phavoc said:
So does anyone actually allow their PC's to run around in a armor factor 15 ship equipped with particle beam barbettes, or a bay weapon of any kind? As I see it, most ships for the RPG side of things will be armed with missiles, sand and lasers. Nothing heavier than that simply because planets should be very leary of anyone running around with weapons bigger than theirs.
Sure, but the players also have to be prepared to deal with the consequences.
Firstly, they're allowed to legally fly around with such weaponry even in civilized systems. They have to declare it when they come into the system. The alternative is to have a tense encounter with the local system patrol, be arrested, fined, and possibly have their ship confiscated when the ship is inevitably scanned as they approach close enough to the mainworld(s) to scan. Otherwise, they declare it, along with some suitable "why do we have this" paperwork, pay expensive special fees, and deal with the local authorities tromping on board their ship and installing various safeguards on their ship to prevent them from using the weapon while in-system (these will be removed when they leave the system).
Secondly, there's something I've noticed a lot of game systems don't take into account, probably because they're descended from "heroic" games where such things as "book keeping" is considered unromantic so nobody deals with it. If you're dealing with the "reality" of players running around with such weapons, I suggest you add it into your game. Big, complex mil-spec weaponry is expensive to keep working both in terms of money
and time.
The first factor is money: Most people don't own weaponized particle beams so the civilian spare parts market for particle beams is small. So it's a seller's market for the supply of spare parts and they're often restricted by various authorities. Subsequently, specialized spare parts are rare and expensive. Many subsystems can be "made do" with generic electronic parts by a skilled tech with some reduction in reliability and power, but I figure that these weapons always have a few systems in them where you'll need to get "authentic parts" you just can't get around.
Now I'm certain there's the 57th century equivalent of Neckbeards in the TU who stand around saying things like, "the plasma particle wave guide in the lounge holoprojector is the same in theory as the one used in a PGMP so every house in the Imperium has a PGMP!" I'm equally as certain that 57th century's equivalent of MythBusters has shown, yes, the physics are the same, but entertainment projector's device deals with less than a hundred joules while the PGMP's is rated in megajoules; the two are not interchangable, no matter how much a nerd tries to overpower it. K'ari tried to do it and there was a tiny puff of black smoke and a few sparks, not even the dramatic capacitor explosion the viewers were hoping for.
So to get the parts they need often involves dealing with criminals; corrupt supply officers, local organized crime, and so on. Or the players can visit those infamous high-tech worlds with a very low law level, where they can go to the local "elemental assembler" and pour in scrap metal, sand, and tar and that "MT113 particle guide beam modulator" comes out of the other end but those worlds aren't all that common when it comes to trying to keep that bay weapon working. (Of course, such elemental assemblers are highly illegal anywhere but on that world because the Ine Givar would be really interested in a machine about the size of a small automobile that can crank out FGMPs in exchange for household waste ... plus it'd wreck the scarcity economy of the Imperium.)
These weapons are also expensive in terms of time. I've modified the rules to account for the upkeep of very expensive, specialized weaponry as a "Maintenance Number" (something I stole from TNE and Twilight: 2000). The Maintenance Number represents the hours a week that have to be put into keeping a subsystem working. Navies traditionally have little problem with large work crews devoted to keeping complex, state-of-the-art systems working; they want a massive powerful weapon that can put a huge crater in that Zhodani battleship after overcoming the screens and armor (which the Zhodani are constantly improving). That such a weapon takes a dedicated crew of five specially trained technical ratings and triple that of robots to keep the weapon working is just something they'll cope with. Even when they're no longer cutting-edge, the weapons still remain maintenance hogs; there's no market for megacorps devoting their R&D budgets to making a "maintenance free" or "low maintenance" version of a particle bay weapon since the market is small. A player-character party simply doesn't have the "ten girls/guys plus thirty robots" or even the "one guy/girl and three robots" it takes to keep a single bay weapon working.
Organizations like the Imperial Navy can spare plenty of robots and ratings for maintenance crews; players cannot.
phavoc said:
Obviously you can't trump the Imperial Navy, and some megacorps might have some very small, very specific heavy-hitters, but even those would be limited in their weapons. The old 800-ton merc cruiser only had lasers and missiles (granted classic Trav didn't have all the same things the current version has today).
I've always seen that there's a Point of Diminishing Returns for military gear. It's highly likely that the players will be better armed and armored than even the Imperial Marines or Imperial Navy. However, there's a point where that Gauss Rifle with the futuristic equivalent of Pictinny Rails mounting a Neural Activity Sensor, vibroblade, meson target designator, rapid target acquisition sight, and a flashlight isn't giving all that much more advantage that the Marine's basic Gauss Rifle. Then it all comes down to numbers; there's only going to be 4-6 players versus 30 Marines. The Marines are used to coordination, willing to soldier on despite taking losses, and if they don't feel they can handle it, they can always call in more Marines and the Navy...
phavoc said:
Merc ground companies seem to have combat armor, G-Carriers and gauss rifles, but all the heavier stuff is limited to the true military.
One thing to remember is that corporations are always concerned about the bottom line. Mercs and corporate armies will be armed with the minimum equipment necessary to do the job; they're likely to be underarmed than overarmed for a situation, especially when fighting players who have cherry picked the best equipment available. However, again, there's that point of diminishing returns here again. Corporate troops are probably less willing to die, but they're still pretty dangerous because they come in numbers.
