Gents,
My. 0.02 CrImps....
Turrets - Despite all the deckplans, turrets
IMTU are very rarely manned. I've always though that sticking all the stuff a gunner needs, like an acceleration chair, life support, controls, etc., in a turret was a waste of space. Instead, the gunner's station is either, in most paramilitary, commercial, small ship, single turret cases, inside the hull very near the turret itself or, in most military, large ship, battery-made-up-of-turrets cases, elsewhere aboard in some gunnery direction compartment.
Turrets
IMTU resemble the "pimple" turrets of the USN's
5"/54 caliber Mark 45 gun in that they're crammed full of machinery that moves very rapidly and, while they can be accessed both internally and externally, it's not a good idea for a sophont to actually be
inside one during operation.
Missiles in turrets - I'd always assumed that turret launched missiles used rails something akin to the USN's
Mk_13_missile_launcher. Furthermore, missiles
IMTU are very rarely "fly out" or "swim out" types. Rather than igniting their maneuver drives while still on the rail or in a bay, they are instead first launched by the rail, hence the need for it, and their maneuver drives then engage at a distance from the ship. While
HG2 sates that missiles require no
energy points that doesn't mean that missiles don't require any energy at all. I simply figured the energy used by the rail was trivial and, in some cases, could be produced by the missile itself.
Sand in turrets - See what I wrote about missiles above. Sand canisters wouldn't use rails, but they'd have some other device which flings from the ship at a "trivial" energy cost.
Lasers in turrets - As an engineer I very much liked
TNE's somewhat more realistic lasers. As a wargamer, I very much disliked losing my triple laser turrets. Anyway, lasers
IMTU are not long thin tubes resembling CPR guns, instead they're emitters. Sometimes, such in the case of mixed turrets, those emitters must be shrouded to some extent.
Energy weapon is turrets - For various reasons mainly having to do with creating and aiming the energy "bolts" they produce,
IMTU plasma guns, fusion guns, and PAs all resemble CPR guns more than lasers do.
Barbettes - These are little more than heavy turrets
IMTU. They're larger because the weapons they house require more volume. Their increased volume also means,
IMTU, that there's a better chance of them being physically manned but hat chance is still low.
Bays in general - These are modular weapons installations
IMTU. If you've the EPs to power them, you can swap any similar sized bay for another similar sized bay. My, admittedly weak, rationale for this is the fact that the Imperium is surrounded and, while incredibly rich, cannot afford to build ships
specifically optimized for use against each of her enemies.
The Zhos, Vargr, Julians, K'Kree, Hivers, Sollies, Aslan, and myriad other potential foes are all going to build warships with capabilities determined by their specific financial, TL, cultural, and other situations. The Imperium cannot build to meet all those specific threats, so the Imperium instead builds warships with a limited modular capability in the form of bays. For example, this means Imperial capital ships can replace missile bays with PAWs, while also losing some agility, in order to slug it out with the huge battlewagons of the Lords of Thunder or make the opposite switch in order to have more large missile batteries with which to swat the smaller, more numerous Vargr raiders along the long coreward border.
(While I came up with this very silly excuse in the early 80s as a way to "explain" bays, you can see something of the same thinking in the various littoral combatants the USN and others are now building. No matter the particulars, all those vessels are modular to some extent or another in order that they may be customized for specific missions. You should also note the same thinking holds true for the same reasons with the fleet operated and built for the RCES in
TNE.)
Just what a bay looks like
externally will depend on what weapon the bay in question is currently holding.
Missile bays - These are not VLS systems
IMTU primarily for the "fly/swim out" reasons I mentioned earlier. Instead, a bay will consists of a box launcher akin to the
ASROC system and a number of reloads for that box launcher. When in use, the bay's outer doors retract and the box launcher is extended. Just how many missiles a bay launched was something I never really settled on. More than a triple missile turret obviously and a 100dTon bay will launch more missiles than a 50dTon bay of the same TL. Other than that I never came up with numbers I liked.
PAW/Energy weapon bays - These bays
IMTU most resembled the bays shown on the
AHL deckplans. There is machinery within the bay producing the energy "bolts" the weapons use and feeding that energy to emitters/directors mounted in something resembling a very large, heavily armored turret. Real world battleship turrets or the Death Star's laser tower turrets both fed my imagination on this.
Repulsor bays - Nothing much protrudes,
IMTU, from bay in this instance. The bay is filled with the machinery producing and projecting the 'anti-grav beams" in the
HG2 description. There may be something resembling the
AN/SPY "dish" mounted on the bay's surface, but that's it.
Meson bays - As with repulsors, nothing much protrudes from the weapon bay
IMTU. Because meson fire passes through matter until it decays, a meson bay installation contains a particle accelerator on an infinite traverse. The meson gun is then "aimed" by positioning the accelerator, there is no need for "turrets", emitters, and the like. Again, there may be something on the surface of the bay like the AN/SPY mentioned earlier, but nothing really "shows" to the untrained eye. Also,
IMTU, I weakly explained the Batteries Bearing limitation on meson gun bays by linking it to fire control instead of physical location.
And that's pretty much how I bloviated to my players about starship weaponry during my days as a GM.
Regards,
Bill
