[SS] Reigning in Projectile Damage

[vierasmarius]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Well, if you don't mind blatantly flouting physics, I'd think it would be okay. The thing is that KK weapons really are that powerful so if you're paying lip service to reality you need a reason for people using your vastly-inferior substitute instead.

While it's true that GURPS has a pretty good definition of the damage dealt by X calibre projectile, the SS rules have their own scaling progression for what size of gun is available to what ship. Notably, large ships seem to have disproportionately small projectiles (as discussed in a recent thread about missile battery capacity). Another way to achieve what I'm going for is to speed up the progression of calibre increases, and boost the damage of beam weapons (and starship DR/HP) to match. Yes, to make Space Opera battles work you typically need to make weapons unrealistically weak, or ships unrealistically strong; that seems to be a time-honored genre convention.

You might want to adjust the ammunition prices if you do throw physics out, as a million $ per ton of missile is probably a bit much to pay for munitions that just don't do the same job.

True, I'll need to reexamine the pricing too.