Some questions on Spaceships

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Stormcrow

While this is largely true, the Spinal Battery system tends to speak against an absolute acceptance of this idea. A Spinal Battery is a fixed mount weapon and must certainly be aimed by aiming the ship. The fire control computer would assist in aiming the ship, not any kind of weapon movable independent of the ship's orientation.

Not necessarily. A spinal beam weapon could be aimed by even quite minute deflection of the beam at the aparture. A spinal missile launcher or even gun scarcely needs to be aimed in the first place - note that all projectile weapons do not experience range penalties in Spaceships.

Originally Posted by Stormcrow

And yet not even Spinal Batteries have rules related to Piloting. And if you dedicate enough systems in your ship to have multiple spinal batteries pointing in the same direction, you can and must still, by a strict interpretation of the rules, fire them independently. Again, that may, given the long space combat turns, mean that the ship is changing its facing enough to fire at multiple target one after the other, but then you give up the idea of all your fixed mount batteries firing at the same target simultaneously.

Having more than one Spinal Battery is completely illegal by the building rules. A Spinal Battery has to pass through the core system in the center hull. You can only have one core system in the center hull, so you may only have one Spinal Battery.

Even if the gun was aimed by turning the ship, frankly, Piloting wouldn't enter into it - it's a minuscule angular adjustment that's completely trivial to tell a computer to do (though not necessarily trivial for the computerized maneuver system to execute) and impossible to do manually. The part where Piloting factors into the use of fixed weapons is in placing the ship so that they are oriented to bear on the target.

Originally Posted by Stormcrow

The least change you can enact to make it work is to assume that, like Habitats, Hangars, Open Spaces, Armor, Fuel Tank, and Jump Gate systems, you can combine weapon systems into larger, "single" systems. This is especially true when talking about the Starhawk: it's a generic version of an X-Wing Fighter, and Spaceships page 31 explicitly tells us we can "combine several systems into one" to better fit a fictional spaceship into the rules.

I suspect that was meant in a different sense, like making a reactionless drive that is also a shield, or a weapon battery that is also a mining assembly, rather than deviating from the foundational 20-systems rule.