[FT] (long) Thoughts on Spinal Mounts and high class beams

No, not Wave Guns or Nova Cannon,

First, some theory and assumptions:

Any weapon could be considered a spinal mount if it is rigidly built
into the
core of the ships structure. This is only worth doing for cases where
the weapon occupies an appreciable fraction of the mass of the whole
ship.

Such a weapon would be aimed by aiming the whole ship. This could be
handled like Wave Guns and Nova Cannon, that fire down the centerline of
the ship, but consider K-guns, although not strictly spinal mounts (they
are not built into the hull, but are on outriggers) they appear to be
rigidly attached to the hull, but can fire into the entire front arc.
This may be a symptom of the Advanced Drive the KV use, but I think
allowing a spinal mount weapon to fire into anywhere in the front arc
(in range) is a reasonable compromise.
Oh, and they _could_ be mounted backward, firing into the aft arc, but
the usual aft-arc blocking effects of the drive apply.

So, what makes a spinal mount different from a forward facing 1-arc
weapon?

Well, as the weapon is rigidly built into the ships hull, I can see that
there could be a slight saving in mass (the weapon could well be a
structural element, so part of the mass is counted as hull mass instead.
This could make the system harder to repair or replace however.

Using this idea, a spinal mount version of a weapon:

Fires into the Fore arc only.
Has a reduced MASS and COST

For Beam Batteries, the reduction in mass is only apparent for weapons
above Class 3 (Class 1 and 2 beams are too small to be spinal mounts)

Spinal Mount Beam Battery
Class	MASS	COST
3	4	12
4	7	21
5	14	42
6	28	84
7	56	168

As an option, spinal mounts suffer a +1 penalty to repair rules (alter
cost accordingly)

For further MASS reductions:
Slow Rate of Fire, the weapon only fires once every 'n' rounds, divide
the Mass and Cost by 'n'

Exclusive power
The weapon uses all ship power, leaving none for thrust, manoeuvre, or
other weapons and screens (c.f. nova cannon). Divide Mass by 3,
resultant MASS should be at least half the MASS of the carrying ship.
The use of the weapon requires written orders.

Almost Exclusive power
The weapon uses sufficient power that no other weapons can be used (c.f.
Wave Gun). Divide MASS by 2, result should be at least one-third of the
MASS of the carrying ship.

These are suggestions to (hopefully) provoke thought and ideas.
The numbers are at best a rough guess - hopefully someone (Oerjan? :-)
will come up with better ones.
Or, alternatively, show that the whole idea is a dead loss.

On a related subject, I've been thinking that the MASS and COST for high
class beam batteries (B6+) are a bit high. Remember someone mentioned
using class-16 beams? MASS 32,768 each! - are they _really_ worth that
much?

Thinking about it, inspired by a comment from Oerjan, I decided that a
possible measure of a weapons relative 'power' could be gauged by taking
the sum of (damage done at a range band multiplied by area covered by
that range band) - which worked out as a sum of squares. Some more maths
gave me a new MASS formula (for class-3 beams and above) of:

Class x (Class + 1) x (Class x 2 + 1) x 4/85.

This gives the same mass values up to class-5, but somewhat cheaper
masses above that. A class-16 now gets a mass of 422 - a lot less - but
is it now too cheap?

Just more food for thought.

Charles.