Fire Rate and Reloading

Fire Rate and Reloading

Every weapon in Flan's Mod Ultimate 2.0 answers two questions after each shot: how long until the next round, and whether that round needs a reload first. This page documents both, for handheld guns, deployed guns, AA guns, driveable weapon banks, seat guns, mecha hand guns and Apocalypse shooters.

Two ideas run through all of it:

• A cadence is a delay in ticks, and it may carry a fraction. A weapon firing faster than once per tick fires several times in the same tick instead of being rounded down to it.
• Reloading never lets a weapon outrun its own rate of fire. Wherever a reload and a cadence both apply, the wait is the longer of the two.

Contents

• Ticks, rounds per minute and sub-tick rates
• Apocalypse shooters
• Handheld and deployed guns
• AA guns
• Driveable weapon banks
• Banks firing mounted guns
• Banks firing shells, bombs and missiles
• Magazines and ReloadRounds
• Choosing what is loaded
• Seat guns and mecha hand guns
• Heads-up display
• Key reference
• Compatibility summary

Ticks, Rounds Per Minute And Sub-Tick Rates

The game runs at 20 ticks per second, so a rate of fire and a delay convert as:

delayTicks = 1200 / roundsPerMin
roundsPerMin = 1200 / delayTicks

1200 RPM is one round per tick, 600 RPM is one every two ticks, 60 RPM is one per second.

Rates above 1200 RPM work. A weapon whose delay is shorter than a tick fires more than once in the same tick, because firing adds its delay to whatever cooldown is left rather than overwriting it. The same carry keeps rates that do not divide evenly into ticks honest: 800 RPM is 1.5 ticks per shot, and over sixty ticks it produces forty rounds rather than the thirty a round-up would give.

The one limit is a floor of 0.05 ticks, or 24000 RPM, which exists so that a delay of zero — reachable through an attachment multiplier of zero, or by declaring no rate at all — cannot make a firing loop spin forever.

A weapon that has not fired for a while does not bank shots. Its cooldown settles just below zero and stays there, so opening fire after a long pause releases one round, not a minute's worth.

Apocalypse Shooters

Survivors and skull drones carry the fractional remainder between shots using the same cooldown rule as other guns. Full-auto and minigun modes may fire several rounds in one tick; semi-auto and burst modes fire at most one round per tick. Each round checks the loaded ammunition again, so an empty gun stops the firing loop and starts its usual reload rather than firing through it.

Survivors aim for 20 ticks at a visible target within 15 blocks, then attempt fire every tick while those conditions hold. Losing sight, leaving range or changing targets starts a new aim period. The old additional 10/20-tick difficulty wait between trigger pulls no longer applies. Survivor semi-auto uses twice the gun's delay, and every third burst round uses three times the delay. Drones use the gun's delay with a minimum of five ticks for semi-auto.

Survivors reload from their consumable reserves in the gun's reload time. Drones keep their reusable reserve magazine and wait three times the gun's reload time. Reloads replace the cooldown with the full reload delay; fractional carry applies between shots, not across a reload.

Handheld And Deployed Guns

GunType resolves its cadence in this order:

grip secondary fire     (when the gun is in secondary mode and has a grip)
  > RoundsPerMin
  > ShootDelay          (legacy ticks)
  > 2 ticks             (600 RPM)

Attachment ShootDelayMultipliers then multiply the result, and an attachment that overrides the fire mode to burst floors it at three ticks.

ReloadTime is the whole-magazine reload, in ticks. It is scaled by attachment reload multipliers and by the loaded ammunition's ReloadTimeMultiplier, and a gun with more than one ammo slot (NumAmmoSlots) pays ReloadTime / slots for each slot it actually has to fill, so a shotgun loading three shells waits for three shells and not for a full tube.

When the gun runs dry, the wait is max(ReloadTime, ShootDelay). A quick reload cannot make a slow weapon cycle faster than its own action allows. This is what governs a launcher whose ammunition holds a single round: every shot is followed by a reload, so ReloadTime is the key that decides its rate of fire and ShootDelay barely matters.

Deployed guns use the same GunType keys and the same rule. They reload when the loaded item has no rounds left in it, which is not the same as the slot being empty — a spent belt is still an item.

AA Guns

AAGunType reads the same two cadence keys with the same precedence:

RoundsPerMin > ShootDelay > 1 tick

The fallback is one tick rather than two, which is the cadence an AA gun declaring neither key has always had.

ReloadTime is scaled by the heaviest ReloadTimeMultiplier among the rounds loaded, and floored at the gun's own cadence exactly as a handheld gun's is.

