Re: [FT] Should all Beams fire at fighters/ordinance?

--- Richard and Emily Bell <rlbell@sympatico.ca>
wrote:
> 
...
> The simple reason is that the power required to slew
> a gun mount
> increases with the square of the mass.  For directed
> energy weapons, the
> method of aiming the beam may vary, but the power to
> slew the beam will
> probably still be proportional to the square of the
> output energy
> (physics is funny that way)....

Doesn't that depend on what kind of mount you're
talking about? If you're dealing with something
that looks like it belongs on the Yamato, then
yes. But lasers and electronics aren't necessarily
heavy, so the weight might be negligible, or at
least pretty light. Also, some designs (like the
collimeter phaser on the dish of the 1701D) 
don't require any motion of any kind and thus
could easily target anything in it's arc instantly.

Now I don't know what kind of mounts are being
used in full thrust, but I don't remember big
obvious gun mounts on the full thrust miniatures
(not many anyway). So, without some information
about the weight and mechanism we don't really
know how fast these guns are to traverse. Since
the rules specify type 1 beams only, that is a
piece of evidence that favors your interpretation.

Perhaps it would require some higher tech level
to have the kinds of beam mounts star fleet 
ships have (and maybe that would explain why
they might be able to fire any of their beams
at small objects instead of just the small ones).

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