Re: Beams and size classes

At 08:21 PM 11/28/96 +0000, you wrote:
>'Lo, folks,
>	     here's a modification of an idea I (and I'm sure lots of
others,
>eg Allan Goodall) have had concerning ship classes and beam weapons. 
The
>basic idea is that Cs are "appropriate" for Escorts, Bs are
"appropriate"
>for Cruisers, As are "appropriate" for Capitals, and AAs are
appropriate for
>Capitals and Superships, especially the latter.  An "appropriate" beam
>weapon requires the usual number of Mass points.  An "inappropriate"
>single-arc weapon requires double Mass allowance, a 2- or 3-arc weapon
needs
>triple.  It is therefore just possible to shoehorn a 3-arc A-Battery
into a
>superdestroyer FTL hull, perhaps as a monitor, but only just.
>Cheers,
>Rob

	How about this? A doubling of mass points for inappropriateness
but
maintainance of ordinary mass for inappropriate weapons but they can
only
fire every other turn. We use mass 1 single arc B-bats and mass 2
multi-arc
B-bats. So for an escort you could have a mass 2 single arc B-bat or a
mass
4 multi-arc B-bat that fired every turn or a mass 1 single arc B-bat or
a
mass 2 multi-arc B-bat that fired every other turn. That would be a more
affordable way to equip a smaller vessel with a more powerful weapon and
it
feels fairly realistic to me (the ship having to take longer to build a
charge for a more potent weapon, etc.). It would also fit naval
destroyer
style tactics--smaller ships with two-turn arming weapons could swing in
and
out of range as appropriate to the armed status of their heavier beam
weapons. 

	Linked weapons could work similarly. You could give somebody a
mass
break on linked weapons--say a 25% or 33% discount on all the weapons
that
were linked. So you could get three C-bats at 2 mass (33% discount) or
four
C-bats at 3 mass (25% discount) but if one were lost due to a threshold
check, they all would be (like they were in the same turret or
something).
You could calculate the discount for linking (I really don't think I
would
link any more than 2 weapons together now that I think about it) and
then
double for inappropriateness or again maintain the same mass but fire
every
other turn. Again using B-bats for an example, you could link two B-bats
together (two mass 2 weapons at 25% discount would be mass 3) and then
you
could double that to mass six to install this two B-bat turret on an
escort.
Linked weapons would be, again, good for escorts because they aren't
likely
to survive a lot of damage anyway so losing extra weapons to a single
threshold check is not that big a deal.

	What do you think?

	James
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