Spaceships: "improved" guns?

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

You can not actually build an Iowa-class with Spaceships. It violates the rules for gun size. The ship is SM+12 by mass yet that SM only allows 32 cm guns while the Iowa has 40 cm main guns. You certainly can't have 9 Spinal Mounts.

Wikipedia isn't entirely reliable, but it notes displacement of a fully-loaded (Spaceships stats are based on fully-loaded weight) Iowa-class as 57,000 tons, which if I remember the Spaceships tables right (from calculating that an SM 0 ship would weigh 0.1 tons) that puts it between SM+13 (30,000) and SM+14 (100,000), leaning more toward +13. Of course, we're still running into the issue that those 40 cm guns weigh (again, according to Wikipedia) 0.2% of the ship's total mass, not the 5% SS assumes, but I don't think that number includes the turret, so maybe it works out?

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

After some reflection I believe the Improved option is not a rules viable choice. With a Beam weapon you're giving up something such as using a UV laser with armor divisor (2) instead of an X-ray model with a (5) to get the higher ROF.

That's because it's an Improved version of old tech.

With a Gun you wouldn't be giving up anything.

That's kind of what I was thinking, and it's why I suggested +2 to TL and Conventional Guns having a "base" of TL 7. I think so long as the next "level" of gun (Conventional->EMag->Grav) is available, allowing for the lower one to be improved would work out.