I vote for the Heavy beam/HET Laser (and perhaps throw in the (NO!) B5
Heavy Beam Weapon before going for the kinetics. I'm with laserlight that we
should have candidates "on paper" (in the WDA) somewhere before we discuss
them. I'v ebeen a little lax with updating the WDA for a bit,
so I'll try to get caught up this week.
BTW, excellent writeup for the stealth stuff, Charles. I'll incorporate it as
soon as I can.
In message <200108181745.f7IHjns14320@scotch.csua.berkeley.edu>
> Noam Izenberg <noam.izenberg@jhuapl.edu> wrote:
> I vote for the Heavy beam/HET Laser (and perhaps throw in the (NO!) B5
> Heavy Beam Weapon before going for the kinetics. I'm with laserlight
Thank You :-)
> Noam R. Izenberg
Well, to start the ball rolling...
> [quoted text omitted]
########################################################################
> Heavy Beam [Alan Brain] (GZG-L, 9 March 2001) Heavy Beams cost and
[Charles]
Well, I'm not sure I'm in favour of introducing a new type of beam dice, but
it does have the effect you desire (a weapon with more damage than a
conventional beam, but with shorter range, and affected more by screens). By
my calculation, the Heavy Beam is 2.5 times more effective than the equivalent
number of beam dice against an unscreened target, this drops to 2.11 times
against a target with level 1 screens, and 1.79 times against a target with
level 2 screens. The loss of one dice at all ranges is equivalent to the Heavy
Beam battery rolling the same number of dice of a Beam battery of one class
smaller, thus it has twice the MASS of a Beam battery that rolls the same
number of dice (it may be somewhat underpriced, depending on the
frequency of level-2 screens in your game, OTOH, heavy use of Heavy
Beams would encourage heavy use of screen-2s by your opponents :-).
My personal preference would be to keep the relationship between beam class
and number of dice rolled, and so state that it has twice the MASS (or
slightly more) of a beam battery of equal class. A simpler system
would be to treat it as a 'doubled' beam battery, i.e., a class-2 heavy
beam battery equals two class-2 beam batteries. But this would lose the
differentiation in respect to screen effectiveness.
> * The same principle could be extended to a "Super Heavy Beam", which
These have 4 times the MASS of a beam system of the same class, but are only
3.75 times as effective vs. unscreened targets, 3.42 times vs.
level 1 screens, and 3.21 times vs. level 2 screens. In other words -
overpriced all round I think!
> =======================================================================
Is
> affected by Phalon vapour shields (diffused by the vapour droplets).
[snip comparison table]
> The L3 and P-torp have the same Mass and both ignore screens, which
[Charles] Well, I've long considered a possible PSB for Needle Beams and
PDS systems to be a laser system (using the 'canon' interpretation of Beam
Batteries as particle beams, and screens as an electromagnetic system). I'm
not sure I see the need for a different dice rolling method, or the different
range bands. I think I would treat these as normal beam batteries, but
unaffected by screens (vapour shrouds work as usual).
*A possible, but specialised defence - ablative hull armour - as normal
hull armour, but each box absorbs 2 boxes of laser damage (or PDS or Needle
Beam) before being lost.
*Reflective hull coating: acts as level-1 screen against lasers -
(needle beams do no damage on a roll of 5) lost when 1st threshold is reached?
or all armour destroyed? I will see if i can develop this further.
[quoted original message omitted]