[Spaceships] Can Spinal Battery be bundles of smaller weapons?

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

I believe that spinal batteries wereeffectively an early attempt to represent what would eventually become the larger systems rule.

No, they were a representation of the spinal mounts from Traveller and other SF games and the odd book. Unfortunately aside from having a sometimes more useful systems layout, they are worse than a 'larger system' Major Battery if they consume munitions, because they hold less.

A more elegant solution would be using a +1 SM front section main weapon battery. For example, a classic science fiction SM+9 gunboat may have a SM+10 main battery in the front section, a SM+10 fusion reactor in the center section, and a SM+10 reactionless drive in the rear section. The remainder of the systems may be a control room, an engine room, a fusion reactor, a habitat, a hanger bay, a tactical sensor/comm array, two main weapon battery turrets, and three armors, all at SM+9.

That's probably a bad idea, because those SM+10 systems aren't much harder to disable than a SM+9 system, but disabling any part of them brings down the whole system. Three SM+9 reactors and engines are thus better than one SM+10 system.