[Spaceships] Can Spinal Battery be bundles of smaller weapons?

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

The spaces it uses are the only difference between a Spinal Mount for one SM of ship and a Major Battery for a ship of +! SM. You will note that making a ship +1 SM (with all other factors being equal) does not make that larger ship 3x as long. Simple geometry would make it 1.45x in each dimension.

I don't think that observation lends itself to the conclusion you're coming to (that an SM +n Spinal Battery is the same weapon as an SM +n+1 Major Battery). A Spinal Battery is, by definition, nearly as long as the ship itself. If we compare an unstreamlined SM +5 ship with a Spinal Battery to a streamlined SM +6 ship with a Major Battery, the first ship is roughly 15 yards long, while the second ship is up to 40 yards long. This most extreme case does allow for the same weapon that is a Spinal Battery in the SM +5 ship to be a (fixed) Major Battery in the SM +6 one (it's a little longer than 1/3rd the length of the latter ship, but close enough for Spaceships level of resolution). If we match up the streamlining, or reverse the situation, however, things change - a 15 yard battery is going to be difficult to fit within the first third of a 20 yard ship (both unstreamlined), as is a 30 yard battery on a 40 yard ship (both streamlined), and don't even get me started on trying to fit a 30 yard battery onto a 20 yard ship (smaller streamlined, larger unstreamlined).

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Again, I think this is rules-lawyering. trying to exploit an abstraction Spaceships makes for the sake of simplicity to get around that simplifying assumption.

I don't think it's really a case of rules-lawyering so much as just trying to get a little better resolution out of the system. Note if he were dealing with anything other than launchers (which are bizarrely unable to be RF/VRF), there likely wouldn't even be a problem - an RF Spinal Battery laser, for example, could easily be described as being 10 weapons (each 1/10th normal mass) mounted next to each other.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Varyon

Note if he were dealing with anything other than launchers (which are bizarrely unable to be RF/VRF), there likely wouldn't even be a problem -r.

IF RF launchers were allowed youi'd have to start with a 32 cm one and for VRF you'd have to start with a 64 mm and all because there are no missiles smaller than 16 cm. An SM +5 fighter has to use a Spinal Mount to carry a 24 cm missile.

Now in Ve2 I once designed a space fighter with a bank of 25 mm missiles because the TL could make nukes that small. I didn't have any arbitrary limits on how many of them I could mount either. I could have as many as my budget allowed and the size of my engine made practical.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

IF RF launchers were allowed youi'd have to start with a 32 cm one and for VRF you'd have to start with a 64 mm and all because there are no missiles smaller than 16 cm. An SM +5 fighter has to use a Spinal Mount to carry a 24 cm missile.

My point was more that, with RF being possible to describe as ten fire-linked -2 SM weapons, one could postulate an SRF (Semi-Rapid Fire) that is x3 to RoF and -1 to SM, which could be described as three fire-linked -1 SM weapons (which is what Pectus Solentis appears to be trying to make). That would certainly allow an SM+5 fighter to use an SRF Spinal Mount for 16 cm missiles, having 3 launching tubes.

Now, I'm not entirely opposed to Spaceships limiting missiles to 16 cm or larger - it may well be the author decided the sort of drives such missiles would rely on couldn't be miniaturized smaller than that (by weight, 16 cm missiles (0.07 ton) are between SM -1 (0.03 ton) and SM +0 (0.1 ton) spaceships). But I don't think disallowing the various forms of Rapid Fire on launchers makes a lot of sense, beyond perhaps not wanting to have a clause of "launchers cannot be made smaller than 16 cm," particularly as, with the Smaller Systems optional rule, the only case where this can restrict a ship's RoF is for a Spinal Battery (in all other cases, you can just make a Major Battery into a Medium Battery, Medium into Secondary, Secondary into Tertiary, or Tertiary into some Smaller Systems Tertiaries).

That said, if you want to charge extra for Smaller System Spinal Batteries (on account of these being designed to order, and only being usable for these ships rather than potentially mountable on other vessels), that could be an option. The polity using the Venatrix Interceptor probably produces enough of such fighters to avoid that surcharge due to volume, but perhaps not. Of course, this is a digression from normal Spaceships rules, which don't seem to change the price of a vessel and its components regardless of if it's a single custom design or one of millions of identical ships.