What works? How are ships and vehicles armed?
- Thread starter Badenov
- Start date
AnotherDilbert
SOC-14 1K
Of course you can have spare drives.
But, the problem with percentage drives is that you can't have more than 100% in a ship... A Tigress with duplicate drives would be at ~115% (even at J-3).
Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
Depends on the edition, and broad interpretations.
In TNE/FF&S, Tigress builds tend to start running out of surface area
Condottiere
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Is that why they added that plug sticking out their rear?
That's been in there since it first showed in Supplement 9, but it's certainly a good reason in TNE for it to be there.
Spinward Flow
SOC-14 5K
The "hat" on the opposite side from the Meson-T are the hangar bays and launch tube/recovery bays for the organic fighter complement.
Funny thing is that seeing the image in this orientation has SERIOUS Pac Man vibes ...
Reminds more of something from "Heavy Metal".
Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
More likely Death Star.
It's a bow.The "hat" on the opposite side from the Meson-T are the hangar bays and launch tube/recovery bays for the organic fighter complement.
Funny thing is that seeing the image in this orientation has SERIOUS Pac Man vibes ...
So... Ms. Pac Man.
The Ship UWP is 3 lines in CT High Guard (either ed). Line 1 is the ratings, line two is for batteries of that rating, and line 3 is how many can be brought to bear on a given target. Only unarmed or single battery per type ships can do single line.
While MT retained the single spinal, unlike CT, you can have all three categories (Spinal, Bays, Turrets) per weapon type. But it also makes the official UCP a minimum half-page...
Badenov
SOC-12
While it certainly makes sense that you can have all three of a type in a ship, a half page seems like overkill for a super-summary, which is what a USP is. Why not just push the USP just a little and turn a single digit into 3 digits [SBT] per weapon. It's not even applicable to all weapons (in CT don't know about MT); Lasers only come in Turrets and Spinals are only applicable to Mesons and Particle Beams.
AnotherDilbert
SOC-14 1K
The USP is difficult to read as it is, adding ten or so more digits wouldn't help.
But sure, we could easily make a more compact summary for MT ships.
Badenov
SOC-12
Well, yeah. It's difficult to read as it is, how much worse is a few extra characters. I need a decoder to read them as they are. Adding digits just means a new decoder for me.
AnotherDilbert
SOC-14 1K
Sorry to be petty, but the USP is only the first line of up to about five lines in LBB5'80.
Only one line, the USP itself, was specified in LBB5'79, as there can only be one battery of each kind.
LBB5'80, p50:
The USP is defined on IN Form 3 (page 37) and page 52:
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mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
I have been proposing a longer USP for several decades now.
AA-0000000-000000-00-0000-0000-0
Type-hullstats-defences-spinal-bay-turret-squadrons
I'm not exactly sure why they bothered with fighter squadrons on the USP...
AA-0000000-000000-00-0000-0000-0
Type-hullstats-defences-spinal-bay-turret-squadrons
I'm not exactly sure why they bothered with fighter squadrons on the USP...
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Badenov
SOC-12
I'm not even sure how many fighters are in a squadron. How do you tell?
Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
I thought default was ten.
Spinward Flow
SOC-14 5K
(original) Type = 2 characters
(yours) Type = 2 characters
(original) Hullstats = 7 characters
(yours) Hullstats = 6 characters
(I'm presuming a typo)(original) Defenses = 6 characters
(yours) Defenses = 6 characters
Although, ideally you would want to include codes for defenses available at tech levels above 15, so black globe and white globe get different USP code entries (for example). Granted, at TL=7-15 those codes would "always be zero" ... but still ... you want to reserve space for them in the USP code format in order to prevent Premature Optimization™.
(original) Spinal = N/A
(yours) Spinal = 2 characters
I would however point out that it's something of an ... artifact ... of LBB5 (79 and 80) ... that there are no spinal mounts for lasers or fusion guns. I know that fusion guns are (conceptually) "flamethrowers in SPAAAAAaaaaaaacceeeee!" but being able to have "gigantic fusion weapons" that can be pointed at stuff in the spinal mount category just seems like such a no-brainer (particularly in hindsight). However, such an expansion of spinal mount options really ought to exclude plasma guns.
That doesn't even include such options a Disintegrators and Jump Projectors at tech levels above 15 (which I presume would be spinal mounts?).
(original) Bay = N/A
(yours) Bay = 4 characters
If you're going to be rewriting the USP code sequencing, it would probably be best to separate plasma guns from fusion guns, so they each get their own code entry, rather than combining them under a single code value as "energy weapons" like the original USP code did. Likewise, I see no reason why lasers "must" be consigned to "turrets only" and there are no laser bays available.
This is a bay sized weapon (with multiple gunners inside), not a (single man) turret sized weapon ... and it's laser based, not meson or particle accelerator or plasma/fusion.
So I'm thinking that expansion of the quantity of codes for bays to greater than 4 ought to be warranted.
(original) Turrets = N/A
(yours) Turrets = 4 characters
Again, I would argue that Plasma Guns ought to be "broken out" from the category of "energy weapons" to differentiate plasma guns from fusion guns, which would result in 5 character being needed here. Additionally, if you want to account for the possibility of meson gun turrets at TL=17+ there ought to be a code here for that as well. If exotic high tech weapons such as disintegrators can (eventually) be miniaturized down into turrets, then there ought to be a USP code "space" reserved for them as well in the turret section.
(original) Fighter Squadrons = 1 character
(yours) Fighter Squadrons = 1 character
It truly was an oversight that the "encoding" for Fighter Squadrons was so poorly explained when the USP was introduced. Ideally speaking, the Fighter Squadrons encoding ought to be 2 characters
- Quantity of sub-craft per squadron
- Quantity of squadrons
If you had three squadrons of 10 fighters, that would be encoded as "A3" ... and so on.
This would then allow squadron sizes of something other than 10.
A starship with 3x Modular Cutters (for example) could be encoded as having "13" ... which would be 3 small craft that operate independently of each other (squadron size: 1, squadron quantity: 3).
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
No idea which is why I consider it odd that they retained it.
It almost had a use in HG79...
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