Now that you've got me thinking about it, energy weapons might be banned on forest worlds, to prevent forest fires. Possibly only slug throwers would be allowed

My character is in the future going to free slaves and destroy slavers for a living, so I started to think that maybe I could get some minions by recruiting some of them. That of course led to the train of thought as to what I'd equip them with, especially since I'd probably have to spend a few weeks training them for them to be of any real use. I looked through the equipment for a while and realized that slugthrowers were perfect for this, as at base price I can buy 4 of them for slightly more than what 1 blaster rifle costs, and they're even cheaper if I crafted them myself, with it taking only 8 hours to build one, while lowering the time and costs more with successes, advantages, and triumphs. So for what 2 blaster rifles cost to build I could outfit a squad of soldiers with slugthrower rifles with a couple days work, train them for a few weeks, and send them off to die like the cannon fodder they are free their fellow slaves from their confinement and take bloody vengeance on slaver scum.

So there's both a story and mechanical reason to make use of slugthrowers.

Maybe very niche, but a disadvantage would be, that you can't fire them in space (needs oxygen to fire a round)

Well, Firefly taught us, you can work around this problem, which leads to a big advantage: When you manage to fire them in space, their range should be infinite

25 minutes ago, MasterZelgadis said:

Maybe very niche, but a disadvantage would be, that you can't fire them in space (needs oxygen to fire a round)

Well, Firefly taught us, you can work around this problem, which leads to a big advantage: When you manage to fire them in space, their range should be infinite

As long as the ammunition has its own oxidizer, it would be able to fire in space. That's a lot cheaper than using space suits

35 minutes ago, MasterZelgadis said:

Maybe very niche, but a disadvantage would be, that you can't fire them in space (needs oxygen to fire a round)

Well, Firefly taught us, you can work around this problem, which leads to a big advantage: When you manage to fire them in space, their range should be infinite

Well, not quite infinite in a practical sense - while they will keep going until they hit something, they still take time to reach their target, during which time the target's position can shift (this happens even in atmosphere at long ranges), meaning you not only have to line up a shot just right, you also have to predict where the foe is going to be. Eventually you reach a point where there's just too many potential variables. And anything big enough to hit reliably at very long distances in space is something that won't be fazed by a slugthrower.

25 minutes ago, Dusk Raven said:

And anything big enough to hit reliably at very long distances in space is something that won't be fazed by a slugthrower.

It depends on the size of the slug; throw one the size that we see in ESB, and you can down a Star Destroyer. ?

1 hour ago, Dusk Raven said:

Well, not quite infinite in a practical sense - while they will keep going until they hit something, they still take time to reach their target, during which time the target's position can shift (this happens even in atmosphere at long ranges), meaning you not only have to line up a shot just right, you also have to predict where the foe is going to be. Eventually you reach a point where there's just too many potential variables. And anything big enough to hit reliably at very long distances in space is something that won't be fazed by a slugthrower.

Didn't say it would be an easy shot, only talked about range.

Also, we play a game in a universe, where such heroic things happen. Like hyperspace jumps to just above a planet's surface

1 hour ago, MasterZelgadis said:

Maybe very niche, but a disadvantage would be, that you can't fire them in space (needs oxygen to fire a round)

Well, Firefly taught us, you can work around this problem, which leads to a big advantage: When you manage to fire them in space, their range should be infinite

Gun powder has oxidizer in it.

23 hours ago, panpolyqueergeek said:

Now that you've got me thinking about it, energy weapons might be banned on forest worlds, to prevent forest fires. Possibly only slug throwers would be allowed

I remember there was an old WEG module where the players end up on a Tibanna gas refinery. The atmosphere was so volatile that energy weapons would cause explosions around the blaster beam (causing damage to shotter and everyone in the path of the shot), and lightsabers basically put you in the middle of an inferno. They specifically said that in that environment, slugthrowers and melee weapons were the best weapon to use.