Re: Disruptors (Upgraded to FB rules)

>I'm not sure if I'm in favor of your description.  The way you mark
>damage off is intreaging, however there's enough similarity to the
>present beam systems that I'm wondering how disruptors would add to the
>game system.  Please don't take that as an insult, I tend to be one of
>those KISS types.  Now on to the specific comments...

Actually, they don't skip armor so much as "eat" it at the same rate as
hull points, and actually, the entire reason I did these up was to see
how
the verticle vs. horizontal damage thing would work. Call it an
intellectual exercise.

>I'd move the cost up to mass x3 to keep them in line with normal beam
>batteries.

The reason I made the Mass x 2 call was that on larger ships, they leave
the ship with all its weaponry and other systems for a frighteningly
long
period of time, and are thus not as usefull as beam weaponry in that
case.
On smaller ships, they have the ability to be slightly more damaging
(particaulary if they are heavily armored), but not by much.

>The skipping of armor is quite and advantage vs. armor only ships.  I'm
>not sure that the virtually no threshold checks is enough of a
>disadvantage vs. the skipping of armor.  With the new ship construction
>system from the FB, I believe we'll see a number of ships that depend
>mainly on armor or screens, but not both.  The disruptor as you've
>presented it would put the strong armor philosophy at a big
disadvantage,
>an idea that I'm not in favor of.

I think you may be misunderstanding how the system deals with armor - or
I
didn't express it clearly enough. Say you've got a ship with 4 rows of 4
hull boxes each, and it has an armor factor of 4, meaning that a row of
armor circles sits atop the first row. The disruptor doesn't skip the
armor, it just takes it in stride. So if the ship was hit with a large
volley, say seven points of disruptor damage, the first five would take
out
the first row - not skipping the armor in that row, but treating it like
another row of hull. The last two points would be scored against the
armor
point in the second row, and the first hull box.

The only time when you gain an advantage from this is if a ship has more
armor factors than it has hull boxes per row. That way armor would be
orphaned when the last row of hull baxes was taken out, destroying the
ship.

>How are re-rolls (of sixes) handled?  Like normal beam batteries?

Yup.

Schoon