Overpowering ships weapons

[cmdrx]

Been playing with ship designs and ship combat. Love it! Very Smooth and everybody has something to do. The Astrogator who once only did jump calcualtions is quite valuable in combat if he's got T/Sensors. Sensor Targeting and Sensor Jaming become very important. Capital ships rarely miss if they got a sensor lock and a high level (Model 7+) computer. I also like weapon overpower. Reminds me of Crusade when the Excalibur fires its main gun and now has no power to move.

But I do have a question about weapon overpower. I'm not sure how to read the rule, does it mean that Scotty can overpower a weapon system up to +9 dice or to a maximum of 9 dice. Forex, Scotty routes power to the main gun that has a USP of 5, can he overpower the weapon and give it 9 extra dice (14 total, +9 DC25) or can he only max it out to 9 dice (+4, DC19).

If it is the former (add up to 9 dice), It could cause some interesting effects as Scotty ramps up the Type T meson gun from 16d20 to 25d20!

I am thinking rather it is the latter, maximum of 9 dice, so you cant overpower Spinals or heavy bays.

Another question, what would happen if Scotty overpowers a weapon that has been damaged? I've been thinking that there should be a greater chance of failure (+5 DC?) and a max overpower dice of 9 minus #of hits to the system.

 

[themink]

I don;t like the Weapon Overpower rules at all!

I don;t like the Idea that a Scout ship sho gets into range can suddenly jump it's single pulse laser to the equivalent of USP9!

I'm going to allow overpower, but:-
i) Only by 1 USP.
ii) The switch between "overpowered" and not takes a turn of not firing
iii) Each turn of firing "heats" the weapon up by a -2 on the engineering check (rather than only -1)
iv) Each turn of not firing allows the weapons to "cool" down and improves the DC by 1 when they are next fired (so a pause of 2 turns after a single overpower shot allows the weapon to totally cool)
v) If the roll is ever failed, then that battery is "off line" as if it took damage - it is repairable
vi) If the roll is ever Crit failed, the Entire battery is destroyed - buy a new one

Given that the +USP improves your to hit chance as well as your damage, it was too useful otherwise.

I won't allow Mil ships to over power their weapons as a standard, I expect pirates to do so. (mil ships find the number creep up on them, it's better to fire sustainably)

As to otherwise - I would allow the "to hit" effect to increase to no higher than 9 (9USP is as good as it gets) but I would allow damage to be increased more than that (so a 9 factor Fusion bay can be overpowered to do more damage even though it won;t increase the to hit)

I won;t allow spinal mounts to be overpowered (and they shouldn't need it)

 

[tjoneslo]

We used the overpower rules to 9 dice, not +9 dice. Since none of my players had a ship with bay weapons or a (god forbid) a spinal mount, the question never came up.

Mink: The part of the rules for overpowering you seem to be missing is that each +1 die takes 1 EP, for each weapon. The scout with 2 EP power plant really can't overpower that much.

Someone brought up the analogy with Starfleet battles and energy allocation phase. My players loved it because they had a constant discussion during combat about how to allocate the (to them) insufficent energy reservers.

 

[apoc527]

<sniff> If only I had people to play games like SFB with.

 

[themink]

Originally posted by tjoneslo:

Mink: The part of the rules for overpowering you seem to be missing is that each +1 die takes 1 EP, for each weapon. The scout with 2 EP power plant really can't overpower that much.

Totally missed that - Oops

Thank you.

I'm not a huge fan of the "linear" effect of the extra EP (square of the bonus sounds better) but I'm much happier with it now.

One nice effect is that if you overpower your weapons, your agility drops to nothing.

 

[graden1]

My first thought when I saw this rule was: only as a last resort! Giving up all my agility, evasion, and acceleration at the same time sounds like suicide to me. Has anyone used this in play, and if so, what was the result? Is it worth being a sitting duck for a whole turn?

Thanx heaps,

DGv2.0