SV: Big Guns and Small Ships (was Re: house rules/offline)

> David wrote:

> An additional thought. Who says the recycle rate of combat lasers or

It depends on what time scale you assume. If you play with very short turns
(and thus pretty high accelerations during maneuvers, high speeds and/or
short distances), long re-loading times make sense (like Wave Guns, or
the
re-charge ideas in some of the FT-B5 variants). If, OTOH, you assume
long game turns (I feel most comfortable with 1 turn ~ 15 minutes), long
recharging times make less sense.

> Once you have a target in your sights a beam weapon will almost

Depending on the speeds you move at, and what maneuvers the target makes.
Note that in case of a light-speed beam weapon, the target has no time
to detect that it is being fired upon until the weapon hits; so if it hasn't
already begun evading "just in case" between when the beam is fired and it
hits, it won't escape. Provided, of course, that the attacker manages to
aim exactly right - if the target is an 1000-meter sphere and the
attacker aims for the middle at a range of 1 light second, a deviation of
0.000096 degrees will cause the beam to miss. And then there's a little
problem with
focussing the beam, too - but who knows what we'll come up with in the
future?

Later,