04-18-2020, 11:34 PM | #21 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Wellington, NZ
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Re: Weighty problem when attempting to reproduce Blaster Cannon canon; Pyramid #3/37
I thought you might be, but +1TL, dame weight, double damage is consistent with other weapon tables (Laser and Pulsar). Plasma weapons don't follow the trend, but then they don't follow the standard UT range scaling either and seem to be a law unto themselves. Ghost Beams don't either - they don't seem to have TL scaling on gun size. A number of those weapons seem to have a typo on their number of cells required, showing as "Fp" when they should be "10Fp".
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Rupert Boleyn "A pessimist is an optimist with a sense of history." |
04-18-2020, 11:40 PM | #22 | |
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: Weighty problem when attempting to reproduce Blaster Cannon canon; Pyramid #3/37
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It doesn't cover having half the damage at the same weight. But that would be quite easy to patch - my preferred way to put it would be that S in the empty weight calculation is 2 for 'early' weapons like TL10 blasters and maybe TL9 lasers. If Phantasm's calculation that the thing generates the TL 10 blaster but not the TL 11 blaster is right, that won't work for lining up UT and Blaster Design though. I'll look at the numbers myself, but not tonight.
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04-19-2020, 12:12 AM | #23 | |||
Join Date: Dec 2013
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Re: Weighty problem when attempting to reproduce Blaster Cannon canon; Pyramid #3/37
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The damage of beam and laser weapons is equal to the cube root of the energy put in, ignoring the flat efficiency percentage. Alternately, the energy needed for a beam or laser weapon is equal to the cube of its damage output, ignoring the flat efficiency percentage. And I can't explain any of the rest until you stop trying to assign units to abstract numbers, and I'm too tired to explain the difference between a linear number and an exponential one. Suffice it to say that cubing damage can get you a linear damage number that represents a real-world value about as much as dice of damage does; that is, not at all. |
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04-19-2020, 12:38 AM | #24 |
Join Date: Dec 2013
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Re: Weighty problem when attempting to reproduce Blaster Cannon canon; Pyramid #3/37
Ah. Perhaps this will be a better explanation.
When converting from energy in the power cell (real-world, more or less, Joules) to shots, the conversion is: Shots = Energy / damage^3 Damage has no exact or definite real-world equivalent; it is an abstract unit. If we have a weapon that converts the entire energy of an energy cell into damage, we can see that: Damage = Energy^(1 / 3) As damage is an abstract unit, the "^(1/3)" part must therefore be an abstract conversion. It would then be equally valid (presuming damage scaled in a linear fashion in GURPS), to use: Linear Damage = Energy We can then convert from Linear Damage to Exponential Damage as such: Exponential Damage = Linear Damage^(1 / 3) Or convert from Exponential Damage to Linear Damage as such: Linear Damage = Exponential Damage^3 Therefore, it is valid to say that GURPS damage is an exponential number. |
04-19-2020, 06:00 AM | #25 | ||
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Wellington, NZ
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Re: Weighty problem when attempting to reproduce Blaster Cannon canon; Pyramid #3/37
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UT sort of does - we know that power cells make more 'bang' when of higher TL, and we know that several higher TL energy weapons get more extra output power than can be accounted for by the more powerful cells. Quote:
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Rupert Boleyn "A pessimist is an optimist with a sense of history." |
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04-19-2020, 09:26 AM | #26 | |
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: Weighty problem when attempting to reproduce Blaster Cannon canon; Pyramid #3/37
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Wait, the TL10 cannon and the TL11 small arms are on the same performance level while the TL11 cannon is twice as powerful? That's going to be a trick to deal with.
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04-19-2020, 10:10 AM | #27 | ||
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Wellington, NZ
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Re: Weighty problem when attempting to reproduce Blaster Cannon canon; Pyramid #3/37
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Rupert Boleyn "A pessimist is an optimist with a sense of history." |
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04-19-2020, 10:33 AM | #28 | |
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: Weighty problem when attempting to reproduce Blaster Cannon canon; Pyramid #3/37
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But the bit where to me that fails to solve the problem is that having the cannon form factor is a dysfunctional distinguishing condition. If TL11 blaster cannons do twice the damage per pound of all other TL11 blasters, there's a strong case for building a 'hand cannon' that has the role and ST rating of a rifle, but is designed as a cannon. It'll be on the bulky side for a rifle (minimum bulk -6) so it won't be able to displace carbines in assault roles, but the huge damage advantage means that you'll easily get more effect for the same weight, ST requirement and cost - and get an extra 5 acc besides. As a battle/sniper rifle it will utterly crush anything actually designed as a rifle...
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04-19-2020, 10:49 AM | #29 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Wellington, NZ
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Re: Weighty problem when attempting to reproduce Blaster Cannon canon; Pyramid #3/37
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I notice that the semi-portable blaster in UT, at 70 pounds and 12d damage does not get the 'cannon' bonus, so if we're trying to emulate UT that's a lower bound.
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Rupert Boleyn "A pessimist is an optimist with a sense of history." |
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04-19-2020, 11:36 AM | #30 |
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: Weighty problem when attempting to reproduce Blaster Cannon canon; Pyramid #3/37
Well at any rate there is actually an easy way to handle this in the system.
Just give weapons that you think should be disproportionately awesome, like the TL11 blaster cannon, the S=0.5 treatment in the Empty Weight calculation. I've put together a partial spreadsheet for the system (because doing work to be lazy is a thing) and yeah, it looks like the blasters are on-model except for that one outlier as far as I've worked the math...
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Tags |
blasters, cannons, houserules, pyramid #3/37, rules |
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