Disruptors (Upgraded to FB rules)

I'm not sure if I'm in favor of your description. The way you mark damage off
is intreaging, however there's enough similarity to the present beam systems
that I'm wondering how disruptors would add to the game system. Please don't
take that as an insult, I tend to be one of those KISS types. Now on to the
specific comments...

> At approximately 5/10/98 8:35 PM, Sean Bayan Schoonmaker wrote:

> The following are my disruptor rules, now up to FB standards:

I'd move the cost up to mass x3 to keep them in line with normal beam
batteries.

> Disruptors damage their targets by an alternating gravitic

> The three basic types of disruptor cannon batteries are:

(Stating the obvious here) They're equivalent in dice to the same mass amount
of equivalent sized beams. However, one puts more of the proverbial eggs in
one basket as far as threshold checks against them. Of course it's easier to
repair one disruptor than two normal beams after they've been damaged.

> Damage is marked off in a slightly different manner for

> Armor is marked off as it appears at the top of each column. Damage

> she would be forced to make a level 2 threshold check. The last box of

The skipping of armor is quite and advantage vs. armor only ships. I'm not
sure that the virtually no threshold checks is enough of a disadvantage vs.
the skipping of armor. With the new ship construction system from the FB, I
believe we'll see a number of ships that depend mainly on armor or screens,
but not both. The disruptor as you've presented it would put the strong armor
philosophy at a big disadvantage, an idea that I'm not in favor of.

How are re-rolls (of sixes) handled?  Like normal beam batteries?

> Please provide comments and criticisms,

Hope you find this somewhat constructive.

> I'm not sure if I'm in favor of your description. The way you mark

Actually, they don't skip armor so much as "eat" it at the same rate as hull
points, and actually, the entire reason I did these up was to see how the
verticle vs. horizontal damage thing would work. Call it an intellectual
exercise.

> I'd move the cost up to mass x3 to keep them in line with normal beam

The reason I made the Mass x 2 call was that on larger ships, they leave the
ship with all its weaponry and other systems for a frighteningly long period
of time, and are thus not as usefull as beam weaponry in that case. On smaller
ships, they have the ability to be slightly more damaging (particaulary if
they are heavily armored), but not by much.

> The skipping of armor is quite and advantage vs. armor only ships. I'm

I think you may be misunderstanding how the system deals with armor - or
I didn't express it clearly enough. Say you've got a ship with 4 rows of 4
hull boxes each, and it has an armor factor of 4, meaning that a row of armor
circles sits atop the first row. The disruptor doesn't skip the armor, it just
takes it in stride. So if the ship was hit with a large volley, say seven
points of disruptor damage, the first five would take out
the first row - not skipping the armor in that row, but treating it like
another row of hull. The last two points would be scored against the armor
point in the second row, and the first hull box.

The only time when you gain an advantage from this is if a ship has more armor
factors than it has hull boxes per row. That way armor would be orphaned when
the last row of hull baxes was taken out, destroying the ship.

> How are re-rolls (of sixes) handled? Like normal beam batteries?

Yup.