This is easily a scifi machinist faction. Dieselpunk comes directly from people adapting vintage machine tools to other objects like guns and vehicles. This is easily a cannon, chemical, and melee faction with a lot of very heavy, high strength industrial parts.
If I came up with a dieselpunk cannon it would fire cubic boron nitride slugs with discarding sabots made of bronze. It would use liquid propellent piped into the barrel instead of powder, for more boom and safer, easier loading. The barrel would have a tapered and mirror ground smoothbore that shrinks and compresses the bronze sabot to create a vacuum tight seal with a tight interference fit in the barrel that sends a projectile flying with more velocity than the Kaiju. It would have recoil several times greater than that of the avalanche and would need to be locked from turning before firing or else it will damage itself. It could be large 12 energy weapon, or an entirely new tech tree of cannons.
If this faction had a chemical weapon it would coat vehicles in a grit loaded cutting fluid that causes all moving parts to passively take damage such as moving weapons and wheels, and to take increased active melee damage. It would look like a cutting oil dispenser. You can freely move, even with an acceleration boost, but you will damage your weapons and movement parts unless you move slowly.
As for melee weapons there are a lot, IDK why there is not a single machine tool melee weapon in this game yet. Lathe chucks, milling heads, facemills, and gigantic twist drills would all be on the table. So would shapers, which are basically a giant power scraper.
When I look up dieselpunk I see airships.
This would explain why the new cab looks a little like a submarine, I think; it’s an airship cab. It would also explain how a slow heavy cab might be suited for drones, like the quad-copters they mentioned in the article. The heavy cabs worked fine with the chopper-blades, for example. Their limited mobility wasn’t an issue, like they might have been on the ground, especially as a drone-boat.
I think what we are looking at is a cab for a sky-bound drone-boat.
If it is, then that means I begged for this for years, and this is all my fault.
I’m gonna want flares for all the gddmn missiles.
Steampunk generally is seen as the late Victorian and early Edwardian period with a cut off date of the start of the First World War. The aesthetic is very much brass, copper and dark wood. Steampower and clockwork with some early electricity, colours such as browns dark greens, maroon etc.
Dieselpunk generally is seen as the interwar year and the beginnings of the machine age. The aesthetic is chrome, Bakelite, thin-framed glass and light wood diesel and electric power, art-deco and streamlined styling, valve technology and nixie tubes. Pale colours or greys and gloss black.
However all of the above is open to interpretation and there is a lot of crossover you are creating your own world ultimately. Both normally involve hats and goggles and can be a lot of fun.
TBH going off the art people come up for steampunk and dieselpunk is like playing telephone. If you want to see steampunk, look at zeppelins and 1800’s machine tooling in museums. Brass is everywhere in steampunk because in that era all cutting oils and lubricants were heavy fatted animal oils which are quite corrosive when they rot. Its also very easy to form with primitive tools.
Dieselpunk is steampunks descendant, petroleum oils were everywhere, high speed steel was ubiquitous opposed to much worse carbon steel, and brazed carbide cutting tools were being used in the 1940’s. These machines had to be built much much heavier to fit the new grades of cutting tools. Stainless steel also became common during this time and its much harder to cut than steel. The parts for this faction are literally lathe and mill castings. The handwheels are identical. Bronze bushings are another aesthetic of dieselpunk, and they are still used in every low speed high pressure application due to being better than ball bearings. Bronze is just extremely expensive compared to all steel.
Yep… think “diesel trains from the 30s” and you’re getting it. It often also incorporates art deco style since that was the big thing when diesels were ruling the world.
My point was more towards the idea that they would possibly push this next update towards airships, and in that context, a slow heavy cab is more viable as a drone boat. Otherwise it’s a silly idea to expect a drone-boat to survive without a much higher top-speed than is typical for heavy cabs.
I don’t think the overall aesthetic is different enough between steampunk and dieselpunk for significant contention. Both aesthetics are very similar artistic interpretations that exist almost exclusively in the fantasies of artists. It’s whatever they say it is the day they make it up. There are common differences, sure (one runs on steam, the other doesn’t), but they aren’t very relevant to the point I was trying to make about how I believe they may likely aim this next update at their new baby, the flight mechanic. Why wouldn’t they? I think (hope) the result is Dieselpunk Airships. The actual aesthetic will be their own, and so far it looks a little bit like a submarine…that probably flies.
If they do this, I think they once again will set themselves well above the competition creatively, in that the rest of the gaming industry appears to just be re-skinning the same third person shooter, over and over, decade after decade, and calling it a new game.
The one issue I do see as problematic to my theory (hopes), is that Targem currently has a game in development called “Age of Water” that could be considered as competition for the genre, and a potential marketing conflict, but maybe not. IDK.
