[SG] firing weapons on the move

Allan, I'm gonna take a moment and play Devil's 
Advocate. 

You (and laserlight) cite several reasons for 
penalizing a vehicle firing on the move:

1) spotting
2) unmodelled terrain obstruction
3) partial turn visibility from shooter to target
4) game balance / trade off

Let me approach these indivdually:

1) spotting
If spotting is subsumed in fire combat, then yes, 
I'd have to agree that this was a somewhat 
reasonable penalty. However, I myself perfer to 
maintain discrete spotting mechanics as it 
works a bit better (people don't shoot at things 
they haven't spotted, nor do they randomly 
lose track of units they knew about). But if you 
subsume spotting in the shooting rolls, I'll 
concede this.

2) unmodelled terrain
You suggest that unmodelled terrain may cut 
target visibility. Why do we never have this 
problem when our units stop otherwise? Since 
we don't, I don't particularly think it is fair to 
impose it. My feeling is if it isn't significant 
enough to appear on the board, it isn't 
significant enough to have in-game impact. I 
think if you used this theory to justify an upshift 
while moving, you'd be using a double 
standard. The "insignificant" terrain would only 
have significance to moving units, but not to 
others.... that seems wrong to me. 

3) partial visibility of enemy unit
One argument holds that you might move in 
such a way as to only have visibility to an enemy 
unit for part of the move. Fine, except that if we 
assume the turn is a continous process where 
really things are happening all at once, this 
could be argued for most situations, not just 
this one case. Also, there may be plenty of 
moves where this is not at all the case and that 
the enemy is in plain sight the whole move. 
Now, if you wanted to argue for a modifier for 
brief target exposure and apppy it across the 
board, I'd say it might be thorny to do but 
reasonable. But certainly I think here again 
you'd be applying a double standard to just hit 
vehicles on the move with a modifier here. 

4) Game trade offs
This argument also is acceptable. It introduces 
a bit of a choice to the game, which is 
worthwhile.

Given that I use explicit spotting, the only one of 
these arguments that I could feel comfortable 
with is #4. 

Also, as an aside: Thanks for pointing out I 
screwed up the open shift (don't do it very 
often). I thought the cover shift was a closed 
shift and that was given as an official Q&A 
answer by Mike Elliot, but I might be mis-
remembering. 

---------------------------------------------
Thomas Barclay
Co-Creator of http://www.stargrunt.ca 
Stargrunt II and Dirtside II game site

No Battle Plan Survives Contact With Dice.
-- Mark 'Indy' Kochte