What's a Barbette?

[BP]

Yeah - the 1d6 damage increase for nearly twice the cost and five times the tonnage makes less sense when one looks at mounting 2 (or even three) 3d6 Particle Beams in a single one ton turret...

Don't really see any indication that this was intended, since this same thing happens for other weapons - the 'problem' being that they restricted themselves to whole dice multipliers with ship weapons, which given the bay weapons makes it hard to place a Particle Beam barbette at say 5d6 vs the 6d6 of a 50-ton bay.

 

[Rikki Tikki Traveller]

It might have an effect during Barrage calculations where the damage dice are very important and is the quantity of the weapons.

I haven't run a scenario comparing

15-PATurretGuns-3+1

Vs

5-PABarbettes-4+1

(using the same number of hardpoints)

I also noticed that NONE of the HG designs presented used Barbettes. They all used Triple Particle Beam turrets with upgrades.

 

[phavoc]

I think this can be added to the "out the door too quick and we didn't edit it well enough" syndrome that's plagued MGT Traveller books thus far.

It's almost to the point where one should only buy the pdf's and print them out to put in a binder to take care of all the inevitable changes and corrections that need to take place.

 

[BP]

I did arm my Big Shots with particle beam barbettes - the extra 1d6 means more with the VHY upgrade (minimum 12 damage versus 9) which helps against heavy armour. Against no armour, the minimum just amounts to the same Double Hit (9-12 damage points).

The turret has another advantage though, giving more chances to hit - something my Big Shots often had a hard time doing. A heavier weapon is useless when it just keeps punching vacumm.