Before you start on the supply usage for weapons it might be better to establish the amount of supplies you start with and work back.
As things stand you can have as many reactors as you wish so any value you put on a weapon's consumption is almost meaningless.
If you limit a ships design to say 2 reactors then the whole choice of using say 2x
5kT or 1x
5kT and 1x
20kT has more impact on what kind of ship you want.
One that can travel far or fight longer.
It might be better to limit the engine choice as well, between the various classes. e.g.
Scouts, Escorts, Corvette : 2 to 4 engines
Frigate, Destroyer, Cruiser : 4 to 6 engines
Battleships and Carriers : 4 to 6 engines*
*The Larger Capital ships can have more reactors, say 3 or 4 so that they can act as supply vessels for a Fleet.
Specialist Vessels such as the Repair Tug can have more reactors by default and maybe more engines to enable them to travel further on rescue missions.
If we decide on a mean average supply storage for any particular ship class, which we know is replenished each turn, we can then decide how far a ship class can travel before exhausting all it's supplies by setting the consumption of a mean number of engines.
This might have to be achieved by setting the reactor supply generation to a value less than the supply storage.
Say your Ship has Supply
Storage of 5000 , but the reactors only generate enough to
replenish 1000 , and each turn, if your ship uses all its movement points it
consumes 2000 supplies, a net
loss of 1000 supplies result. After five turns your ship would have to rest to refill its supply capacity. This would be your effective operating range. i.e. 5 movement turns from your base.
Ideally it might be better to lower this to say three movement turns or three systems distance. Having
Supply Bases in settled systems would act as
top ups so that you can operate at full efficiency.
This might simulate the reactor/ mission duration scenario of B5 whilst making local support bases more essential to successful campaigning.
Now none of this takes into account
weapons consumption on any given turn, and as pointed out if you are out of supplies your movement is reduce to 1 space.
Is this such a bad thing? Can it be crooked by providing emergency movement points for some vessels e.g. Ancients so that they can out run a Young Race if both sides have exhausted supplies in battle.
Making the Ancient's
Slicer Beam and say EA
Heavy* Lasers eat up supplies means you can set the number of shots each class is able to make in combat. *They can also then take up less kT so that you can have three Heavy Lasers, not just one. Otherwise what is the point of having
Multiplex Tracking . If you fire three Lasers in three directions, you just run out of supplies sooner and are then left with your
no supply usage weapons.
Your weapon supply use can then be regarded as your
battle fatigue rating. If you have
bigger reactors/supply capacity and the
lower number of engines, your ship should in effect be able to fight longer with it's capital weapons before having to rely on it's secondary weapons systems.
This creates a better
pro verse
cons choice for some of the
crappier medium weapons some of which can have
no supply usage.
I don't know why medium lasers can not be used to target all types of target. After all it still has to hit the target, and fighters and seekers have a "to hit advantage".Makes use of developing Targeting computers.
Other weapons such as
point defence can perhaps use
no supplies .
Missile and
Torpedo weapons can be assumed to have their own supplies and be restricted by
reload/range and
seeking speed .
Hows that?
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