[Curmudgeon]

Originally Posted by Rupert

Funnily enough I've been noddling around with this for some time, too. I have the old "Seldon's" series Fred mentions. And yes, the Terrans are simply richer and a bit more advanced than everyone else, so they make gold-plated ships, and match everyone else's ship types. I doubt they actually know shere some of their ship types actually fit into their naval doctrine.

Below that it's not quite so clear-cut - some Mechantile League ships are better than their Azuriach contemporaries in some areas. The GPR, being Space Soviets, build them cheap and cheerful (but some of their ships have some features that can surprise).

All true, I was simplifying it a bit, but I may have slid into oversimplifying the relative positions.

I was going to treat Nova Guns as some kind of laser and play with Gravitic Focussing options and exact type until I got the range and damage balance I wanted. StarTorps are just missiles. MegaBolts would need some special penetration rules. I was intending to use Spaceships - maybe. Or maybe VE2. Or maybe Fire, Fusion, and Steel (Traveller: The New Era's design rules).

It sounds like you're converting to 4e while I'm converting to 3e. I can't answer for Spaceships but I'm finding that Vehicles is workable but as I've mentioned elsewhere, I'm not going for an exact conversion, partly because even a FP 40 beam weapon is an energy hog. IIRC getting an antiparticle beam (which is what both games claim the Novagun/Sungun/Pulsars are), required a powerplant in the 10 Gj range and I have trouble justifying someone cramming a powerplant that's equivalent to two Niagara Falls generating stations into one starship to power just one weapon, and then do it repeatedly. Fire, Fusion and Steel [FFS] is a good call, though so far my tendency has been to use it as a reverse engineer system for GURPS firearms, i.e. I prefer to design the round being fired first and then build the weapon to fire it, which is FFS's process, and then dump those stats into GURPS to get my weapon.

For movement I was going to go with pseudo-velocity, with the surrounding techno-babble including the TISA drive being at least partly inertialess, thus allowing the massive accelerations without turning everything in the ship into paste.

That seems like a workable choice, though I don't like the way pseudo-velocity drives mess with physics. So says the guy who blithely puts FTL stardrives in his starships. :)

Rainbow lasers lose range and penetration in a vacuum (UT116) - x1/10th range and no penetration modifier. EDIT - only relevant if you're converting all the stats and behaviour to 4e, I suppose (and doing that involves having to make some choices about how to convert lasers).

That's a huge change from 3e where rainbow lasers gain x50 range in vacuum (compared to x10 range for regular ruby lasers) and there is no loss in penetrating power (armor divisor) in vacuum.

Have you experimented with giving the types with high damage and low range one of the extended range options?

Not yet, but as all the weapons I was comparing took the extreme range option to maximize their ranges, I'm doubtful that it would change things by much.

The primary objective in the comparison was to see exactly how the beam weapons compared to each other and whether there were any clear winners in the superiority sweepstakes. Once that analysis was done, it got posted here since I hadn't seen a similar analysis and it might save others a bit of work setting up and running the numbers.

If I were flat out designing my own starships from scratch, I suspect that I might go Dreadnaught-style with nothing but big rainbow lasers, maybe with some smaller rainbow lasers to swat starfighters and provide point defense.

The only other nod to wet navy thinking might be to carry a small horde of starfighters, but there've been enough articles in gaming magazines to suggest that it's not really a feasible strategy unless you make your carrier vessel really sluggish, which isn't something most design rules force on you.