[Spaceships] More Weapons at In-Between Sizes?

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by dataweaver

I don't think that's technically legal. Sure, two of the space requirements can be satisfied by non-core spaces in the front and rear sections; but the third must be a center core space; and a spaceship can only have at most one of those. So per the rules for space allocation, a spaceship can only have one Spinal Battery.

And even if it's possible to assign both core spaces to the center hull (and I don't think it is), that would only permit two Spinal Batteries. Three is completely beyond the pale, barring a house rule negating the need for the center space to be core.

If you're using the 'large systems' rule, a large major weapon takes up the same space as a spinal mount, but requires three spaces in one section rather than spacing them out (and it also carries more ammunition than a spinal mount, which seems a bit off).

So you can have two forward-firing big guns by having a spinal and a fixed large major battery. The third requires 'cheating'.

[The_Ryujin]

Ok, so for even quicker in-between weapons:

Take the damage for a SM 5 ship as a baseline.

For beam weapons multiply output by the difference in mass and the damage by the cube root of the difference in mass.

Example: A SM 5 ship has a mass of 30 tons. A SM 5 Major Beam Battery has an output of 10 mj and does 4d. A 360 ton ship would have 12 times the mass which means a Major Beam Battery for it would have a 120 mj output and have a base damage of 4d × 12^(1/3) or 9d+1.

Missiles and Guns are bit trickier. Caliber seems to go up somewhere around the 6.4th root of the ships mass. A SM 13 ship has a 40cm major battery, which is 4 times as much as a SM 5 ships. It weighs 10,000 times as much. The 6.4th root of 10,000 is ~4.22. A S SM 7 ship weighs 10 times as much ans has a 14cm major battery. The 6.4 root of 10 is 1.433. So in most cases is gets pretty close. Though it's off by a little on a few sizes so you might need to adjust the numbers a little.

Damage is linear with caliber. Multiple caliber in CM by 1.5 to get decade scale dice of damage.

Number or shots follows an increase of roughly the cube root of the difference in mass, rounded off to match the SSR table progression of 1, 1.5, 2, 3, 5, 10. A Major Gun Battery for the 360 tons ship in our previous example would have a caliber of ~15cm , would have a base damage of about 7d×3 and hold 160 shots (a missile battery would have double the caliber and damage but hold only 16 shots).

Hope this helps.

[dataweaver]

Some corrections:

1. s/difference in mass/mass ratio/.
2. The SSR table has a 7 between 5 and 10.
3. In Spaceships, a weapon's average damage scales the same way, regardless of what type of weapon it is: it's proportional to the cube root of the mass ratio. The trick is how to translate that into damage dice.