "health chunks", the actual healing rate probably is much slower, maybe around 5-10/s. ''Riordan Dynamic Weapon Systems is best known for their all-purpose combat engineering weapon system, the Advanced Plasma Rifle v24. Its primary mode is a standard rapid-fire plasma weapon. But the alternate mode beam also serves a multitude of engineering uses on the battlefield, from repairing friendly vehicles to constructing power Nodes. The beam lens incorporates IFF detection, so that its dynamic energy matrix automatically switches to a deadly plasma stream when contacting an enemy vehicle or soldier. Contact with a friendly target switches to a harmless carrier stream, offloading energy from the onboard cells to the target. This boosts the output of any teammate who is linked to the rifle -- hence its nickname, the "Link Gun".''
 * Primary Fire
 * Secondary Fire
 * Game Description

Players wanting to combine the power of their Link Guns simply move closer together to create a kind of "power grid". Power boosts are received automatically from any nearby equipped Link Gun and any of its own links. A simple power grid with only one other Link gun boosts beam and projectile damage by 50%. If the grid contains at least two other Link Guns, beam damage output is doubled. Link Gun power grids with more participants only make the grid more reliable, but do not provide further damage boosting. The maximum distance between two players for establishing a link is 160 UU, but Link Guns "route" their linked power to all other Link Guns, so not all players have to stay within that small space.

Unreal Championship
"The Link looks like a high-tech laser and is similar to a Shock Rifle in its functionality, but delivers less damage. This is more of a team weapon and its real power comes when used in a team. If this weapon is fired at a teammate, it creates a link between the two players for as long as the firing player presses their fire button and as long as a direct line of sight is maintained between the players. This link will allow the linked player’s weapon to do extra damage, with a faster rate of fire. If another player is added to the link, the firing rate will increase again, and the beam will deliver a devastating blow."

- Unreal Championship website

The Link, as it is called in Unreal Championship, is supposed to be the same as the Link Gun of Unreal Tournament 2003. Only the weapon appearance and sound is different, although the ammo used is the same.


 * Primary fire: Rapid-fire charged plasma.
 * Secondary fire: Charged plasma beam.