A couple of points on your post phavoc:
Regards battle riders you'll note I've already build these and done a general conclusion in the fleet paradigm thread. In the current set up riders are marginalized to the point of not being viable. They leave hull points and hard points back on the tender which means they're vulnerable to fighter attack and bay+missile/torp attack. If we push up the hitting power of spinal mounts this will create more of a use case for riders but should still see, as desired, the big battleships being top dog.
Creating disparate armor factors would be a huge and unnecessary headache. What can be scaled easily should be left that way for game balance and in a sense that these are different weapon issues. And also this is already compensated for with the Hull Reinforcement and Armored bulkheads option. Big ships, or low jump ships can put this in and see real advantage for what we can give a blanket term 'better protection'.
(as an aside the Jutland example should take into account the poor shells of the British big guns. If their weapons were more effective per hit the outcome and relative scenarios could have been quite different)
Anyway... spinals
You could get away with putting in a 100x multiplier, but that is leaving all other weaponry far far behind I think.
How's this for a first draft (with edits):
- Damage is a 50x multiplier rather than 10x multiplier (written DDV for x 50?)
So we get in a 10DDV spinal an average of 3.5x10x50=1750 hull points in a shot which is not half of only a 10k ship 4000 hull points basic.
Let's compare that 2DD of medium fusions (not necessarily a good choice with screens impacting this but a start). We have 70 points average a bay = 25 bays, which is not too bad weight and balance wise. 25 x 80 = 4000 power points.
If we assume 1DD as the 100ton balance paradigm and need 50 bays to equal the 10DDV spinal that's a fair comparison with what I'm doing below.
- All particle weapons get a flat 1000 ton increase in weight.
This to be in part counter balance the increase hitting power allowing more bays for the same weight (note this gets reduced considerable at higher TLs) and also to keep in mind the general minimal size build paradigms. This will push battle riders upwards a little but nothing out of control.
- All spinal particle weapons triple their current power requirements
Again a tweak towards the greater hitting power of spinals vs bays. Looking at the 10DDV example that's 2100 power points. Actually fairly restrained.
- Using the new power requirements a 25% increase in power provides 1DDV damage achieving a max dice increase of TL-5. For each 2 DDV add 500 tons to the weapon weight. For each 1DDV the spinal mount obtains the DM-2 when attacking targets of 10,000 tons or less increases by 2,000 tons, the DM-6 when attacking targets of 5,000 tons or less increases by 1,500 tons and the lower 2,000 tons limit to even hit increases by 1000 tons. This hit dice size and power requirement is set during construction, not used on the fly.
- Spinals get a boon on critical effect severity rolls (this will mount up quickly and be of genuine effect)
- Hull criticals (for all weapons) roll the multiplier dice that the weapon uses. I.e 1d hull crit = 1 DDV
:!: It make sense to drop the hull points a bit. What happened to the 4 tons for a hull point that was supposed to be the vehicle alignment paradigm?