Steve writes:
>I've been wanting to rehash the weapon limits since the game first
>appeared, since the existing limits are the one of the main reasons
>piracy is unworkable: a merchant ship can be armed as heavily as a
>similar-sized pirate for a sacrifice of 1-2% of cargo capacity, so why
>NOT?
You can also add lots of guns (you know the section in the ref's guide that
follows spinals, bays and turrents :-) They are cheap and can pack a decent
punch. Not as good as a real starship weapon, but still pretty good. This
would also be slightly more realistic. I feel it is pretty absurd that most
small starships only carry the big weapons and forget about the little things.
How many ships today only carry large guns? From what I've seen they usually
carry a decent mixture of weaponary.
>BTW, has anyone besides me noticed that "agility" (by any definition
>ever given) is completely meaningless in Traveller (all incarnations)?
>If your ship can pull 6Gs, and is one light second from whoever is
>shooting at it (long range), then your ship can shift from it's
>predicted position by no more than 118 meters during the detection
>cycle? And most warships are bigger than that (anything over 63,000T
>MUST be bigger, and anything under it that isn't a sphere is probably
>bigger)
Your figures are a little incorrect but what the hell. I'll agree that
agility is hopeless as is.
Scott KelloGG writes:
>Rob Sez:
>}perhaps it would be time to rehash the maximum
>}weapon mount limits? After all, you can pack more power plant into a
>}SDB (for example) than would ever be needed to run all of its weapons
>}allowable under the current rules. Why not add more turrets?
>While I would like to design stuff that makes sence, I don't wanna design
>stuff that isn't usable. For if we adopted a modification then ALL our
>previous designs would be so much pieces of paper. They would suffer huge
>disadvantages in combat with the newer designs.
Do you understand the term cannon fodder?
>I know, I know, it's a lousy argument, but if we dump the hardpoint rule,
>we're gonna have a HUGE arms race on our hands as all the TML designers
>suddenly find out their ships are under armed! :-)
What is wrong with a little arms races? They don't cause too many problems do
they.
Realisticly, it is possible to decrease the price of a merchant ship (which
was mentioned somewhere else on TML) without decreasing the cost of military
ships. What do military ships have that merchants don't? They carry weapons,
fib style (big) computers, screens, armour and they have agility.
Armour and agility are already pretty expensive (more wouldn't hurt too much).
So increase the cost of big computers and screens a lot. Maybe increase the
cost of the better sensor suites and make weapons very expensive (what is
the going rate on a cruise missile these days?) Then add a markup for
being military of 500% and you are set.
Pauli
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