RE: 3 arc cost

On Thu, 11 Dec 1997, Tim Jones wrote:

> If you take a WWII battleship turrent as
> a baseline. Most of these had a three 
> arc field or fire, but you payed the one
> off mass cost of the turret once. A
> more fixed mount weapon didn't pay
> for the mass cost of the turret but 
> had a more limited field of fire.
> 
> So I would say any multi-arc weapon 
> pays a single mass cost, which is for
> the machinery to point it into the multiple
> arcs.
> 
> As A beams are bigger than C-B then
> the mass/cost  of the A turrent should be
> significantly greater. 

I basically agree, but I think you have made an important 
omission in your reasonings:

Most of the dreadnought era battleship PRIMARY turrets had 3-arcs. The
secondary and tertiary turrets more often than not DIDN'T (the Yamato
design is a notable exception, placing 6" secondaries on top of primary
turrets for best possible field of fire). 

Why?

For the same reason none of the ships have a "tank-style" 4-arc turret:
You can fit only so many turrets on a ship before they start interfering

with each other.

3 or 4 centerliners with "3 arcs" for main guns with secondaries
littered
where they happened to fit was just found to be the best choice (though
the WWI-era experiments were very interesting and neat looking ships --
by
WWII everyone's battleships looked pretty much alike). After that point,
people started widening the turrets or mounting bigger guns. 5 or more 
turrets just wasn't optimal anymore.

Sky Galleons of Mars has a nice simple system to show this effect, but
it's best suited to gunship -level. Ironclads & Ether Flyers had a
considerably more cumbersome system to allow multiple turrets. 

Yeah, space is 3D even if your board isn't and so on. But still there's
a 
limit to how many full arc mounts you can fit on a hull.

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