Here are a few weapon ideas produced by tinkering with the basic stats. I
would appreciate any feed back.
Fusion Beam Envisaged as an earlier ship mounted weapon system before the
standard beam became common. Mass and cost as Beam Range 8mu brackets per
weapon class
Damage as per standard beam x2 (die result 4-5= 2hits, 6=4hits)
Screens- as beams
Armour- as beams
Helical Beam Helical adjusted wave guide carrier particle beam, sometimes
called the Hell beam more commonly H beam Mass and cost as Graser Range 27mu
brackets per weapon class Damage d3 per hit
Screens- as Graser
Armour- as Graser
Salvo Missile Variants SM variants have probably been done to death, but here
goes
The standard SM is a Nuclear tipped warhead that detonates within a few
kilometres of the target causing damage through thermal shock, hard radiation
etc. The distance that the missile detonates and other factors
account for the vagaries in damage of from 1 to 6 points The 2 variants are
1. An earlier smaller (1/3 the size) missile that relies on kinetic
impact/HE to cause damage
All mass allocations for racks, magazine and tubes are the same but instead of
launching a salvo of 6 missiles it becomes a "swarm" of 18 missiles. Although
a smaller target they have a longer attack run and are easier for PDS to lock
on and hit, so add 1 to the die roll for each PDS, B1, K1 or fighter that
fires (fighters are not in danger from missiles they shoot down) Scatterguns
are even more effective, they will destroy 3d3 missiles from
each swarm. Being smaller they do not have the capacity to carry ECCM and are
very susceptible to being spoofed by their targets ECM so for each swarm roll
3d6 and minus 3 from result the number left minus those destroyed by defenses
is the number of missiles that impact the target. each missiles causes 1 pt of
damage
2. This variant is a salvo missile with a bomb pumped laser (BPL) warhead.
As it is more of a stand -off weapon than the standard SM and weapons
firing
in the PD role have less time to lock-on before the BPL fires, so minus
1 to the die roll for each PDS, B1, K1 or fighter that fires. ( fighters are
in the same danger as when firing at standard SM)
Scatterguns are d3-1 missiles destroyed
Roll d6 to see number of missiles that lock-on minus those destroyed.
Damage - roll d6 for each missile, results 1 to 3 = 1 hit point 4,5 2
hit points 6 3 hit points no effect from screens 1 point from each missile
goes on armour the rest on hull.
I think the cost for the 2 variants should be the same as standard SM but any
thoughts please.
> Tony wrote:
Seems too cheap for twice the damage and 75% of the range. I'd either drop the
range bands to 6mu or increase the mass. Or maybe they could have the same
damage as beams, but only take up 75% of the mass.
There HAS to be a reason everyone switched to beams, after all.
Robert wrote
> Seems too cheap for twice the damage and 75% of the range. I'd either
I wanted to keep the mass the same as canon weapons
The weapons were produced by tinkering with the stats. If you double the mass
you either increase the range band by 50%, or you
double the damage and if you half the weapon mass, it decreases the range to
2/3rds or halves the damage.
So if you carry out both adjustments to bring the weapon back to it's original
mass
you end with 2/3rd range and double damage or 150% range and 1/2 damage.
> On 13/05/07, Robert Crawford <crawford@kloognome.com> wrote:
Does it get rerolls as per a standard beam? I assume it does.
> Seems too cheap for twice the damage and 75% of the range. I'd either
With 2/3 the range it covers 4/9 the area. So it will find a target to
hit less than half as often as a beam of the same mass but will do twice as
much damage on average. Overall it appears to be a slightly worse weapon.
If you play on fixed tables then it would be an advantage. The amount of
damage you take whilst closing would probably be outweighed by the extra
damage you do at close range as you opponent has less chance to keep the range
open without leaving the table. If you play on floating tables then the
standard beam is probably better.
Now we wait for Oerjan to tell us that we're all completely wrong...
