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

From: Charles Taylor <charles.taylor@cableol.co.uk>

>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.

I'm not particularly in favor of it becuase it doesn't simplify things
_and_
loses flexibility. Every "banked weapon" will have its own firing
profile
and range rules, whereas beams with bridges use the simpler logic of
each to
dictate. My counter example is 3 3-arc Class 3 beams (F/FS/AS, FS/F/FP,
AP/FP/F cross-bridged (each beam connected to the other two). This would
entail quite the writeup as a single bank. But its easy to determine
with
beam and bridge rules.

F arc can fire a single die out to 60" by combining all 3 beams, or 2
dice
out to 48" (with three or two thresholds depending on whether you're
using
the alternate 1 or not.)
FP or FS can fire a single die out to 48" by suitable combinations of 2
beams. Everything closer uses the individual beams.

From: "Brian Bell" <bbell1@insight.rr.com>

>Yes, I intended dropping the extra threshold rolls (it must have gotten
>lost in quick edit) but keep the cascade effect if the bridge is lost.
>If a Class-1 is lost, the bridge acts as 1 class lower. 

I think this could work. Could you write it up as a "classed beam
bridge"
entry for the WDA?

However,  I still don't like the loss of flexibility though, and prefer
multiple bridges. The largest practical bridge array is 3 bridges (50%
failure rate when all are used), which ties 3 beams in the original
concept
or 4 beams in Alternate 1. That's really not so bad on an SSD, as FT
SSD's
are among the least cluttered of all the space games I know.