If I'm reading the starship construction rules right, it appears that aft facing banks take up less SUs than forward facing banks that cover the same size arc (FR vs AR for instance).

Why is that? Because forward facing weapons are more likely to be brought to bear?

If so, that seems open to exploitation by building ships designed to constantly run away for their opponents (besides also being counter-intuitive that the same number and type of weapons take up more space mounted in the front of a ship than the rear.)

If I've read something wrong there forgive my questions please.

I'm all for broadside fleets!  I was actually in the process of translating FASA's Leviathan to SAE when Nova was announced. Now I'm trying to evaluate whether to move to Nova or not. So far, Nova's the favorite for the reduction in die rolls among other things. The construction of weapons threw me a little though.  I agree that weighting the effectiveness of arcs of fire should be an ORAT mod not an SU mod.

So, uh...  noticed a little weirdness with some weapon pricing.

Consider a thrust 6 vessel.  It can mount a range 6 weapon, or a range 9 carronade.  The carronade is superior, since it has a longer short range and can fire without penalty out to 6, so, all else being equal, it should be more expensive.  However, according to both the drydock and my own spreadsheet, the carronade is actually less expensive, both in terms of SU and ORAT.  This is not true of higher ranges at thrust 6, but at thrust 12, the same is true of range 12 vs range 18 carronade.

SU cost factors into ORAT as well.  Ultimately ORAT is likely a better measure, since it takes into account strictly more information (though since ORAT is calculated for the battery as a whole, it is less useful in measuring the expected effectiveness of a single weapon).

Well, I can see the traits representing weapons that require more space for larger lasing crystals or bigger particle cannon loops or more targeting arrays, so I don't really question that they modify SU. The firing arcs though, except for game balance based on the way movement is done there's not much difference in them, so it seems to me that that is more about rating the effectiveness of the ship not the amount of space used.

The more I've thought about this, the more I wonder about how tied weighted arcs are to the movemen systemt. If, for instance, I wanted to use a movement system more like the one from RL Interceptor where facing and heading can be drastically different, the weighted arcs don't really work well. And if I try to build a space station which has no thrust... I know though that these scenarios are not intended for out of the box Starmada.

Dan,

Some of the arc conversions in the table SAE Conversion chapter seem a little off.  For example it has ACE as converting to FH rather than PH.  The conversion example is right though.

Thanks

Robin

Dunno...  that seems a bit odd, too.  I think deriving significant advantage from the minor carronade discount will be tricky, as using it on longish range weapons requires a high thrust to generate the savings, which nullifies the SU savings and is not terribly useful on its own (since Evasive penalizes your own shooting, and I keep hearing claims that having tons of engines is significantly less useful under Newtonian that it was for us under Naval).  I only managed to generate ~20 points of ORAT savings arming a thrust 6 hull 9 with 9-Carronades vs 6s, and it saved me one point of CRAT.  On a 114 vs 115 point ship, I was getting <1% yield, so...  not sure if I'm concerned or not.  I'll see if I can produce a really pathological case.

6 points of savings on a TL2 hull 9 engines 12, 12 vs 18 carronade.

Well, took a TL2 hull 1000 vessel, thrust 6, no defenses, and filled up the AA arc with guns.  Carronade version could fit 9757 guns, un-carronade could fit 9074, so about a 10% increase in firepower.  Difference in CRATs was only 220 points, which was less than 2% of the CRATs (21736 for carronade, 21516 for un-carronade).

I had some thoughts on an "anti armour" wpn trait.  I don't think a system that lets you bypass x% of the damage directly to the hull to be that effective.  For cases where the ship has relatively low armour to hull, a system like that makes no net difference.  If the ship has more armour than hull it does help, but only if there are no other weapon types being used against the same target.  This is a problem as neither "piercing" (vs shields) or fire control ( vs ECM) are less useful based on the magnitude of the defence or if other weapons are used.

My suggestion is to use one if these two:
"armour eater": each time this weapon scores a point of damage to armour cross off an additional point of armour.
OR
"armour penetrator": for each point of armour damage this weapon causes roll a d6.  On 4,5,6 also cross off a point of hull.

I like the penetrator more as it really makes it feel like the armour is being defeated.

-Tim

Having no 'ignore shield' and 'ignore armor' traits will make designing some starfire weapon difficult.
Also, I noticed that there is no command trait for ships. It would be easy to create it (it was on SFO), and would be very useful on many universes.

Marc

For some, it might be.

For others, not so much.

How about the compromise: "Ignores Armor, Stopped by Shields" where if the ship has even "on a six" shields, the weapon is useless. But if the ship has no shields, it ignores armor (but not ECM) when it hits, going straight to hull boxes?

Oh, and regardless of how you feel about this idea, in my world, Ignores Shields would be mutually exclusive with Ignores Armor and Ignores ECM. I'm not looking for be-all, end-all weapons. I'm just hoping to model some traits from other games.

I Used to play Starfire a lot before discovering other games.  It was simple & elegent.   You could not design ur own weapons, but could design ships.  It was like Battletech in that reguard.

In Starfire, Energy Beams ignored Armor completely!  But compared to Force Beams which hit shields and armor they had a shorter range & cost more.  There was a device that could be installed on Starmada Starships thad absorbed some of this damage.  These were called Overload Dampeners and each could absorb/delete one point of Energy Beam dammage per turn. An option, if you got zapped badly by energy beams, it could absorb 3 points and then was burned out, destroyed.

Lasers of all types ignored shields.  They were shorter ranged than Force Beams also.  A counter, when designing a ship, was to use reflective armor.  It cost more than regular armor, but halved laser beam damage, rounding down.

Then there were primary beams!  They only fired once every other turn and ignored shields & armor.  They were very expensive & shorter ranged than force beams. 

Ships I designed in that game always had shields, laser-reflective armor, and a few Overload Dampeners.  There were several types of missiles & Point Defence units that could attempt to shot them down.  My ships had a few of them also.
Wow, I am rambling on...(I will be 54 y.o. in Sept<LOL>)