esampson
SOC-13
Well, digging through the rules over my lunch has helped me understand multiple aspects of space based weapons much better and helped reinforce my believe that the damage from missile launchers has nothing to do with the mount.
The argument that mounts always determine damage seem to be based on statements made on two separate pages. On page 387 it states "it inflicts damage based [sic] the Weapon Mount Size" and on page 408 it states "Hits inflicted by an Attack are determined by the Weapon Mount" and "Total Hits is determined by the sum of the mounts" in regards to Battery Fire.
However on further reading it looks like rather than being meant as absolute statements those statements are unfortunate condensations of what they are actually suppose to be. Also on page 387 it says '"Mounts determine the skill required to operate the weapon, the mod on the Space Weapon Task, and (in most cases) the Hits the weapon inflicts" (emphasis mine). Additionally on page 415 (the page dedicated to resolving damage) it shows that only some weapons do hits based upon the mount while missiles do damage based on the type of missile.
So how does this handle missile launchers of different scales like the spinal mount missile launcher? Turns out I missed another important rule. There are restrictions on how much a mount can be upgraded (I'd swear that somewhere I read that the mounts listed on pg 342 were simply the minimum mount sizes). According to page 387 a weapon that is listed as a turret can only be upgraded to a larger turret or else to a barbette. Bays can only be upgraded to larger bays. Thus, a missile launcher could not be any larger than a dual barbette.
That does still leave me with a minor quandary as to how many missiles a barbette/dual barbette can fire but that is much more easily handled as I can either HR that missile launchers are an unstated exception to being able to be upgraded to barbettes, I could HR that they are capable of firing 5 or 10 missiles (probably my choice) or HR that it doesn't matter and that any launcher can only fire one missile at a time (a possible variation of that to help mitigate the 'Queen of Space Combat' effectiveness of missiles would be to limit the maximum number of missiles that they can fire in a combat to the Hits of the mount, so a triple turret could launch 3 missiles in a combat, 1 per round, while a dual barbette could launch 10 missiles in a combat, again at 1 per round).
This unfortunately still leaves Salvo Racks in a bit of a state. If you were to use the idea that a missile launcher fires a number of missiles equal to the hits of the mount that would have them fire 20-30 size 3 missiles (depending on the size of the bay). That at least works but it would be a huge amount of work that would not be terribly effective against heavily armored targets.
The argument that mounts always determine damage seem to be based on statements made on two separate pages. On page 387 it states "it inflicts damage based [sic] the Weapon Mount Size" and on page 408 it states "Hits inflicted by an Attack are determined by the Weapon Mount" and "Total Hits is determined by the sum of the mounts" in regards to Battery Fire.
However on further reading it looks like rather than being meant as absolute statements those statements are unfortunate condensations of what they are actually suppose to be. Also on page 387 it says '"Mounts determine the skill required to operate the weapon, the mod on the Space Weapon Task, and (in most cases) the Hits the weapon inflicts" (emphasis mine). Additionally on page 415 (the page dedicated to resolving damage) it shows that only some weapons do hits based upon the mount while missiles do damage based on the type of missile.
So how does this handle missile launchers of different scales like the spinal mount missile launcher? Turns out I missed another important rule. There are restrictions on how much a mount can be upgraded (I'd swear that somewhere I read that the mounts listed on pg 342 were simply the minimum mount sizes). According to page 387 a weapon that is listed as a turret can only be upgraded to a larger turret or else to a barbette. Bays can only be upgraded to larger bays. Thus, a missile launcher could not be any larger than a dual barbette.
That does still leave me with a minor quandary as to how many missiles a barbette/dual barbette can fire but that is much more easily handled as I can either HR that missile launchers are an unstated exception to being able to be upgraded to barbettes, I could HR that they are capable of firing 5 or 10 missiles (probably my choice) or HR that it doesn't matter and that any launcher can only fire one missile at a time (a possible variation of that to help mitigate the 'Queen of Space Combat' effectiveness of missiles would be to limit the maximum number of missiles that they can fire in a combat to the Hits of the mount, so a triple turret could launch 3 missiles in a combat, 1 per round, while a dual barbette could launch 10 missiles in a combat, again at 1 per round).
This unfortunately still leaves Salvo Racks in a bit of a state. If you were to use the idea that a missile launcher fires a number of missiles equal to the hits of the mount that would have them fire 20-30 size 3 missiles (depending on the size of the bay). That at least works but it would be a huge amount of work that would not be terribly effective against heavily armored targets.
