Quote:
Originally Posted by Varyon
The same place you get the long, not-as-skinny weapon systems for a typical Spinal Battery? It's not like a spaceship designer goes to the local Blasters R Us to pick up such a thing for the vessel they're building - rather, such would be built to the specifications the design team decided on, just like the thrusters and similar. Many of the components in a spaceship are likely designed specifically for that ship design, and Spinal Batteries are certainly going to be such a component.
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That may be the case, but it doesn't have to be the case. If we look at real modern weapon systems, it's quite common for a new type of ship, tank, or airplane to be designed around off-the-shelf available weapons. (And sometimes other major subsystems, but weapons maybe more than most.)
Spinal batteries are possibly more likely than other mounts to use a specifically designed weapon due to how big and integrated a part of the ship they are. On the other hand, I don't really buy SS6's view that spinal weapons can be treated as modular and swapped out easily - if you build a ship literally around a new weapon that turns out to be a lemon in service, I suspect you'd find that very hard to exchange it for something more satisfactory.