weapon platforms, weight ratios and modding questions

[Pax]

Originally posted by orev_saara:
I'm in the process of creating my own personal mod, and a thought struck me Last night: Why weapon platforms? They really make no sense. For projectile guns and missile launchers, you have all of that gravity to overcome. Launching a missile out of orbit uses tremendous amounts of fuel. As for energy weapons, you have atmosphere to get through, which would degrade just about anything, espacially those projectile guns. A depleted uranium cannon firing from ground, through atmosphere, and escaping orbit? Ludicrous. Not really impossible, but far costlier than putting a similar launcher in orbit beforehand. The whole concept of planetary weapon platforms is somewhat fanciful, but they can have a huge impact on SE games, especially if you allow any WP range extending mounts. If anything, there should be WP range-decreasing mounts. Maybe someone else already said all of this.

P&N v3.x -- Gravitic Manipulation racial trechnology ... Graviton Flux Cannons.

Weapon-platform only, uses theplanet's own gravitational field as a weapon. Very odd damage-at-range table (lots of damage in a bell-curve pattern ... with a "myopic zone" where no damage is done at all); one normal-mount and one "biggest" mount GFC on a Large WPlat makes for DEAD ships, at extreme ranges.

And then I started wondering about fighters too. 20 kt for a fighter? Not sure about that, and probably nothing I can do about it. I'm sure someone has noticed that before.

Remember those are SPACE fighters. 20,000 ton displacement, and probably a crew of twenty to fifty.

"Escorts" are (AFAIK) roughly the size of a modern nuclear aircraft carrier; you MIGHT manage to get an Escort to hold one Fighter bay and one cargo bay, to handle four fighters. Tops.

Modern aircraft carriers handle and launch/recover scores of "fightercraft" as we, today, know them.