RE: Vertical Damage (was: [FT] nasty idea for spinal mounts)

Taking damage vertically without additional effects (threshold check if
bottom hull box is damaged) is a much less powerful weapon than regular
ones
because it takes MUCH longer to reach the end of a row for a threshold
check.

Example: the target ship has 20 hull boxes (4 rows of 5). A standard
weapon
would have to do 5 points of damage to get a threshold check, but a
vertically damaging weapon would have to do 17 points of damage to get
the
same threshold check.

This is why there was the proposed effect of taking a threshold check
when
the last (lowest) hull box in a column is destroyed by a vertical
damaging
weapon.

-----
Brian Bell
bkb@beol.net	   
-----

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Alex Kettle [SMTP:squawk@csolve.net]
> Sent: Wednesday, August 02, 2000 11:30 PM
> To:	gzg-l@CSUA.Berkeley.EDU
> Subject:	Re: Vertical Damage (was:  [FT] nasty idea for spinal
> mounts)
> 
> Hello all, just a thought on this.
> If you were to mark the damage off of the first undamaged box in each
row,
> with extra damage being applied starting again at the top, wouldn't
this
> tend to weaken the ship rather effectively for follow up attacks with
> regular weapons? As each row now has that many fewer boxes of
structure.
> So 6 points of damage (assuming no armour) would do 2 to first row, 2
to
> second row and 1 to the third and fourth rows.
> Seems as though this weapon wouldn't be to much use in causing
threshold
> checks, but would be great for weakening the structure on heavies to
be
> attacked by a group of lights. Make it a weapon with a long range and
it
> would be a great sniping weapon to open up battles and set up for
attacks.
> Then as a ship lost rows the damage is still applied to the first
> undamaged
> block in each row. So any ship that was down to it's third row, that
took
> 6
> damage would end up taking 3 damage to each remaining row...seems
pretty
> effective to me.
> Just wondering, as we've only played a couple of games so far and this
> seems
> like it would be a pretty useful weapon.
> 
> Later,
> Alexander Kettle,
> Upper Canada Battle Group
>