[doulos05]

Ok, guys. I'm of two minds about this so I want to put it to a crew vote. We have two options for armament, a single TL9 Pulse Laser or a single Missile Launcher w/ 5 missiles.

Here are the pros I see for the Missile launcher:
Longer range: With 8.0 Gs of sAccel, we can reach out an touch a target up to 24 hexes (240,000 miles) away. That's farther than we can effectively can (and we'd be shooting at a -8 just due to range, but still). Pulse lasers TL/9 only go to 3 hexes, and they only do full damage a 1 hex.
More damage: Missiles that hit do 12d(10)burning damage, which is more than enough to disable another Hero-class (average damage puts a Hero at -11 dHP).
Slightly easier to hit: As I'm reading the rules, assuming we have Gunner(Missiles)-12, we need a 15 to hit another Hero at max range. It goes up by 1 for every 3 hexes closer it is.
No power demands: Kind of self-explanatory. We only have 8 MW of power to play with. A TL10 Pulse laser uses 10. So we'd have to switch off the sensors to fire the laser (or switch off an engine). A TL9 Pulse Laser only uses 2.5 MW of power, so we could install up to 3 of those before we ran out of power.

Pros of the Pulse Laser:
No Ammo: Missiles are $30,000 a pop. They'll probably end the fight, but at present we could only afford 5. A full load would be 12 per launcher. Meaning assuming we don't get in a fight before we load up to the gills, we need $210,000 to spend on ammo alone. Once the ammo runs out, reloading can only be accomplished out of combat.
Cheaper: We could put another $400,000 in our pockets if we took a Pulse laser ($250,000 for the price difference between the weapon systems + $150,000 for the 5 missiles we have). That allows us to buy some more nice kit for the ship or puts us just $100,000 away from another pulse laser (or just $380,000 away from a missile launcher w/ 1 missile as an emergency backup).
No point defense: Ok, here's the biggie for me. A Pulse laser allows us to take point defense rolls in case the enemy shoots a missile at us. I just showed that an average hit from a missile puts us into disable territory. As it is, we can knock two missiles out of the sky per turn, at the cost of 1 sandcaster canister per missile. Pulse lasers can knock as many out of the sky as they can hit and cost no ammo.

So, what's your vote?
Missile Launcher w/ 5 missiles ($900,000, $30,000 per reload, and 12d(10) @ +(8.0 - their sAccel)/2 Accuracy)
TL9 Pulse Laser ($500,000, 2.5 MW of power, and 3d(5) @ +0 Accuracy)
TL10 Pulse Laser ($500,000, 10 MW of power, and 4d(5) @ +2 Accuracy)

A TL/9 Beam Laser could be had too if we dropped a Sandcaster ($1,000,000, 5 MW of power, and 6d(5) @ +0 Accuracy), but that seems really risky to me, having only 1 sandcaster means we can only protect ourselves against 1 missile OR 1 ship per turn. Granted, we'd only be $100,000 away from buying the second sandcaster, but still...