A multi-barrel mount reloads as one weapon. The crew reloads only once every barrel has run dry, and then loads them all together on a single ReloadTime. A barrel that empties early simply stops firing while the others carry on; it does not stand the whole mount down. ShareAmmo mounts feed every barrel from one slot and are unaffected.

RoundsPerMin on an AA gun counts firing events, not projectiles. With FireAlternately false every loaded barrel fires on the same event, so projectile output is event RPM multiplied by NumBarrels and NumBullets.

Driveable Weapon Banks

A driveable has a primary and a secondary bank. What a bank is determines which rules apply to it:

Primary / Secondary	The bank is	Governed by
Gun	mounted guns	Banks firing mounted guns
Shell, Bomb, Missile, Mine	the vehicle's own ordnance	Banks firing shells, bombs and missiles
None	nothing	—

Both banks share one cooldown readout each, covering reloading and the delay between shots alike. A driver only needs to know whether the weapon can fire.

Banks Firing Mounted Guns

A bank whose shoot points carry a PilotGun or AddGun mount fires a real GunType, so by default the gun owns both its cadence and its reload time. The vehicle overrides that only by stating a key of its own, and it does so per key:

The definition states	Cadence from	Reload from
nothing	the mounted gun	the mounted gun
ShootDelayPrimary (or any alias)	the vehicle	the mounted gun
ReloadTimePrimary	the mounted gun	the vehicle
both	the vehicle	the vehicle
ReadWeaponsFromGunTypes true	the gun, always	the gun, always

ReadWeaponsFromGunTypes is therefore no longer the only way to defer to a gun; it is the way to make deferring unconditional, so that a vehicle key added later cannot quietly shadow the gun category.

With ReadWeaponsFromGunTypes true, a mounted gun bank also plays its gun type's shoot sound and uses that gun's sound range, even if the driveable defines a shoot sound for the bank. Crewed passenger seat guns use their own gun type's shoot and reload sounds independently of the driver's banks.

The gun's own ReloadSound plays on every reload of such a bank, whoever owns the timings, including the reload that follows loading ammunition into its slot. A gun without one falls back only to that bank's ReloadSoundPrimary / ReloadSoundSecondary: the shared ReloadSound and ShootReloadSound belong to the main gun, so a machine gun never sounds like a shell being loaded. Only the restocked bank reloads; loading shells or a passenger's belt leaves a gun bank alone.

Driveable Muzzle Flashes

FlashModel DefaultFlash enables the three-frame default muzzle flash on a driveable. Successful shots from primary and secondary gun or shell banks flash at the specific shoot point and barrel that fired. Passenger guns flash at their GunOrigin barrel. Flashes follow the live muzzle and aim as the driveable moves or turns.

A mounted gun's FlashModel and FlashTexture replace the default flash for that point. Its MuzzleFlashModel is used when it has no FlashModel. Its ShowMuzzleFlashParticle, MuzzleFlashParticle, and MuzzleFlashParticleSize settings also apply at that muzzle. Existing ShootParticlesPrimary and ShootParticlesSecondary effects continue to spawn separately.

The WW2 Tiger I (WW2_Vehicle_TigerI_1A) includes the setting as an example. A deployable gun uses its gun definition's FlashModel in the same way; the WW2 MG42 Zweibein (WW2_MG_MG42ZB_1A) also selects DefaultFlash.

Banks Firing Shells, Bombs And Missiles

A bank firing the vehicle's own ordnance has no gun to defer to. Its cadence — the delay between rounds within one magazine — resolves like this:

ShootDelayPrimarySeconds            (seconds, x20)
  > RoundsPerMinPrimary
  > ShootDelayPrimary > ShellDelay > BombDelay
  > 60 rounds per minute

with ShootDelaySecondarySeconds, RoundsPerMinSecondary, ShootDelaySecondary and bare ShootDelay as the secondary bank's equivalents. The first key present in the file wins, so a pack carrying several for backwards compatibility still gets the reading it intends.

Its reload time is the longest figure the definition states anywhere for that bank:

reloadTime = max( ReloadTime, ReloadTimePrimary,
                  ShootDelayPrimarySeconds, RoundsPerMinPrimary,
                  ShootDelayPrimary, ShellDelay, BombDelay, ShootDelay,
                  the resolved cadence )

Every key is converted to ticks first. Taking the maximum rather than a priority order is deliberate, and it is what keeps old packs working: a definition that expresses a tank's whole loading cycle as ShellDelay 60 and states no reload time still reloads in three seconds, because its one stated figure is also its longest. A definition that states both a fast cadence and a slow reload gets both, used for what each describes.

