Re: [FT] WotW #9 Beam Bridge & E/M Sabot

Well, I've had a number of thoughts about Beam Bridges and the E-M
Sabot.

One (actually brought up by Adam) is that probably the easiest way to
represent such a system is simply to have it as one big beam battery,
with the PSB that it is a number of smaller batteries 'bridged'
together.

As a development of this, consider the 'bridged' beams as a group of
beam batteries - for example.

2 1-arc B-3's bridged together as a B-4.

This does damage as follows:

Range	Dice
0-12	don't use bridge so does 6 (2 B-3's)
12-24	ditto so does 4
24-36	ditto so does 2
36-48	use bridge, so does 1

This is almost identical to the damage vs. range profile of a B-4 and a
B-2, except for the 2 extra arcs on the B-2.

Comparing MASS and COST

2x B-3 plus a Beam Bridge is a total of 9 MASS and 28 COST

B-4 plus a 3-arc B-2 is a total of 10 MASS and 30 COST, ok, it is 1 MASS
and 2 COST more, but doesn't threshold and has 2 extra arcs out to 24
mu.

More complex is the case of 2 3-arc B-3s that only share 1 arc.

This case cannot be exactly simulated using just beam batteries, but a
reasonable representation could be, say 1 x 1-arc B-4 + 1x 5-arc B-3
(MASS 16, COST 48), compared with the Beam Bridged system (MASS 13, COST
40) this is a bit more, but does more damage in the combined arc (1
extra dice out to 36 mu) - and does not need to make threshold checks
when fired at long range.

The benefits of doing it this way increase compared with more complex
multi-beam bridge networks :-)

Similar arguments could be applied to the E-M sabot (just use several
pulse torps, perhaps with a house rule to allow them the option of using
a single hit determination roll?)

On a related note, however - what about a 'beam combiner' or
'multi-beam' where several ships can combine there firepower into one
large beam - this is a 'genre' weapon, and one I have seen several times
(and even had described in a SF novel).

I'm not sure how to handle it, except for firing order - where the
'combined beam' gets resolved when the _last_ ship generating it is
activated.

Any thoughts?

Charles