Got a super quick one for you guys today.
A little while I put up a blog post covering my attempt to give a greater range of detail when it came to giving a beam weapons a high ROF. It worked pretty well and the attempt has been really well received by my readers but it did differ a bit from RAW and I was never fully happy with that. Not so much as I think the RAW value is better but the fewer paces into house rule territory I can keep my blog the more universal my post will be and the more people can benefit from them. Of course, lacking official design documents sometimes I'm forced to do so and at first that's what I thought I was going to have to settle with my ROF rules. That is until I decided to take another crack at it and it just hit me. Once again I was overthinking things!
Alrighty, that being said, below you will find what G should be for a given ROF up to 20 with the this version of the ROF rules.
ROF G
1 1
2 1.01
3 1.0225
4 1.04
5 1.0625
6 1.09
7 1.1225
8 1.16
9 1.2025
10 1.25
11 1.3025
12 1.36
13 1.4225
14 1.49
15 1.5625
16 1.64
17 1.7225
18 1.81
19 1.9025
20 2
For ROF greater then 20, G can be figured as 1+(ROF/20)2.
Now you might be going, "Wait, this still doesn't explain why a semi-automatic generator and alight automatic generator both have a modifier of ×1.25?!"
Well I got a theory on this one. The semi-auto generator and the light auto generator are the same thing, semi-auto beam weapons are just locked out of full auto mode by the developers. So why bother with such a heavy generator? Well, with modern pistols the ROF of 3 is only what most people can pull off with a semi-auto and some people can pull that trigger really fast! So a semi-auto beam weapon can actually use the Fast-Firing rules (High-Tech pg.84)! Use the rules as listed but Rcl does not go up (except for plasma guns, they use the rules as is),
For my own beams found on this blog I'm going to keep to my own ROF rules just because of some feed back I got and to keep things consistent though this more updated version will still find it uses for another project I'm working on.
Ok guys, I hope you find this all useful. Don't say I don't give you options heh.
Using a quadratic function like that implies that it is actually more efficient at high rates of fire to use multiple beam generators, possibly firing through the same focusing mechanism. For instance, at RoF 100, you would get a RoF modifier of 26, whereas if you just use five RoF 20 beam generators, you effectively get multiplier of 2 × 5 = 10.
ReplyDeleteIf you want an excuse for gatling laser guns, this is definitely a feature, but if you don't care about the mechanism that enables yhe listed RoF, it introduces unnecessary complications and requires iterative designs to minimize weight - and therefore ST, Bulk, and Cost - for a given RoF.
Personally, I don't mind because it gives me more fluff, but some might be put off if they only want to min/max weapons.
Yeah, that I agree. It's good for small arms but once you get up to really high rates of fire then things get cra-cra.
DeleteThis was just an attempt to figure out what David was thinking and I may still be way off.
In my older post the progression was a more linear one though it does make low end ROF heavier but with a smoother progression for higher ROF ones.
But thanks for the feed back, getting response like this actually helps a lot, helps gives me a new angle to think about.
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DeleteAs someone who likes that sort of detail, I think it's great. Heck, even large guns like M61s and GAU-8s use a gatling configuration. This promotes that approach! So yeah, I like it.
DeleteBut for every me, I assume there is someone who just wants to min/max their weapons and don't care about the details. Those people may have issues. But hey, this replicates the sorts of things I like, so I'm going to incorporate this!
Good stuff man. Once again I appreciate the feed back.
DeleteBut yeah, there's always gonna be the dirty min/maxers and in that case they're going wanna use these ROF rules for low ROF and my other ROF rules for high ROF weapons heh.