> Tony wrote:
> Fusion Beam
If it is "earlier", then shouldn't it be less Mass-effective but cheaper
than the standard beams? If it is *as* Mass-effective, there's little or
no
clear in-background incentive for everyone to change to the current
"standard" beams (which they obviously have done, since none of the FB powers
use it any longer)... To me this fusion beam looks more like a contemporary
alternative to the standard beam, not like an obsolecent or
obsolete weapon.
> Mass and cost as Beam
In theory this should balance OK, but as with all modified-range beam
weapons it runs into the problem that the standard class-2 battery is
somewhat overpowered/underpriced compared to the standard class-1 and
class-3 batteries. Because of this, a 6-arc "class-2 fusion beam" (max
range 16, Mass 3) will be overpowered compared to 3x class-1 standard
beam
batteries while a 3-arc "class-3 fusion beam" (max range 24, Mass 6)
will
be *under*powered compared to 3x class-2 standard beam batteries.
(Note to Steve Pugh: The value of a weapon's range is *almost* proportional to
the area within range and arc, but since the weapon can only fire at one
target per turn even when it has multiple targets to choose between it isn't
an exact match. In math terms the area itself is proportional to range^2, but
for the weapon's value the exponent slightly less than 2.)
> Helical Beam
Overpowered compared to Grasers - the average result of 1D3 is 2.0
whereas the average result of 1D6 is 3.5 (ie. less than twice as much), so
reducing the damage per hit from 1D6 to 1D3 does not fully compensate for the
50%
longer range bands.
> Salvo Missile Variants
[mechanics snipped]
> I think the cost for the 2 variants should be the same as standard SM
Here are the average damages for 1 salvo of standard SMs and the two SM
variants, each opposed by 0 - 6 PDSs:
#PDS: Standard SM: Kinetic: BPL: 0 12.25 7.50 5.83 1 9.75 6.33 5.12 2 7.62
5.21 4.46 3 5.84 4.18 3.86 4 4.39 3.27 3.32 5 3.24 2.48 2.84 6 2.34 1.84 2.41
Both the Kinetic and the BPL values depend somewhat on how their respective
DRMs are applied to the PDS rerolls. Here I've treated the +1 as
applying
to all rerolls (as for Attack fighters) while the -1 doesn't apply to
rerolls (as per beams vs. lvl-2 screens), but even eliminating the
rerolls entirely has very little effect on the overall result due to the low
per-missile damages.
I'll leave it as an exercise for the readers to determine appropriate costs
for the variant SMs
:-)
Regards,
Thanks for the input Oerjan, sorry it has taken a while to reply RL intrudes.
> I wrote:
beam
> became common.
Oerjan replied
If it is "earlier", then shouldn't it be less Mass-effective but cheaper
than the standard beams? If it is *as* Mass-effective, there's little or
no
clear in-background incentive for everyone to change to the current
"standard" beams (which they obviously have done, since none of the FB powers
use it any longer)... To me this fusion beam looks more like a contemporary
alternative to the standard beam, not like an obsolecent or obsolete weapon.
I based the reason the fusion had gone out of favour due to it's range
limitations. A ship that was able to stand outside the range of a fusion armed
vessel was deemed to be more effective.
> I wrote:
> Oerjan replied In theory this should balance OK, but as with all
(max
> range 24, Mass 6) will be *under*powered compared to 3x class-2
If it's a standard problem with beam type weapons I can live with it
> I wrote:
Oerjan replied
> Overpowered compared to Grasers - the average result of 1D3 is 2.0
Would damage of d6per hit/2 rounding up be better?
> >Salvo Missile Variants
Oerjan replied
> Here are the average damages for 1 salvo of standard SMs and the two
The Kinetic missile looks like it has the correct values and I would put the
cost at 2 points per mass but only for the mass of the missile magazine SML
are the same as standard as the launching tubes can be used by both missile
types. Missile racks are same mass but those with Kinetic missiles cost 10
points if with standard range missiles and 12 points for extended range (based
on racks being 2 mass and costing 3 points per mass and the salvoes massing 2
and 3 mass respectively)
It looks like the damage values of the BPL should be upped to
2,2,2,3,3,4 or
even 3,3,3,4,4,5 so costs should match standard salvo missiles, although I
think the 2nd set of values may be too powerful.