Re: FT-quick number crunching needed

BIF wrote:

>>>I am after some input for the grasers, [...]
>>
>>HHverse grasers are good at ripping through *armour*, but they seem to
be 
>>just as vulnerable to sidewalls as the lasers are. Are you using FT's 
>>"screens" to represent sidewalls, or do you include the effect of the 
>>sidewalls into the ships' armour instead?
>
>The armour piercing effect of said graisers is what sent me looking
down 
>the route of the k gun/mkp mechanics. Sidewalls will be represented  as

>standard on every warship for free (level 0, no effect), with bigger
ships 
>having sheild generators to represent hevier sidewalls (upto 2, as fb 
>construction rules). Civilian ships will have no sidewalls, and a ship 
>with no sidewalls (civ or battledammaged warships) will take dubble 
>dammage (as will end on shots up the kilt/down the throth*).

Not just "no screen", then? Makes sense for the setting; "up-the-kilt"
etc. 
shots always seem to inflict FAR more damage than shots that had to go 
through sidewalls first.

Could be a bit difficult to tell when a small warship with "level-0" 
sidewalls has lost its sidewall if there's no explicit sidewall
generator 
to lose, though - it might be worthwhile to represent the free "level-0"

sidewall generators as explicit systems on the SSD too so they can be
lost 
in threshold checks.

>Another question, for each 5% mass, you gain 2 screen generators (one
for 
>each sidewall). Would you consider this unbalanced?, considering that
you 
>are only covering 2 arcs with each and doubbling dammage throgh the
open ends?

That should be OK - you get a bit more redundancy since you can Roll
Ship 
to present an undamaged sidewall, but with the double damage for "naked"

arcs you won't always have time to do that. Similarly you could
represent a 
pair of broadside Laser batteries by buying one each 3-arc and 1-arc 
Pulser-C (total of 5 Mass), and then move one arc from the 3-arc to the 
1-arc so you get 2 2-arc weapons instead for those 5 Mass.

***
>I am building a HH style ships, and am using MT missiles as primary
weapons,

Using the launcher/magazine variant in the WDA, then? (If not, you
should <g>)

***
Back to the HHverse grasers:

>These weapons would need to have a 2 arc version, and a 1 arc vesion
(to 
>represent broadside and chaisers), with the 1 arc being more powerful.

I think it'll be less confusing if the 1- and 2-arc versions both
inflict 
the same damage - if you want your chaser armament to be more powerful, 
simply use a larger weapon in the chaser mounts!

Since these weapons only have a range of 12mu, they're going to be quite

small - except for the "L" version they're too small to pay for the 
difference between 1- and 2-arc versions with a Mass difference, so
instead 
I'd make the 1-arc version cost 3xMass while the 2-arc one costs 4xMass.

I'd also shift the damage values for the larger weapons a bit upwards to

make them a full Mass point better than the next smaller variant:

Rough mass and damage ratings:

Size:	Damage: Mass
S	3		1
M	5		2
H	7		3
L	10		4

Cost:
1-arc version: 3xMass
2-arc version: 4xMass

They're degraded more by level-1 and -2 sidewalls than the lasers are,
and 
except for the "S" they're not quite as good for anti-missile work; but 
their (much) better armour penetration should compensate for that.

The Mass and damage values above make the "H" version somewhat
underpowered 
compared to the "M" and "L" - ideally it should inflict 7.5 pts/hit
instead 
of 7 :-/ It also makes the "L" able to punch through even 4-layer SDN 
armour with ease and gut a destroyer with a single hit; this might be a
bit 
over the top, but then again the biggest HHverse grasers do seem to gut
DDs 
pretty easily.

Hope this helps,

Oerjan
oerjan.ohlson@telia.com

"Life is like a sewer.
  What you get out of it, depends on what you put into it."
-Hen3ry