Because the reload can never fall below the cadence, a bomb rack that states only a release interval behaves exactly as it always did: its "reload" and its interval are the same number.

Magazines And ReloadRounds

A bank fires a magazine, then reloads. The magazine holds:

magazineSize = min( ReloadRoundsPrimary, RoundsPerItem of the loaded ammunition )

RoundsPerItem is declared on the ammunition and defaults to one round per item, which is why a tank shell costs a full reload after every shot.

ReloadRoundsPrimary / ReloadRoundsSecondary, with ReloadRounds as a shared fallback, exist for a weapon that is reloaded more often than its ammunition item would imply. A Panzer II feeding its 2 cm gun from ten-round magazines states ReloadRoundsPrimary 10 whatever the ammunition item holds, and the gun then fires ten rounds at its cadence, reloads, and fires ten more. Zero, the default, leaves the ammunition item's own count in charge.

Rounds are counted as fired, not as consumed. A creative crew reloads on exactly the schedule everyone else does, even though their ammunition is never used up. A reload also happens early if the item being fired runs out before the magazine does, which is what a partly spent belt does.

Every reload plays the bank's ReloadSoundPrimary / ReloadSoundSecondary, falling back to a shared ReloadSound.

Choosing What Is Loaded

An ordnance bank fires what the crew has chambered, not simply whatever sits in the lowest slot.

• The first round aboard is the one loaded. Slots are ranked by the order they were filled in, so a crew that stows armour-piercing first has armour-piercing chambered. Slots filled in the same tick — by a command, for instance — are ranked by slot number, lowest first.
• Chambering costs the bank's reload time, whether it is the first round aboard, the round after a magazine ran out, or a round the crew swapped to.
• Press the ammunition key to swap. This is the same binding that picks a handheld gun's ammunition, [ by default, listed as Preferred Ammo in the Controls screen. It moves to the next usable round in slot order, preferring the primary ordnance bank and falling back to the secondary — so a fighter-bomber with Primary Gun and Secondary Bomb cycles its bombs.
• Swapping a shell costs a fresh reload, because it means working one round out of the breech and another in. Swapping again interrupts that reload and starts another, so a crew may keep changing its mind for as long as it is willing to keep waiting.
• Swapping a bomb or a missile is free. They are selected on their racks rather than loaded into anything.

What is chambered survives saving and reloading the world, mid-reload included, and is tracked whether or not anyone is aboard — so mounting a vehicle that is already stocked costs nothing.

Seat Guns And Mecha Hand Guns

A passenger seat's gun is outside every driveable key above. It uses its own GunType cadence and its own ReloadTime, reloading when its magazine is spent and playing its own ReloadSound. A hull with twenty passenger mounts therefore needs no driveable timing keys at all — only correct gun definitions.

Loading ammunition into a seat gun's slot also costs that reload, just as restocking a driver's gun bank does: putting the first belt into an empty gun, swapping in a different round, or topping the slot up all make the gunner wait out ReloadTime before the first shot. Firing, and the automatic refill from cargo when a belt runs out, do not count as a restock.

Mecha hand guns behave the same way, with two deliberate floors: a semi-automatic hand gun cannot cycle faster than five ticks, and a failed reload costs at least four.

Heads-Up Display

A weapon is called ready whenever it is not reloading. The ordinary delay between shots deliberately does not show as a reload: a gunner holding the trigger on an autocannon would otherwise watch the line flicker between reloading and ready at the cyclic rate, which tells them nothing.

A driver, and the crew of an AA gun, see one readiness line per weapon bank. Both read identically, in the same words:

Shell: Ready                    the weapon can fire
Shell: Ready (7/10)             ... with 7 of its 10 rounds left before a reload
Shell: Reload Time: 3.5 seconds reloading, and how long is left of it
Shell: No Ammo                  nothing aboard to fire

The round count appears only when a magazine holds more than one round, so a tank gun reloading after every shell simply reads Shell: Ready, while an autocannon carrying ReloadRoundsPrimary 10 counts its burst down.

A mounted gun gets one line naming the weapon instead, so a gunner can tell which gun the numbers belong to. This covers the gun on a seat, a deployed gun, and a driver's weapon bank whose type is Gun — a tank's coaxial machine gun is reported as the machine gun it is, not as an anonymous "ordnance bank":

MG 34: 247/300
MG 34: Reload Time: 1.4 seconds
MG 34: No Ammo

The count is what the gun's ammunition slot holds against what went into it at the last restock. In creative, where firing never consumes the item, the count still runs down towards the next reload. A seat mounting no gun shows no line.

