Re: [Spaceships] Combat Examples?
 

I'm not really sure why you wouldn't be able to mount multiple weapons in the same turret housing. It was done historically, and it's a common concept in fiction.

So yeah, for so many reasons, I'm going to continue ignoring that rule.

Re: [Spaceships] Combat Examples?
 

Seems reasonable, though I'd suggest that multiple turreted weapons sharing a turret should be a design choice rather than freely clustering turret weapons the way you do fixed weapons.

(Also, can't resist pointing out that a triple-mount is almost guaranteed to be worse than a three single mounts, except for needing fewer gunners.)

Re: [Spaceships] Combat Examples?
 

Do you say that because of RoF issues? And does that change if you have three Improved Lasers in there, with double the RoF?

Re: [Spaceships] Combat Examples?
 

Even if you have things arranged so that 3x RoF results in getting +2 to hit, it's usually not going to increase your chances to hit compared to taking three separate shots. The huge recoil on guns and the PD rules make it even more unfortunate for them, but in most cases I expect beams to do better separated too.

Re: [Spaceships] Combat Examples?
 

Sure, and sure. I just don't care enough to roll the dice three times in these example combats, when rolling a single attack at RoF x3 is faster to type. Yes, I'm getting less hits, but no, I don't really mind.

At the table, in competition play, without needing to take notes? I'd roll the attacks separately.

Re: [Spaceships] Combat Examples?
 

It's not as though there is any system that allows a single person to control multiple turrets. The B-29 is completely fictional.

Re: [Spaceships] Combat Examples?
 

Well, as far as Spaceships knows!

I'm not actually sure how I'd model that system in GURPS. The player-orientation friendly version would be to simply use Gunner skill and aggregated RoF from however many turrets a gunner is currently operating. But I'm dubious of that if the machine is calling the shot...

Re: [Spaceships] Combat Examples?
 

Well, let's look at some real-world reasons for multiple-weapon turrets. Usually there are two questions:
A) "Why not use one bigger weapon?"
B) "Why not mount each weapon in its own turret?"

* (A) Design, development, and other fixed costs. It may not be cost-effective to have a weapon in every size range, but instead to use multiple weapons of the smaller size for intermediate roles. So, if you wanted more firepower than one .50 cal (12.5mm), but didn't want or need to step up to a 20mm or 30mm design, you used two .50 cal rather than having to develop a 15mm-ish design.

* (A) Logistics, supply chain, and running costs, particularly ammo and other consumables (barrels or liners, etc.). Particularly in the case of upgrades and refits; if a cruiser already had a variety of .50 cal mounts for AA, upgrading them to twin .50 mounts doesn't change your ammo logistics much (pretty close to doubling your rate of fire while halving your duration of fire, which turned out to be needed for kamikaze defense). You use the same boxes, pallets, store rooms, ammo dumps, etc. as you have been all along.

* (A) Redundancy and reliability. If a single-weapon mount fails (jams, overheats) or is damaged by the enemy on a design that can only realistically have one turret covering some angle, you have a hole in your fire.

* (A) Technological limitations. At some point, you just don't *have* a bigger weapon. This might be something you can fix eventually with a research program ("We need better metallurgy!"), or it might be a supply limitation ("Laser crystals simply don't come any larger!"), or various other reasons; but at some point in designing capital ships you typically hit the point where one single instance of the best weapon available is not enough. Even if it is today, what if your enemy deploys a vehicle tomorrow with two? It almost always takes less research and development to put in multiple copies of an existing (or just-developed) weapon than to develop an entirely new one that is more powerful.

* (A) Dispersal of fire. In situations where single hits are capable of causing significant damage, but fire control is not enough superior to physics limitations and/or defensive measures that hits are common, the deliberate dispersion of a multiple-weapon mount controlled by a single targeting suite may result in a higher rate of effective hits than individual weapons. Whether a 4x 40mm Bofors AA trying to hit an incoming aircraft, or a 3x 16"/50 trying to bracket a hostile BB in heavy sea state, there are frequently situations where it's more important to increase one's chance of hitting once via dispersal of fire.

* (A,B) External design constraints. Perhaps your ship has to fit through a canal, or a stargate, or some existing ship's launch tubes, or some other limitation that controls certain dimensions more strongly than others. Perhaps streamlining for water, air, interstellar medium, or hyperspace efficiency requires certain critical dimensions; typically, a ship that is long and pointy. The Iowa-class BB had to both fit through the Panama canal, and meet certain speed targets; there's no way a single 6x 16"/50 forward turret would have fit, and they didn't have any single more powerful weapons. So, 2x3 forward, with one super-firing, was the best fit; in this case the dead zone from the superstructure meant that the turrets didn't loose very much more coverage angle.

