Re: [FT] Weapons Cost for firing every other turn

The GZG Digest wrote on 5/18/2005 1:00 AM:
> Date: Tue, 17 May 2005 20:15:22 -0400
> From: "Laserlight" <laserlight@quixnet.net>
> I was thinking that losing
> one gun from a turret wouldn't necessarily mean that you'd lose the
> others, but you'd be more likely to.

There is historical precedent for losing one gun out of a turret, too. 
During the Russo-Japanese War, there were a couple of cases where the 
barrels of 12" guns were hit by enemy fire. This bent the barrel, making

it unusable, but had no effect on the other gun in the turret.

The main reason for having a turret (as opposed to a casement) is to 
give the gun a wider arc under which it can rotate. You mounted multiple

guns per turret because you had an issue with weight (the traverse 
mechanism), space, and line-of-sight. You simply couldn't put 12 main 
guns in their own turrets. It added too much weight and they got in each

other's way. You had to double them up, or triple them up.

None of these issues show up in FT, due to the abstract nature of weapon

placement. You can have a long, skinny ship model and the rules still 
allow you to mount all your weapons to the forward arc. Likewise, we 
really don't know if weapons with multiple arcs are placed in their own 
turrets or separate turrets. This sort of detail is abstracted into the 
game system. When a threshold check takes out three 5-arc B3s, is that 
because all three turrets were taken out, or because they were all in 
one turret and the turret took a direct hit? If one of them gets to fire

again is that because that turret was repaired, or because one weapon of

three in a single turret was repaired? In FT we don't know.

I personally think placing weapons in turrets is below FT's level of 
detail. If you want to do it, you should give the weapon a mass break as

well as a cost break. You then need a mechanism where hitting the turret

is more likely to take out all of the weapons than if they were mounted 
separately, but still have the possibility that only one or some of the 
weapons in the turret are out of commission due to a threshold check. 
Whenever I've gone down the turret route, I find players want to change 
the armour on those turrets, too, which adds additional complications (I

mentioned an armouring system for turrets that I came up with for my 
attempt at an FT Russo-Japanese War set of rules, but it was shot down 
by Oerjan and others as an option in FT).

Allan

-- 

Allan Goodall		http://www.hyperbear.com
agoodall@cmaaccess.com	  agoodall@hyperbear.com