Biggest flaw I've seen with the idea of banked weapons is that a couple of lucky hits can leave you with entire fields of space an enemy can move through, where you can't fire.... for example, you have your weapons set in banks to either side, and lose one.... you now have a defenseless ship if the enemy comes in on that side... and with Starmada's ability to choose what specific weapons you lose in a battery, we've found that people tend to choose the weapon that has no bearing at the moment anyways. You would find players taking a hit on the Starboard side, but deciding that the Port weapon bank is damaged, so that they can keep returning fire.
The Phaser Strip question has come up a couple of times in our group. One of our players is an avid Trek fan, and thinks that the Intrepid class is the ultimate star ship ever developed. Because of this, we ended up basically making the phaser strips into multiple phasers, but since we use both the standard ABCDEF fire arcs and the 123456 arcs, we just make multiple phasers each only firing into single arcs, and use the overlapping arcs. That was to simulate the couple of shows, where you see a strip damaged, but still firing out of the undamaged section. Some phasers fire into the A arc, some into the 1 or 2 arc, ect. It works quite well at simulating the all around fire you see from the trek ships, and keeps things within the rules for the game, while allowing you to concentrate fire, or fire off into different targets as needed. Give it a try and let me know if it works for anyone else.
The hardest problem we had with Trek ships, was the Torpedoes.... one player wants to make them into drones, to simulate the range, and the other player wants them to be range 18 with high PEN and DMG to simulate the impact they do.......
Dan, what would be the chance of coming up with heavier Drones.... Something to simulate the really heavy torpedoes in games such as Starlancer, Freespace, and Wing Commander. They have a really long range, but can be intercepted via fighters..... and also ship based weaponry.... as in the movie Star Wreck. During the initial salvo of Torps from the P-fleet, a lot of them were shot down, either from defensive guns on the ships, or via fighters. Of course, the ones that made it through, did do considerable damage..... taking out a Whitestar in one hit.
Anyways... time to take off to work
John
