Re: Beam Batteries and Honor Harrington

At 10:51 AM 10/14/96, Alex Williams wrote:
> > In my experience, broadside ships are lethal - if they manage to
>keep the
> > enemy in the fire-arc of their broadside. Small attack ships (eg, a
DD
> > with lots of forward-arc B batteries) are lethal - as long as they
point
> > towards their target. In a single arc, broadside weapons will win
out if
> > the ship fires into more than one arc simultaneously; but a ship
with
> > three-arc weapons can concentrate more fire into one arc.
>
> Personally, I /like/ broadsides ships to have some sort of `advantage'
> over just mounting everything 3-arc or forward.  Using the right
> tactics, broadsides convoys flanked with some quick-turning escorts
> can lay down devestating fire over an area.
>
> Mind you, this from someone that enjoys Leviathan.  :)

I always thought it was a shame that Leviathan had such great ship
designs and art, and such lame rules...

Broadsde ships would also work very well for David Weber's "Honor
Harrington" series. Any rules that encourage that make FT work even
better for a set of Honor Harrington (HH) rules.

in the HH novels we have,

* an option for ships to become invulnerable to enemies by rolling ship.

* active and passive EW and anti-missile systems. All ships can plug
into the 'tactical data net' and share point defense systems.

* missile ranges orders of magnitude higher than beams

* a strong emphasis on deception tacics by winning admirals

* operations large enough that lightspeed becomes a severely limiting
factor in communications and detection.

* An obvious need for morale rules

I'm just getting through the books for the second time. Another pass
for research and indexing will be necessary before I can seriously
start writing rules. In the meantime, I'll leave you all with these
thoughts.

Michael Carter Llaneza
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1991-1950
http://www.hypnotic.com/
Devolution is very real to me.