Burton Choinski writes:
In my last message I mentioned how a ship could have
more than 1 hardpoint per 100t. How many hardpoints
should a 100t ship get? Maybe not 40 like I mentioned
before, but certainly more than 1. This will SIGNIFI-
CANTLY alter the armaments of large ships. (BTW, is
there any reason WHY only one spinal mount is allowed?
If the ship is large enough, could it not have 2 paral-
lel, or 3 triaxial mounts? Perhaps with the limitation
that they all be of the same type and size.)
I hope that Burton will forgive me for seriously editing portions of his
message from last night. I'd like to address his question about turrets
without going into any of his other concerns about combat at the moment.
(As you are all painfully aware, I tend to be of the 'hard physics' school
of space combat, so any anime innovations are unlikely to meet with my
approval. Forget about that for right now.)
Overall, I would agree that the whole concept of turret limitations needs
to be re-examined. My personal preference would be to eliminate the limi-
tation entirely. For energy weapons I don't think that this would cause a
problem, because of the cost, space, and fuel requirements of the addition-
al power plant that would be required to create an energy weapon specialty
vessel that carries substantially more weapons than possible under the
current design rules. In the same vein, I would see no reason why ships
could not be built with multiple spinal mounts, although I think that a
rule that multiple mounts must attack the same target would limit their
utility somewhat.
The main 'problem' with removing turret restrictions is the effect that it
would have on missile and (to a lesser extent) sand turrets. Before this
can be discussed, we really need to decide how missiles work. If missiles
require guidance from the launching ship for a significant fraction of
their flight, then the 'game balance' limitations on missiles should be
based on the number of control channels/transmitters that the launching/
guiding ship has available. This would make them somewhat like missiles in
Star Cruiser/2300AD. If you wanted a missile launching specialty vessel,
you invest in extra computers, comm links, and so forth. On the other
hand, if missiles are 'self guided', along the lines of the missile designs
that have been posted here using the Robots book, there is really no basis
for limiting the number of missiles that a single ship can launch in a
turn, EXCEPT for the cost of the missiles. My players, in their space
combat session two weeks ago, burned through MCr1.5 worth of missiles,
which is prohibitive for many player groups (I hope.) In a Trillion Credit
Squadron setting, forcing players to purchase and transport the missiles
(and sand--we should insert the sand canister prices form Old Traveller in
MT) would cut down on their use a bit.
What do you think?
Rob Dean