No can't say that I have.

I fully agree with you, tough the example I give (as told in other threads) about it as comparison is another:

to me, the Spinals are like the rams in Ironclads age: a potentially decisive weapon (usually one hit one kill), but difficult to use and dangerous to try to bring to bear while the less devastating (per hit) but more numerous artillery (secondaries, mostly missiles, in this casae) are still active.

While this is quite true in atmosphere, where the expanding air in the fireball and shock wave may be devastating, I guess those firballs will be less in vacuum. The shock produced by an explosión is dependant on the density of the médium (that's why torpedoes are quite more dangerous than artillery), and if the médium is vacuum only the direct exposition (and radiation) will affect your ship.

Of course, in the case of mesons, where the explosión is inside the ship, the own ship's atmosphere makes them so devastating, but i na sameller ship, if the "explosión sphere" is largr than the ship, only the part inside it is really relevant (expet, maybe, for radiation effects).

Fully agreed in your dislike for statistical resolution. That's why I like the MgT:HG (at least in 1E, I have not seen MgT2E:HG) barrage rules for the secondaries (though spinals on it are less devastating).

This does not mean I believe it to be a flawless system, as my long discussions in MgT forum clearly show...

Fully agrees to here. For one battle match, the point you say about magazines taking space it's the main part of it; fro a more strategic campaign, the cost of those nukes (that I don't expect to be cheap) would be another important limiting factor, as a battle will be quite expensive, even if the ship's damages are minimal.

While we're fixing broken things, let's bring up nuclear missiles. For all the worry about unlimited supplies, they don't do much. Something that one-hit kills a tank, no matter how heavily armored, barely attracts the notice of a capital ship, or a destroyer, or even a fighter (unless they're in large batteries, in which case they do the same damage that HE missiles would). You fire off a thousand missiles, you take out one weapon - maybe, if his armor isn't so thick that he shrugs it off. Cost-benefit analysis doesn't look good there, and not very realistic considering even the baby ones are delivering gamma energy equivalent to 6 tons of TNT to the point of impact. It's a bit of a logic fail when a 10-dTon tank is destroyed on impact by a single missile while a similarly armored 10 dTon fighter walks away with maybe a damaged turret - and maybe not that.

Some of that could be addressed with one of the fixes to the armor rules we discussed earlier, but it's still pretty obvious the nuke is anemic. They wanted to nerf it down enough that it wouldn't outclass dreadnoughts, but I think they took that a bit farther than needed.

I agree. Looking at the black globe rules you see how much energy is dumped by weapons into a black globe screen - for a nuke it is 100 x factor.

My solution is to treat nukes as factor A+ weapons so they don't get the +6DM on the damage table, but continue to get their -6DM.

They also get a number of hits equal to their factor.

The volume rules I was referring to helps with that- even at TL15, going Armor 15 on a small craft ends up taking 48% of volume, and TL14 Armor 14 is 90% volume. That will balloon up the fighter so that far fewer can be carried, and at a certain point the critical hits start adding up to not worth it.


As for nukes, I have the luxury of detaching myself from the tyranny of those tables and their flaws and multiple frustrations and die rolling. An individual nuke does 1000 tons of damage and penetrates like a spinal weapon, so in my system the bigger costs are justified. But, I'm also making PD somewhat easier, and ships are going to tend to carry more lasers and repulsors just as much for the kinetic effects of conventional missiles as nukes.



I find the loss of a dreadnaught's Maneuver drive to dinky weapons far more egregious. That's what pushed me over the edge to ditch that resolution.

Nicely elegant for those that want to stay with most of the table resolution.

<These are house rules for clarity.>

I have three lines for weapon USP.

Top line is for spinals and nuke bays,
second line is for bay weapons
third is for turrets.

Bays don't get the +6DM on the damage table either, this makes bay weapons a bit more dangerous than a turret battery of equivalent factor.

They don't?

I thought anything <= factor 9 was impacted by the DM. Doesn't say anything about the source being a bay weapon or a turret. At least not in the "DMs for Damage Tables" section.

In a quick glance, I don't see anything about Bays standing out in the combat section.

He's saying that's his homebrew rule to handle the 'should be' force of turrets vs. bays vs. spinals vs. nukes.

Exactly - this is an IMTU thread.

I want a trinity of weapon systems:

spinals and nukes vs capital ships - but the suffer from the agility DM
bays - good against escort ships
turret batteries - good as point defence and vs smallcraft.