This suggestion may probably be seen as dumb, but I feel as if it could act as a neat detail and perhaps lower the amount of "dual wielding" that is sometimes performed.
Basically, I think that if someone is holding an item in their offhand and cocks their shotgun, either by clicking on it or using the "Activate held item" key with hotkey mode on, there's a slight delay on actually cocking the shotgun instead of being instant. The time it takes to perform this action would depend on the size/bulkiness of the item in your offhand. In terms of realism, think of it like this. If you're holding, say, another shotgun shell you're preparing to load in your off-hand, it's not that hard to get a hold of the grip on the shotgun, even if it'll take a bit longer than normal. With a larger item, though, for example a full-sized riot shield, you would be performing a one-handed cocking motion with the shotgun. An example of one-handed shotgun operation can be found in this video:
"Single Handed Shotgun Tips and Tricks "Arm Down" Drills" by "shadowtsolutions", quite an unwieldy title.
Of course, despite the variety of methods to cock a shotgun with one hand, I think just one should be settled on as to not make things too convoluted, despite the varying lengths of the action depending on the size of an item in your off hand. (before anyone asks, no, I'm not American, just a Canadian that thinks guns can be neat.)
So, with that paragraph of nonsense out of the way, let me explain WHY I think this should be added. Most of my reasons for it are pretty silly, though.
1. It sort of bugs me that no matter the weapon, pretty much all guns in SS13 are wielded one-handed. I understand why this is. Forcing you to "wield" a weapon with both hands to use it properly, despite being a neat mechanic, would further complicate an already complicated control system. So I think a good compromise would be making it so a weapon works at its full potential when you don't have anything large in your off-hand (or another gun, god forbid) without forcing you to actually perform an action to wield the weapon in both hands. But that's going way too far, so for now I just think it could be neat to slow down shotgun cocking if your hands are full. Going so far as to add full varying recoil, accuracy, etcetera to ALL guns when you're holding an item in your off-hand would be extremely excessive.
2. I think dual wielding guns is silly. Controversial opinion, I know. I don't think it should be impossible, though. This idea wouldn't make dual wielding shotguns impossible, just... a bit more impractical. But cocking two shotguns with one hand each would sure look cool to others.
3. I like small details! Small details are fun!
That is pretty much the entire suggestion. Due to how simple it really is from a gameplay sense, I probably could compress all this to a single paragraph, but I feel a change as strange/obscure as this probably needs a bit more justification.
(And before I forget to put this somewhere, if there are any other manually-cocked weapons in Paradise that I don't know about, like bolt-action rifles perhaps, this should obviously apply to them too.)
