Originally posted by MrMorden:
What you say is true, as far as it goes. However, most of these additional costs are what economists call "sunk costs." In other words, the "additional powerplant" costs and similar costs have already been borne by the PCs. It's not like they have to pay *additional* money to get that capability -- it is part of the value they have already purchased in buying their ship. So why not make use of it?
I guarantee my PCs are concerned with the fact that after the 25th missile launched, their missile rack starts costing them Cr5000 more PER SHOT than a beam laser, for the same damage. Much more so than some vague concept of "wow, we could have bought a smaller powerplant...except that this one was included with the ship."
Add to the above the fact that lasers shoot down missiles but not vice versa, and things are even more out or whack. If there is no additional incentive to purchase missiles, the players will pick a laser every time.
As a DM, I want the PCs to have options, and I also want to tempt them to spend that Cr5K per shot...if they think they can put a bigger hurt on the bad guys (or the good guys, depending on the day and the PCs mood), then they might go for it.
However of all the standard non-military ships the Type-S is the only ship that has excess power capacity intentionally built in. And you trade agility, in that case, for the lasers. The other ships that have excess power do so because their jump capacity is higher than their maneuver capacity, for example the Subsidized Liner, and the Fast Courier (Avenger Enterprises Golden Age Starship 1), both of which are Jump-3 Maneuver 1G, and if a Far Trader has a Maneuver Drive 1 with its Jump 2 drive (I have seen that done both ways.). Depending on the version of Traveller, in general, the other ships that have the power for lasers also have the lasers already. In T20 this is especially the case. (In fact the Mercenary Cruiser is underpowered compared to its CT and MT version.) Now the Liner and Fast Courier do actually have 12 points and 4 points of excess power respectively that doesn't effect agility but other than those two cases I am at a loss to find ships that are normally built with energy to power lasers, instead of being used for something else, included in the design.
Because of the cost of excess power capacity, standard commercial ships do not generally include excess power capacity.
Regardless of how you count it, the overall cost is still quite a bit higher for the Laser than the Missile Launcher. So before you go changing the damage you still have to bear that in mind.
Yes the Players might not like throwing KCr5 at an enemy, but losing 8 tons of cargo per turret will also cause them to gripe and will generally be felt more than the KCr5 per missile, unless they run into a starship battle constantly.
The cost of the excess power required for the lasers has to be taken into account, for true economics of the ship. Looking at it another way, the cost of the power for a sub TL13 ship, adds Cr18,750 to the monthly mortgage per single laser.
So that Triple Laser turret that cost them 8 tons of cargo also costs them an additional Cr56250 per month. (If they are firing 12+ missiles on average per month, then the additional cost for the lasers is worth it.)
Did you have a ship in mind that had excess power that I haven't mentioned?
