Ringworld PDB

[Baron Munchausen]

quote:

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Originally posted by BKrani:
On the subject of PDBs, I'd like to cast my vote to give enlarged weapon mounts the same bonuses as Starbase weapon mounts or even go a little better.

The reasoning is that planets have one thing in common with Starbases, and one thing fairly unique.

In common, both planets and SBs have SIZE. The weapon systems onboard these sites have the luxury of spreading out, larger generators, wider and more accurate focusing systems and room to house the large maintenance crews required for higher powered systems. Ships OTOH, have a very limited size for their function. A ship that spreads out to encompass larger weapon systems risks becoming an overlarge target, inefficiently crowded and becoming unwieldy and unmanuverable.

Planets are unique in comparison to Ships and SBs in that they have enormous cooling facilities available to shed the heat of advanced powerful beam generators. While in space, the best that ships or SBs can manage is to contain and then slowly radiate heat. Vacuum is not the best of environments for dissipating heat. On planets however, entire rivers, lakes and seas are available to rapidly dissipate the waste heat generated. This means that much larger amounts of energy can be safely manipulated on planetary systems than on SBs or ships.

Of course all this conjecture is pointless if it doesn't meet game balances. I would however point out that planets share the same vulnerability as SBs, that being inability to move. Ships are infinitely more versatile in this point in that an entire empire's might (in the form of ships) can be brought to bare upon another empire's single planet's worth of military might. No contest really. The balance should be that immobile but larger sites can use correspondingly larger and more efficient weapon systems.

Personally, I'd recommend that PDBs get a slightly greater range bonus than SBs.

Comments?

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Very good, Bkrani. These are the very same reasons that I posted in the beta forums for WP mounts to be equivalent (at least) to base mounts. Ideally, there should be certain mounts or even special weapons that cannot be placed anywhere but on a planet. When the bug fixing starts to settle down, we'll have to press for more cool "features" like a weapon facility with some unique power -- maybe the ability to fire on the strategic map at targets in another sector?