Topic: A few thoughts...

I've been working on a few concepts and, while I think I'm likely to finish them, here's a few thoughts I've had that might give others on here a jumpstart in case I burn out and don't release them...

1) Boosters make an excellent simulated 'burst speed' for settings involving units that have muscle-power powering the engines--for example, some fantastical settings or ancient/Renaissance-era naval galley warfare. Have an ER of 1-2, have boosters, house-rule that a unit can only use their ER's number of boosters per turn, and you have a system that replicates the standard cruising speed of galleys, with the boosters replicating faster rowing at times that, when exhausted, means the rowers are tired out and can only give you a low sustained speed. Fantastical settings...dragons with howdahs for crew to be carried in?

2) The loss of ammunition in SUE is a bit of a problem in certain circumstances, especially WRT seekers, for some settings I'd like to game. I see seekers sometimes as customised fighters/drones, sometimes (more often) as missiles. The latter causes problems because at the moment, with no ammunition, you either have to give the weapon Exp, which is...less than ideal, or give it UNLIMITED POW--er, unlimited ammunition.

A workaround I've been working on recently is to give a second, SU-intensive but worthless weapon mode (by worthless, I mean high R/I/D but 6+, Inc and NPr, to really make it unlikely to be used above the seeker mode) to bump up the SU cost.

The second part of the workaround is a house-rule that you can use only one bank of Expendable-trait weapons in a battery in a turn. That way, an Exp battery with, say, five total banks could use one a turn for five turns. These two, together, could reduce the 'seeker cloud of DOOM!' that has caused BeowulfJB, among others (I gather from some posts on here) to ban them.

3) I noticed (as in, actually thought about it rather than going 'yeah, okay') that Knt and Inc were not incompatible--thus, you could have a weapon that automatically does x hull damage, but ONLY x hull damage. This could be a good way to simulate some weapons that have a very narrow field of very destructive focus--the railguns used by the Colonial Council in the Old Man's War series, or the Magog PSPs...

4) The above led me to think of a new weapon trait--Concentrated (Cnd). This functions in the same way as FrL but for DMG rather than RoF--roll a single DMG dice for all DMG that weapon causes--a weapon with DMG 3 would cause 3 hull damage on a roll of 2, say. Make it incompatible with Dsr (my initial thoughts--especially as I really don't like that trait).

Yeah, I had a very quiet yesterday (the last three thoughts occurred to me then), why'd you ask? big_smile