Resident forum troll The Flying Fish has CSI’d some of the .dds material files included with the spark editor and made a discovery so startling it would make Horatio take off his sunglasses. One file, cunningly named armory_weapon_upgrades.dds, contains 4 (presumably placeholder) icons. Using his amazing powers of logic and lateral thinking, The Flying Fish has deduced that these are icons for weapon upgrades you research using the armory.
Baseless speculation below:
The most obvious upgrade for a flame icon is the flamethrower, which has already been confirmed to be making an appearance in NS2.
The bouncing steel balls may indicate a ricochet upgrade. Possibly flechette rounds for the shotgun – another feature that has been confirmed for NS2.
A bullet piercing a plate of armor. Hmmm. Armor piercing rounds, handy for shooting an onos in the face and teamkilling fellow marines after enabling friendly fire.
The last icon appears to be a mine of some sort, so either mines now have to be researched before they can be bought or there is an upgrade that adds functionality or increases their effectiveness.
If you want to check the file out for yourself you’ll need either the DDS plugin for photoshop or for GIMP and then browse to:
Natural Selection 2\ns2\materials\hud\armory_weapon_upgrades.dds
