Starship weapons
From MegaTravellerWiki
Perhaps the worst thing about the Referee's Manual was the complete lack of any indication of how much damage a weapons battery does to another starship. The starship combat tables allow a firer to roll to see how much damage a starship battery does to the sensitive equipment on board a craft during a 20-minute span of combat, but do not say anything about hull damage (let alone whether it applies per 20-minute span).
A person has to dig around to find the starship weapon tables in the Player's Manual where they are almost never used, and the numbers there happen to strike me as being problematic in more than one case. Do those apply to a concentrated blast from several weapons? If a starship parks itself in orbit and unleashes a full broadside of all of its beam laser cannons towards as surface installation, how much damage would this inflict to the installation?
If the numbers given in the Player's Manual are assumed to be correct, is that the damage inflicted in a single discharge of just one beam? A Beam Laser-13 turret, for instance, fires once per barrel every two seconds (three times per personal combat round) according to the Rate of Fire on p.74 of the Referee's Manual. If the numbers in the Player's Manual are correct, then just *one* beam from that laser turret would inflict 600 Damage Value to an ordinary target at moderate range with a High Penetration result. If we assume that a Beam Laser-13 turret with a single laser cannon fires 30 times per minute, then it has discharged a staggering 600 times over a 20-minute space combat turn, which works out to an unleashed force of 360,000 Damage Value. Under the old system, this is enough to inflict 36,000 damage points against another enemy ship, which is enough to shatter all but the most massive craft... and combat that's over in just one round with just one laser cannon is a bit underwhelming.
Now take the alternative: assume that the 600 Damage Value is the cumulative damage suffered over 20 minutes by an enemy target. This works out to 30 Damage Value per minute, meaning that each shot from the Beam Laser-13 is a hideously low 1 Damage Value (a punch in hand-to-hand combat is also 1 Damage Value!).
Another possibility: assume that the 600 Damage Value is the cumulative output provided over 1 minute of repeated blasts. Since the cannon discharges 30 times per minute, this means that each discharge inflicts 20 Damage Value -- enough to disable a ground car in one shot, and enough to immolate any person -- which is quite a bit more believable!
Yet another possibility: assume that the 600 Damage Value is the cumulative output provided by a single concentrated discharge of 30 Beam Laser-13s in a full battery, and that the rate of fire applies not to each barrel but to the entire battery firing just one of its barrels at a time. This means that a single discharge of a beam laser inflicts 20 Damage Value and takes a minute to recharge. If one of the beam lasers in the 30-laser battery discharges one beam every two seconds, the cumulative output is 600 Damage Value exactly -- the output is also the same if all 30 guns discharge simultaneously and then take a minute to recharge for the next discharge. However, why would a single Beam Laser-13 only fire once every minute, when a 16cm Howitzer firing explosive ammunition offers comparable Damage Value per shell and fires 14 times per minute?
If I have one Beam Laser-13 all by its lonesome self in a single turret, it has a UCP factor of 2. If I have 10 Beam Laser-13s in one battery, I have a UCP factor of 6. If I triple that number to 30 Beam Laser-13s by added two more lasers per turret, I only increase to UCP factor 9. Does the UCP factor 9 inflict 4.5 times as much damage as the factor 2 single laser (suggesting that fewer beam lasers hit the target the more beam lasers I get)? Does the UCP factor 9 inflict no more damage at all (suggesting that only one beam laser hits out of the entire battery)? Does the UCP factor 9 inflict 30 times as much damage?
The more I think about it, the more I feel as though the ship-to-ship combat system needs a complete re-write.
