Re: Beam Weapons

At 03:43 PM 11/23/96 -0500, you wrote:
>The basic beam weapons within the game seem to force the selection of
>the A battery over the B and C due to the range and die advantages. Has
>any tried using different die for the different batteries.

It's an interesting idea, but I'm not sure that I want to add different
die
types to FT as it would slow things down.

I use B and C batteries by mandating their use in my game universe. A's
are
only allowed on capital ships, B's are the largest available to
cruisers,
and C's are used on escorts. What's more, in my Age of Iridium
background
C's are the secondary mount. If a capital ship has A's, they can only
have a
maximum of 4 with any other beam batteries mandated as C's. Cruisers can
have up to 4 B batteries, but the rest must be C's. 

Actually, I go a bit further than that by dictating the ORDER in which
ships
mount batteries. For instance, if a capital ship mounts an A battery for
the
fwd/port/stbd arc and an A battery for the rear/port/stbd arc (I allow
rear
arcs), the ship must mount 4 C batteries before it is allowed to mount
anymore A batteries. Also, I only allow a certain "pattern" of beam
placement. This is because my universe is roughly equated to
pre-dreadnought
warfare.

If anyone is interested, I'll "publish" the full AOI ship design
criteria.

Allan Goodall:	agoodall@sympatico.ca 
"You'll want to hear about my new obsession.
 I'm riding high upon a deep depression. 
 I'm only happy when it rains."    - Garbage