van Riebeeck said:
Braddoc, the base rules have the flaw that one can stack all battery hits together, in essence making the armour redundant against a stacked salvo once the armour value has been beaten. A simple example, if you manage to do 21 points of damage against an armour 20 ship with your first sunsear battery, the second sunsear battery stacked with it will not be hindered by armour at all, which makes lance weapons almost completely useless. That second stacked sunsear can do its full four hits without the armour coming into the equation at all, as if it were a STR 4 lance, but then one with a fraction of the power cost and far easier to mount on a ship. The idea here is to ensure that armour is dealing with each individual hit, so that lances are getting efficiency back, especially against well armoured ships.
FvR
Ah, I see; but by reducing the armour and not adding battery damage together, would that invert the problem? Meaning that if you sunsear does 1d10+3 (average of 5+3=8 damage) vs armour of 6, it still makes an average of 2 damage per hit, times 4-7 (using the idea that the single void shield blocks a single blast from the volley) you get around 8-16 damage per 'shot'. Comprated to a lance that does 1d10+2 (so 8 damage) with..what another hit every 1/2 DoS, averaging 8-24 damage, not counting the void shield. Now you have a decent lance damage output, yet the batteries have lost their offensive capabilitites to really bomb the hell out of the other ship, and seems (to me) with that method they are only used as a way to drop the other ship's void shield to make sure that Lance doesn't get blocked by it.
Volley after volley, the batteries will do respectable damage, yet the critical rating for batteries are 5+DoS while lances are 3+DoS; still mkaing the lance a more heavy hitter to me, as the crit rating is way more obtainable with a lance than batteries. Mt PCs got plasma broadside, and score cits every other hit, thanks to the low DoS requirement; I'm certain that if they were using a lance (plasma broadside, one on each side) they will be using it everytime as their show-stopper.