This mod is an edit for BBBBilly's Simple Make Reinforced Barrel mod.
In RimWorld, you have mortars. They're neat. However, by default they require a reinforced barrel to build and it's only good for 20 shots, requiring a barrel replacement to continue. That's all well and good, but 20 shots? Maybe if they were made of the worst steel you could find (which, well, fits the setting? but other weapons don't do this!)
You can switch this off, at the cost of the shells being more expensive and the accuracy being nerfed. I like the need to replace barrels, and enjoy the better accuracy - but what really grinds my gears is that these barrels cannot be locally produced. You must buy or find them. Well, that's a load of horse dung - we've had mortars since the 1400s. If the Ottomans could cast a mortar from raw iron, you can toss a billet of steel on a lathe and turn a barrel. That your people can make machine guns shows they are clearly capable of this task.
I wanted to rectify all this, and I decided to use this mod as a basis to do so, since I didn't like the balancing that was done on any I could find - and this one was the simplest implementation. Maybe, someday, I'll also go and fix the shots-per-barrel to be a bit more sane.
It makes the following changes from the original mod:
- Drop chinese localization. I don't read it, or care about it, or want to maintain it.
- Raise steel cost to match the per-shot difference from Classic Mortars mode. (200 steel)
- Reduce crafting skill requirement - it's just a big pipe. (6 crafting skill) *
- Reduce crafting time to same as components - it's just a big pipe, but it substantial in size. *
- Raise selling cost to match the input material cost to output cost of components, minus some overhead (to make it a nice round number) (500 silver) **
* To cut arguments against "it's just a big pipe" off at the knee, I have actually operated a mill and lathe before and am familiar with the basics of gunsmithing.
** 1 steel = 1.9 silver. Inspecting the steel cost for a component vs it's silver price, I found that there's a ~40% markup for transforming that steel into a component. I figure, since it's a big pipe and components are supposed to be real fiddly stuff like gears... meeting this ratio is fair. However, the actual result would have been like 533.33 silver... so I actually chopped a little value off to make it an even 500 silver - which is still cheaper than the default cost for a barrel.