DescentBB

Since some years I always had this doubt, and now while I was playing Plutonian Shores it bugged me again.

I'm up to level 27, and I'm mostly sure that I started the level with 4 shaker missiles. Died several times, and everytime I respawned I went to gather my powerups.
However, I noticed my Shaker missile count decreased to 3, even if I picked all my powerups!

Made a quick fly through the level, and it doesn't seems that I missed any of my powerups.
And IIRC, I think I saw this happened to me before, specially with Shaker missiles.

Does the Descent code includes some kind of 'penalty' on your missile or ammo count if you die many times on a level?

Do the all weapons cheat, then blow up your ship on a wall somewhere near the spawn room, respawn, wait and watch the field of powerups without picking any up.

Done, and found some pretty interesting stuff!
It seems that it doesn't matter how much do you have, after you die you only spew 3 Smarts, 3 Megas and 3 Shakers

Now that I look at it, I think I might recall this behaviour from the days when I was a tester for D2X-XL and paid attention to every single detail, but it seems I totally forgot about this until now that I'm playing Descent 2 again, lol

EDIT: It seems that nowadays D2X-XL changed this behaviour, as there I can get all smarts, megas and shakers, but the original DOS and Rebirth versions features this 3-missile spew limit

It seems like you're also capped to whatever can be held without an ammo rack on everything else. Could be wrong though.

Get the rack before too much missiles/vulcan and thou'lt get over the limit without it.