Gatling Mount & Multi Spinal Mounts

[Ed Kolis]

Just an idea I had for a mount for Devnull, Adamant, or whatever mods anyone is working on... probably suggested already but I haven't seen too many mods using it

Gatling Mount - Extremely miniaturized Version of a weapon, typically used in large batteries for a "machine gun" effect. Each shot does a large (for the gun's size, not overall) amount of damage but has a low chance of hitting; however, the large number of shots fired ensure that at least a few will hit.
10% Size, Hitpoints
20% Damage, Supply, Cost
-2 Range
-15 To Hit
Any ship size
Direct fire only

I also had the idea a while back of having a different Spinal Mount for each hull size (sort of the weapon equivalent of engine/armor/cloak scale mounts), each of which has the same to-hit penalty but increasing efficiency in terms of damage/kT. Of course the question would be "why can't you put a destroyer spinal weapon onto a battleship and give it a smaller penalty since the battleship can support the actuators to aim the weapon?" and it would just degrade into the existing mount system only with to-hit penalties... also, the whole idea of nullifying the to-hit penalties of gatling and spinal weapons with COMBAT SENSORS is kind of ridiculous anyway... "yes sir, our sensors are so good they can actually turn our ship in another direction / make our bullets spray out in a straight line!"

[spoon]

Gatling Mount - 10% Size, Hitpoints
20% Damage, Supply, Cost
-2 Range
-15 To Hit
Any ship size
Direct fire only

I like it. Cost and To Hit seem about right, and the -2 range keeps it from being a no-brainer for the Talisman weilders...
And it gives smaller ships a boost in damage potential, which is nice.

[PvK]

Yes, it's too bad the SE4 to-hit system is so basic. About the only solution for the issue of combat sensors improving gatling gun shots too much would be to work combat sensor effects into mounts... which would tend to create an unmanageable number of mounts.

On the other hand, for those not particularly interested in realism and accuracy of sci-fi equipment, they could note that modern aegis-like systems do use gatling guns and advanced fire control to try to provide naval point defense.

The other problem though with gatling mounts like this is that there's no way to speed up the combat display - it will take ten times as long to watch an attack by a ship with ten times the number of attacks.

You can relatively easily allow smaller spinal mounts on larger ships, though, except again you may end up creating more mount categories than you really want.

PvK

[Ed Kolis]

Yeah, what we really need is a Combat VCR with pause, step forward, step back, fast forward, etc., like in Stars!... and/or a "combined fire" feature like in MOO where even if you have 95 HV Disruptors on your Doom Star, you only see one shot (per weapon group, so Disruptors and Neutron BLasters can still fire separately) and a little floating damage number reminiscent of early Final Fantasy games...

Of course with the real-time combat in SE5 this won't be an issue, it will by definition be simultaneous fire (unless the game pauses for a moment every time you shoot like it's trying to be an anime film or something... "Millennium Falcon... PUNCH!" ), and there are already timescale keys in Starfury...

[Fyron]

Check out Deathstalker's Mount Mod. It has both of those mount types in it.