I would pay good money for that turret cannon. Just imagine it a legendary 11 energy turret cannon has two weapons. A 150mm cannon which holds 5 shots, and a rapid fire auto cannon that fires in 3 round bursts and has 64 shots. both can be put on seperate keys. The cannons perk being something like the primary cannon heats parts meaning propper use of it is to shoot the main cannon and burst down the vehicle with the auto cannon while it reloads.
I’m not convinced that the slow drone boat will fail, based on how successful heavy skinner/king builds can be.
Use the same strategy with fuses and/or grenadiers and it could work in PVP.
This why I got bored of them all. Pick a player type, change his clothes & appearance a bit (which was novel 15 years ago), and maybe get different weapons later in the game. Yawn. Heck, it’s not much different than the 1st gen Tomb Raider or Metal Gear Solid… or any plethora of other 64 bit games that were around back then.
As for the differences between steam & diesel punk…
I read a post somewhere on the interwebs a while back explaining the differences between all these “punk” aesthetics. There are many more than just these two. There’s Atom Punk, Cyber Punk, Bio-Punk, “Cassette” punk etc… They all just imagine a world where - instead of tech and society progressing the way it did, it kinda’ got stuck on one technology. I don’t see a clear delineation among them, either.
I do hope you’re right about the cab being faster than the other heavy cabs. As a drone boat, at 65kph, it’ll be useless.
That and slow drone boats are actually quite effective in the b ase 8v8 mode so long as they stick with their team. you are tanking damage from bots and dumber players while your drones spread damage across the field.
The problem with slow drone boats is you have to stick with your team you have to play smart and you have to know the map and how your enemies play.
Like you have to recognize ok X player is artillery I can’t stay still, Y player is a lance so I should go hear to try and block his damage, Z player is a dog so I might need to be a bulkward so the cricket user on my team can one shot him from behind. oh crap AB player is here his scorp might one shot all of us. so I need to some how draw his fire… good thing I have obvious exposed fuel barrels in the back that are there to distract snipers.
Playing a smart drone user is about observation more then any other build as you can’t shoot back.
I agree, and that’s why I think this cabin could work: good drone players now have a way of focus firing their weapons, which could make many a lot more powerful.
It’s not all going to be about speed either. The range of control over the drones is going to play a fair part too as it could effectively double the range of some of the drones.
STeam punk, is steam pipes as everything is steam powered minimal use of gears but a high use of pipes.
Clock punk, is use of gears and gear based systems no pipes anywhere.
Diesel punk, is early gas powered everything is powered on well diesel so combustion engines and a 1940s like astetic. Techincly speaking ww2 is Diesel punk IRL.
cyber punk is wires and data. so no pipes just RGB, but don’t get that mixed up with neon punk which is apparently a thing, and generally is used to describe fallouts prewar astetic.
Ya…anyway, “Hyperborean” is a term that I think is difficult to translate into Dieselpunk (or whatever-retro-future-fashion-punk).
Nobody really agrees much on what that is, beyond being an ancient, far-north, snowy, Conan the Barbarian style, fantasy-sci-fi. I think it makes sense as to why a Russian outfit like Crossout might find some affinity with the term, but nothing I’ve seen of it’s description evokes a retro-future fashion sense like Dieselpunk (or whatever).
It’s maybe a good idea in the sense that nobody else seems to have picked up the term and run with it, and they can make it be whatever they want it to be (even dieselpunk…or whatever), since it’s such an underdeveloped myth. I am curious to see how they translate the myth into this game. It will be the only significant development that mythology has seen in a very long time.
It’s easier for me to imagine what a Dieselpunk weapon might look like or how it might function, but it’s hard for me to blend the current Hyperborean interpretations of that legend with that theme. They are going to have to go way off the reservation to combine that idea with Dieselpunk and bring that into Crossout, I think.
It sounds challenging, and is a very original idea, IMO. I can’t wait to see what they do with it, because frankly, I struggle to blend that together in my mind.
It could be similar to some popular interpretations of Atlantis, I suppose.
Its all so very vague and subjective due to it all being an artstyle. I personally stick with what IRL objects those artstyles come from, and it all goes back to machinery and the ways they were made. Going off the shapes in the official leaks, this is very much a mid 1900’s machinist faction. The handwheels are identical to the ones on lathes, the parts are made of massive 1"/25mm thick castings which are then milled on all the mating surfaces.
IDK about all these punk terms I think they need more concrete definitions. I propose 3 main styles, Steampunk, Dieselpunk, and Cyberpunk, everything else is just redundant mud. Fallout is dieselpunk with nuclear power. I noticed that all of these 3 have a direct resemblance to some stage of modern industry. There is the 1800’s style of rough castings that look like ornate wood carvings with all the brass, pipes, and steam, there are the rugged and heavy castings of the 1900’s, and modern day CNC machined, wire EDM’d, and sintered parts with loads of electronics. Lots of injection molded plastic too.
If it was up to me they would have tesla technology with a dieselpunk aesthetic that is only light enough to move because everything is made from titanium alloys.
