T20 point defense/fire support weapon

[Morte]

I don't understand the T20 design systems, I might be missing something very obvious here. I'm hoping someone who does can help me out.

I want to use a ship turret mounted rapid fire weapon that's designed for (a) shooting down incoming missiles in starship combat and (b) fire support to forces on the ground (with a forward observer). I need to know how to do this in the design system, and how to run it in the game.

For use in ground combat, it's got to fire something like every 1-5 personal combat rounds (6-30 seconds), the faster the better, or the fight's going to be over before it's zeroed in. For anti-missile duty (i.e. 20 minute ship combat rounds), I figure I could use the normal T20 burst rules to convert many small attacks to fewer, larger ones.

I thought about using one of the vehicle lasers described in TA 6 Against gravity but they don't seem to have the range -- 480km for the top pulse laser doesn't seem much for spacegoing anti-missile use.

And now I'm stuck.

Thoughts?

 

[far-trader]

Originally posted by Morte:
Thoughts?

Maybe. It is all a rather simple abstracted system but what about a standard turret mounted laser?

You have your already built in anti-missile fire. It has more than enough range for ortillery fire. And you get a nice big 5 meter per USP rating damage zone when used against such targets.

To figure the higher rate of fire for attacking ground targets you could reverse the burst fire procedure.

So the +5 dice damage normally assigned due to the scale difference of ship vs vehicles gives you a 20 round burst for the the 20 minute ship combat turn, which is (perhaps not coincidently) one shot per 1 minute turn for combat between only ships and vehicles. And you are still doing the full USP in damage dice. The two work out pretty much the same, its just more detail using the rapid fire method rather than the abstract +5 dice method.

Similarily the +10 dice damage normally assigned due to the scale difference of ship vs personnel gives you a 100 round burst for the 20 minute ship combat turn, which works out to one shot per 12 seconds, 2 personal combat turns per shot. Not quite as nice as the other but still effective, very effective I dare say.

That's probably how I'd approach it. It's quick and easy and doesn't bend the rules too much but still adds the detail I think you're after. As well you can swap in the other ship weapons if you want to for example cut loose with a turret mounted plasma gun, or maybe a particle accelerator*

**

* the radiation hits alone will kill them or make them wish they were dead already

** or bay weapons, or spinals, and don't forget all the new varieties worked out here.

Hmm, is it deja-vu all over again or did I already propose this or similar here a while back?

 

[Hal]

Not that this will help, as it is geared towards GURPS TRAVELLER, but I too built point defense laser systems with the game system of interest - knowing that it made more logical sense to utilize lesser powered weapons on turrets so that civilians wouldn't get too big for their britches (turns out that we all have PC's who say "I'm a player character - so what if I nuke a city with a nuclear warhead, the story revolves around ME!")

I don't know the T20 game system nor the design system as such - but keep trying and then - POST your attempts. I'm sure others will appreciate your efforts

 

[mike wightman]

Designed using the vehicle design rules and then converting vl to dt.
</font><blockquote>code:</font><hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;">AP/AM laser turret 0.4dt 5.12vEP 0.2MCr</pre>[/QUOTE]The AP/AM laser turret is a 560vl heavy vehicle turret fitted with 4 linked medium lasers.

Since there is no conversion given for vEP to EP then install batteries, you'll be amazed at how many vEP worth you can get in 0.1dt