Hello all,
My apologies for the late reply, but I stumbled on this topic thread while searching for something else.
Quick background: I am an USAF brat that served for 20 years in the USN's submarine service.
I watch a lot of documentaries produced by stations like TLC, Discovery, National Geographic, Smithsonian. During one of the documentaries on modern combat aircraft one person described the attachment points as firmpoints and a different person called them hardpoints.
From the show my opinion is that a firmpoint is the same thing as a hardpoint which allows all sorts of stuff to be mounted on the aircraft.
CT LBB 5 HG 2e page 34:
"A small craft may mount the equivalent of one turret. In actuality, the mountings are probably rigid, and no actual turret is present. All computations, however, may assume that the craft carries one turret...."
IIRC small craft until MgT have been limited to three star ship/non-star ship weapons that are probably in rigid/fixed mounts or in a turret allowing the craft to mount a maximum of 3 weapons.
I have not been a fan of the requirements that small craft can have only three weapons and one hardpoint since most combat aircraft can mount a wide variety of ordnance, drop tanks, electronics, or anything someone wants to hang on the airframe. I prefer the HG 2e requirements over the ones in CT for small craft.
Based on the information gained from the documentary and the material on HG 2e page 23/PDF page 24 my conclusion is that a small craft firmpoint is the equivalent of a hardpoint.
HG 2e page 23/PDF page 24 allows Small craft hulls from 10 to < 35 to have 1 firmpoint, 35 - 70 tons to have 2 firmpoints, and, my correction, hulls > 70 to < 100 tons to have 3 firmpoints.
One small craft firm point can be upgraded to an 1 ton Single Turret that can mount 1 turret sized weapon. A 75 ton small craft could mount three single weapon turrets or per HG 2e page 24/PDF page 25 the three firmpoints could mount 9 weapons in a fixed position.
Firmpoints have further restrictions of medium range of less weapons are limited to Adjacent range, Long or greater ranges are treated as Close range which can not be increased. Weapon power requirements are reduced by 25% which I believe accounts for the reduced range bands. Sticking a barbette on a small craft requires two firmpoints versus 1 on hulls >= 100 tons.
I will admit to being very light on Space Combat but looking at the CRB 2e Chapter 8 Space Combat pages 155/PDF 154 through 163/PDF page 164. This means I am not sure how the requirements will alter the damage caused as a result of combat.
My gut feeling is that small craft engaging a target >= 100 tons has to travel through two or three range bands before getting into range. This gives the target time to hammer away on the small craft attacker with fairly good odds of knocking out the turrets if not destroying the small craft before it can attack.
Small Craft versus Small Craft will depend on the armor, weapons, and how the weapons are mounted. A 75 ton small craft with three single weapon turret versus a small craft with 3 firmpoint mounting nine weapons I think the hull with the three turrets could have them put out of action pretty quickly. Of course if one of my characters was handling the nine weapons the other small craft will probably be the winner.;-)