* (A,B) Continuity of fire. In difficult fire-control situations, being able to maintain "continued fire" with multiple smaller weapons may be more likely to score hits than fewer, larger shots with a much lower RoF. In circuit terms, this has to do with the feedback parameters of your closed-loop feedback compared to its tuning weights, and controls how fast you converge on a changing input, or even whether you do at all.

* (A,B) Mitigation of side effects, or leveling of surge. Two obvious examples would be recoil in a projectile weapon, and capacitor charging in an energy weapon. In many cases design of a support system (recoil buffers and reinforcing, electrical supply harness, etc.) has to handle the peak net load; a staggered recoil or charge cycle may result in considerably less overhead for a multiple-weapon turret than twice that of a single one, or of one sufficiently larger weapon.

* (B) Commonality of high-cost components. This could be human gunners, analog fire-control computers, targeting AIs, coaxial fire control sensors, or any other situation where in a particular setting, the weapon *accessories* are a significant expense concern in some critical way (cost, mass, volume, power, cooling, etc.) compared to the weapon itself. In the previous cruiser example, putting more trained gunners on board has all sorts of knock-on costs (more bunks, more heads, more kitchens, more food stores, more oil to lug all of that around, etc.); whereas simply giving each existing gunner a paired weapon to manage has far less infrastructure overhead.

* (B) Field of fire. A single turret with N weapons, optimally placed, can cover an arc of fire with all N weapons; individual turrets can't fire through each other, and so there will be sub-arcs that you have at best N-1 weapon coverage, and possibly less. This is considerably worse in 2D than 3D (and probably even less so in 4D or higher dimensions, for those very few of you doing native-hyperspatial weapons design; on the flip side, Flatland turret design is problematic.) In situations where the turrets are a significant fraction of the vehicle's volume, this tends to become more of a problem.

* (B) Armor and other surface-area defenses. To a *very* rough approximation, in many settings weapons take up mostly volume with some surface area, ammo takes up volume alone, and armor, force screens, etc. take up mostly surface area. To get the same protection (thickness of armor, etc.) over N separate turrets of volume V takes up considerably more mass/power/etc. than getting that same protection over a single turret with N*V volume, even if there's some inefficiency (N*V)+k.

Try to imagine an Iowa-class BB with nine separate 16"/50 turrets; where would they go? How would they shoot around each other? How many more tons of armor would you need to get the same level of protection? When you have to consider fitting through a canal (stargate, etc.) and being "fast" on top of all that, it's a complicated design optimization issue... but throughout the history of deployed turreted warships from the USS Monitor onward, the *usual* answer has been turrets with 2-4 weapons each for ships with significant numbers of heavy guns.

Re: [Spaceships] Combat Examples?
 

I would like rules for mounting weapons in a single turret. THe way I see it, any given single turret of a given SM is a single very large gun in an appropriately housed turret. As a design option, you can replace a single battery of any size with a triple mount of an SM-1 weapon system. So, if I'm SM+15 and I have a Medium battery normally with 3 300 GJ beams, I can replace one of those with a double/triple/quad mount of 100 GJ beams.

Of course, all that really is is the completely standard Smaller Systems rule in action for weapons, right? So, maybe this kind of detail is simply beyond GURPS Spaceships resolution.

OTOH, I see the point--I'd like to be able to mount weapons in turrets to get the RoF bonus. That's an easy enough house rule, I"ll just "ignore the RAW" like Mark is doing.

Re: [Spaceships] Combat Examples?
 

I added to takes on the "corvettes versus a strike carrier" scenario to my blog:
http://noschoolgrognard.blogspot.com...vs-strike.html
http://noschoolgrognard.blogspot.com...strike_21.html
(the ship designs for these examples are here http://noschoolgrognard.blogspot.com...s-bricriu.html)

The first version was played out at 3 minute turns, and was something of a disaster.

The second version was played out with 1 minute turns, and was just painful and sad.

My final conclusion was that the default dHP scaling in Spaceships may be realistic, but it isn't fun to game. In the future, I'm almost certainly going to use the "HP and Weight: an Alternate Approach" scaling from Pyramid #3.34, p25, which would scale dHP with the square root of weight and dramatically increase the dHP of the larger ships.