Each crew member sees only the weapons they work. The driver sees both weapon banks and, under Current Ammo, the round loaded in each of them. A passenger sees only the gun on their own seat and the round it is loaded with; the driver's banks and smoke are not shown to them.

So the driver of a Panzer II sees both of its weapons at once: its 2 cm gun as a shell bank counting down its magazine, and its coaxial machine gun by name.

Key Reference

Key	Type	Applies to	Purpose
RoundsPerMin	float RPM	GunType, AAGunType	Rate of fire; overrides ShootDelay.
ShootDelay	float ticks	GunType, AAGunType	Legacy cadence.
ReloadTime	int ticks	GunType, AAGunType	Magazine reload; the running-dry wait is this or the cadence, whichever is longer.
ShootDelayPrimarySeconds / ShootDelaySecondarySeconds	float seconds	DriveableType	Highest-priority bank cadence.
RoundsPerMinPrimary / RoundsPerMinSecondary	float RPM	DriveableType	Bank cadence as a rate.
ShootDelayPrimary / ShellDelay / BombDelay	float ticks	DriveableType	Primary bank cadence aliases, in priority order.
ShootDelaySecondary / ShootDelay	float ticks	DriveableType	Secondary bank cadence aliases.
ReloadTimePrimary / ReloadTimeSecondary	int ticks	DriveableType	Bank reload time.
ReloadTime	int ticks	DriveableType	Shared reload time, counted into both banks.
ReloadRoundsPrimary / ReloadRoundsSecondary	int rounds	DriveableType	Rounds fired between reloads, when fewer than the ammunition holds.
ReloadRounds	int rounds	DriveableType	Shared fallback for both banks.
ReloadSoundPrimary / ReloadSoundSecondary	sound	DriveableType	Bank reload sound.
ReloadSound	sound	DriveableType	Shared fallback for both banks.
ReadWeaponsFromGunTypes	bool	DriveableType	Makes mounted gun types unconditionally authoritative.
RoundsPerItem	int rounds	ammunition	Rounds an ammunition item holds; defaults to one.
ReloadTimeMultiplier	float	ammunition	Scales the reload time of whatever loads this round.

Compatibility Summary

• Packs authoring only ShootDelay or RoundsPerMin are unchanged, except that rates that did not divide evenly into ticks are now honoured instead of being rounded up.
• A driveable bank stating only a delay key keeps that delay as both its cadence and its reload time, so nothing slows down.
• A gun bank that previously relied on ReadWeaponsFromGunTypes still behaves identically. A gun bank that did not now defers to its mounted gun instead of silently sitting at 60 RPM, unless the definition states a key of its own.
• ReloadRounds, the shared ReloadTime and the shared ReloadSound are new keys. Omitting them keeps the previous behaviour exactly.
• An AA gun declaring neither RoundsPerMin nor ShootDelay keeps its one-round- per-tick cadence.

Tactical Reloads and Secondary Switching

A gun with one ammo slot containing live multi-round ammunition uses a tactical reload duration. By default this is 80% of the ordinary ReloadTime; TacticalReloadMultiplier configures the factor. This is a gameplay default, not a claim about historical reload speeds. Set the multiplier to 1, or TacticalReloadTime 0, to retain ordinary timing. A positive TacticalReloadTime gives an explicit duration instead; attachment, ammunition and enchantment multipliers still apply. Empty guns use their ordinary reload duration.

Internal/multiple-slot and single-round loads receive no automatic bonus. An explicit positive tactical time enables it when they contain live ammunition; the existing proportional slot-reload calculation still applies. The secondary grip uses its own SecondaryReloadTime. NPCs and other integrations querying equipped weapon properties receive the same ammunition-aware duration.

The reviewed belt-fed Vickers, M240, M2, M60, M249, M1919, MG 34, MG 42 and Maxim categories set TacticalReloadMultiplier 1 to preserve their current belt service cycle. Category settings remain editable through the Category System.

SecondarySwitchTime and SecondaryUnSwitchTime independently control entering and leaving secondary mode (defaults: eight ticks, or 0.4 seconds; zero disables a delay). The server selects the duration and rejects switching while the weapon is busy or a reload is pending. Shots and reload requests stay blocked until the switch finishes, and the previous burst queue is cleared. The client displays a brief dip; SecondarySwitchMovement false removes that movement without removing the delay.

A grip attachment using RenderOnlyOnMode true hides its model and ammunition in primary mode, except during a switch. This is intended for mode-dependent or deployed components; a physically mounted launcher should normally remain visible. These controls do not load glTF animation clips or refund ammunition when changing modes.