Ah, and if that was a fair analogy to the Barrage rules, I'd definitely agree with you. The reality is that the Barrage rules do a pretty decent job of differentiating between the weapon types. A ship with 3000 beam lasers in triple turrets is going to be pretty useless against an armored dreadnaught. You just aren't going to overcome the Armor Defense DM with beam lasers...heavy particle bays, now, that's a different story.
Agreed. Armour versus weapon damage does affect barrage fire just as much. I don't really see the problem with it as a rule-set given the simplicity.
Just as an observation:
You can get 'm-16's killing tanks' but only in very rare cases and only with light damage from exceptional shots. If (in your example) someone has enough marksmanship skills to overcome a -16 DM to hit, then in normal traveller combat, they will be able to generate sufficient effect that they most definitely can hurt a tank with an assault rifle!
Certainly I would expect that whilst punching through the armour of a tank will always remain impossible with an M16, with sufficient quantities of fire I can see you hitting the laser rangefinder and periscopes (sensors), track links (drive), the M2 0.5" mounts (weapons) and for that matter, in extreme cases even put a round down the main gun. It won't set the shell off (that's movie logic, not reality) but will damage the round if it's loaded.
You can't cause armour or hull damage, but you can cause significant damage (i.e. damage that will meaningfully affect the combat ability of the tank, not just mess with the paintwork). Since traveller uses a global armour value, rather than rolling to see where on the tank you hit and assigning an armour value to each location, that's what we're stuck with.
There is no need to use anything other than weapon damage, unmodified by addition. Otherwise, you would be having triple turrets in small ship combat acting as "barrage attacks". MGT just added this illogical "accelerator" to speed up combat. In reality, if you pound on an Iowa class BB with 2 & 4 inch guns, you're in for a LONG fight. As it should be.
Which wouldn't work with traveller barrage combat either. Beam lasers can whale on an armour 14 dreadnought until the cows come home and will irritate it and nothing more.
i still maintain my endurance thing If you're not coming up against massively armoured ships, then you can carry many more missiles than torps...
Hmm, maybe missiles are better for mercs and customs patrols?
Yes. Missiles are a civilian and paramilitary weapon. My main complaint is that they do no more damage than the beam laser - which is the primary point defence weapon used to shoot them down. Which makes the standard round seems unutterably pointless to me.
The nuclear missile, or multi-warhead round, is better, but in both cases it's for engaging unarmoured or lightly armoured opponents.