Re: Tech Level Differences

stiltman@teleport.com wrote:

>Actually, I would suggest that there might be a couple of different
ways >to go about this.  If it's the beam itself that is lower tech,
then sure, >change the range band.  But if the targetting equipment is
what's lower >tech, then keep the maximum range the same but decrease
the sub >ranges that it takes before you have to roll higher to do
damage with it.

Depends on how you visualise the way the weapon inflict damage. 

What FT calls the "maximum range" of the FT weapons isn't the *real*
"maximum range" - K-gun slugs don't magically evaporate after moving
30mu, for example, and beams disperse with range (IIRC in a fairly
linear fashion) but won't just "stop" (unlike certain hand-to-hand beam
weapons featured in a series of well-known SF flicks :-/ ). Their
probability to hit something beyond that "maximum range" hard enough to
inflict FT-scale damage (scarring the paintwork doesn't count!) is
small enough to be negligible though, so the rules ignore the very
remote hit chance they do have.

I visualise the beams and Pulsers as firing large numbers of
individually low-powered shots, slightly dispersed over the
cross-section area of the volume you expect the target to be in when
the shots arrive. If you roll high on the damage roll you hit with many
of the shots so you inflict lots of damage; if you roll too low to
inflict any damage whatever you either missed completely, or didn't hit
with enough shots to inflict enough damage for the FT damage system to
notice it (blackening the paintwork etc. isn't enough to count as a
hull box <g>).

With this image, it doesn't matter much to the game mechanics if your
targetting gear is poor or if it is your beam projectors which are
primitive so the beams themselves disperse and "lose power" (or at
least lose focus, so get less able to inflict damage on the target).
The former forces you to disperse the shots more to get a hit pattern
(so the distance in which the potential number of hits, and thus the
potential damage, is "constant enough" to count as a given number of FT
beam dice gets shorter - ie., the range bands get shorter); the latter
weakens the beams themselves so even though you can get the same number
of *hits* as the "normal" weapon the beams themselves weaken faster
range where the potential damage is "constant enough" to count as a
given number of FT beam dice gets shorter... in either case you end up
with shorter range bands, and in either case your "maximum range" goes
down as well as the "inner" range bands.

But, as I said, it depends entirely on how you visualise the weapon
effects :-/

Regards,

Oerjan Ohlson
oerjan.ohlson@telia.com

"Life is like a sewer.
  What you get out of it, depends on what you put into it."
- Hen3ry