Thancred's Handicap Solution

[Soge01]

Ceruleum powered cartridges instead of aether charged ones. Never understood why this problem was never thought up and fixed for him on the Source after Shadowbringers. Thoughts?

[HollowedDoll]

Probably gameplay reasons primarily, I can't imagine they want to have two versions of a character, and yes G'raha exists he's more of a visual difference not AI.
EW might do something about it.

[Jeeqbit]

Because from what I understand, ceruleum and earth-aspected aether are the same thing.

[HollowedDoll]

Because from what I understand, ceruleum and earth-aspected aether are the same thing.

So? it's ammo. If garlicans can use it so can Thancred.

[Jeeqbit]

There isn't a lot of point bothering with ceruleum if a friend can just make some ammo.

[Rongway]

Most ceruleum processing facilities are currently under the control of

the Telophoroi

and whatever comes out of the processing plant in Northern Thanalan is probably already allocated and unavailable for Scion use, and as Jeeqbit said, why bother when you have a magic buddy who can charge some cartridges for you so you don't have to engage in commerce for something that is incredibly limited in supply.

Someone probably asked Tataru to requisition some, to which she promptly replied, "Ceruleum gunblade cartridges, Thancred, in this economy??!"

[Enkidoh]

Cereleum is basically aether-enriched petroleum which hrothgarian gunblades as used by GNB and Thancred are not designed to use as their propellant.

Garlean gunblades don't even use cereleum anyway, as they are basically just guns with a greatly elongated bayonet built into the barrel, that use gunpowder or a similar explosive to fire a solid charge or bullet out the barrel (cereleum instead is used in vehicles and machines like airships and juggernauts for fuel).

Hrothgar gunblades however use cartridges of aether to instead trigger a blast of aetheric energy along the blade and don't actually fire anything solid, hence are more like swords with an aether-powered rumble pack attached, so using cereleum in them would be a very bad idea - it would blow the gunblade to pieces if you tried to do so. Not surprisingly the hrothgar regarded Garlean gunblades as a cheap knockoff to the real thing.

Also, as Rongway said above, Thancred is already getting Urianger to create his cartridges for him so there is no point to even try to use cereleum-derived cartridges in his gunblade as an alternative.

[Jandor]

Garlean gunblades don't even use cereleum anyway, as they are basically just guns with a greatly elongated bayonet built into the barrel, that use gunpowder or a similar explosive to fire a solid charge or bullet out the barrel (cereleum instead is used in vehicles and machines like airships and juggernauts for fuel).

Hrothgar gunblades however use cartridges of aether to instead trigger a blast of aetheric energy along the blade and don't actually fire anything solid, hence are more like swords with an aether-powered rumble pack attached, so using cereleum in them would be a very bad idea - it would blow the gunblade to pieces if you tried to do so. Not surprisingly the hrothgar regarded Garlean gunblades as a cheap knockoff to the real thing.

I feel the Hrothgar may be more than a little biased in their assessment. The Garlean gunblade is more range focused than the Hrothgar original, but we've seen it in action enough to see it's clearly got a bit more going on than just being a gun with an elongated bayonet attached. You can't carve big magical X shaped projectiles into the air with a gun.

That said though, I also don't really a point in using ceruleum in our gunblades, we can already create all the ammo we need using either our own or a friends ability to enchant the cartridges.

[CaptainLagbeard]

As far as I can tell, Ceruleum is basically just oil. There's very little special magical properties to it. It wouldn't really do anything in a cartridge for the gunblades used by the GNB class, except maybe explode inside the thing...

The short and simplified explanation of how the Gunblades work is that you load up the cartridges with Aether, you put them in the gun and when you pull the trigger it lets out Aether that you then use to do some quick magics in the middle of the fight, in most cases to just hit harder...

[Cabalabob]

The real question is why did Thancred take up GNB in the first place when it used a weapon he was incapable of maintaining by himself?