I think you may be overthinking things a little.
All Piercing does is simply reduce the number of saves a targeted ship may be entitled to.
Sometimes piercing weapons will benefit a firing ship more than others, as mc has shown, based on what the original save of the target is.

There are several ways to make a weapons battery more effective.
* Adding dice rolled (in effect more hits)
* Adding damage caused per hit (in effect more hits)
* Accurate (in effect more hits)
* Piercing (less saving by the target, so in effect more hits)

You'll notice a trend here. 

Kevin

I prefer simpler designs, so I like it.
I'm not sure what the "RT" arc is, though, unless it's the opposite of "TR"? I don't think it's in my copy of the rules.

If that's the case, my only recommendation would be to consider slightly more restricted arcs for the secondaries, such as the "PP" and "SS." With the ranges on your weapons, you shouldn't have any problem keeping prospective targets on your broadsides, so the slightly more restricted arcs would be a slight cost savings, or allow for a few more secondary dice.

With no ECM or shields you're relying on your armor to slow down internal damage, so having at least as many armor boxes (or more) as hull is a good thing.

Kevin

We didn't do anything with the Imperial ships, as we were dealing only with Chaos and Eldar.
But you're right, we 'd probably want to replicate that with any Imperial conversions.

Well, first of all, the Chaos conversion s Mark did were stored in the sandbox, which was cleared out a few days ago.
He may be able to reload those into his file, but we'll see.

Once we adopted a baseline for the weapons batteries and torpedoes, the conversions were fairly straightforward.
I won't go into the details, as you can see them in the ship designs themselves (at least the Eldar in the "underling" folder.

The Eldar were a little different matter.
The saves ability came over okay, as we simply gave them a high shield rating.
The problem with the Eldar is that in Nova it's hard to reproduce their maneuverability.
There is no second move mechanic in Nova, so the question becomes how do you make their speed pay off.

And the quick answer is you can't.

In Nova, once you get up to about a thrust of six or so, any thrust above that starts becoming a diminishing "return on investment." I don't have any ship design experience in previous editions, but I have dinked around quite a bit with Nova (but not in the last two or three months, so the point costing may have been tweaked a little in the interum).

We found that keeping them to a thrust of seven (cruisers), and eight (little guys), made them a little faster than the norm, but still allowed for some offensive punch.
I toyed with some designs using a thrust of twelve, but the verdict is still out on that.

For protection, a little ECM, quite a bit of shielding, with a layer or two of Stealth, seemed to capture their ability to be hard(er) to damage.
We experimented with Cloaking, but in our opinion that's not really how they work in BG.

Overthrusters is an ability that was added after our initial ship designs, so that may be something that might be worked into to capture their maneuverability a little more.

Hopefully Mark will be able to reload his Chaos stuff over the next few days.

Kevin

Well, if it's any consolation, a number of our early play-test ship designs (if I'm remembering correctly) were set up with multiple batteries in the same arcs, and the game played just fine. I also don't think it really does anything to the point costing to do so.
It makes as much sense to be able to design two banks of six, as it does one bank of twelve.
I don't think it affects things much from a game play perspective either way.

Kevin

I may be misunderstanding your question, but there are rules for replacing...

... SAE shields with SNE shields (page 49)

... SAE armor plating with SNE armor (page 49)

... SAE countermeasures with SNE ECM (page 49)

... SAE faceted shielding with SNE shields (page 50)

... and SAE screens with SNE shields (page 50)

Doesn't this cover about everything you'd need?

Kevin

I think the conversion rules are in place so two different players can convert the same ship, and theoretically end up with the same Nova ship.
If I was going to do conversions of my own stuff, I probably wouldn't convert them using the conversion rules.
I'd just redo them.
I like having weapon arc modifiers as close to zero as possible, and conversions are going to leave you with larger arc modifiers.

Kevin

I did some conversions during early play-testing, and even using the drydock they were a little messy to do.
I can imagine they'd really be a pain non-electronically. 

Kevin

This does bring up an interesting question, though, and one that I don't believe has been addressed in the rules.
Can a ship that has seekers targeting it not activate during the combat phase, and if so, when do the seekers impact?
It probably should be stated in the rules that any ship that has seekers targeting it must activate at some point during the combat phase.

Kevin

Yep, I missed this.
I was looking for the activation sequence earlier and didn't notice that there was one for combat.
It looks to me to work the same though. I think it just looks like it's "backloaded" because the numbers in the examples are different.
As for destroyed ships altering the sequence, I'd think it'd be calculated at the beginning of the phase, and not change due to losses.

With respect to seekers, I just want to make sure we're on the same page. They activate and attack after the target ship attacks. So a targeted ship will never be totally out of range, because if nothing else they can fire at seekers attacking them.
Kevin

I believe the outnumbering rule is for the movement phase only.
The sequence during the combat phase is simply alternating fire between sides, one ship at a time.
At least that's how we have played it.

They don't count, and I'm not sure why you'd want to nominate a ship to fire when it's out of range anyway.
But if you alternate ships one at a time you don't have this problem.

Kevin