Hi,
Yesterday we had session 3, which was great fun (a pilot fumbling the driving maneuver on a grav tank for which he has no skill, and a character manning the cannon for which he has no skill either but pressing the "fire" button every round while at the same time turning the turret in random directions....).
My feedback:
a) Vehicle Weapons in Atmosphere: to me the particle cannon is de facto a blaster cannon in all but name. A Mk 1 particle beam cannon has a RI of 2km. A heavy support blaster has a RI of 40m. My players and I were quite astonished when comparing this.
So if looking at today weapons, I would guess that a heavy support weapon goes in my opinion up to 2cm, a Mk 1 cannon starts at 2cm and goes up to 4cm (assuming that a main battle tank has about Mk 3 and a battleship Mk 5). So a factor of 50:1 in range between the largest heavy support weapon and the smallest cannon seems too much to me. I do not know about the other weapons (Lasers,...), but I can imagine that there is a similar situation. In addition I saw that range is independent of Mk. #.
Suggestion: Close this gap between and heavy support and cannons and make at least in atmosphere the RI dependent on Mk #, as also for normal weapons RI increases with Critical Size or size of the weapon.
b) Vehicle Sensors: the tank had sensors. Looking at the ranges given in the manuscripit, which are in AUs, I wondered whether they are applicable for vehicles.
Suggestion: either include a table for sensor ranges of vehicles which are lower than for spacecraft or rule that vehicles are too small for sensors and use scanners.
c) The Engineer started making heavy modifications to the gear (e.g. he put energy from the cannon to the grav drive, which resulted in a "hopper" (he rolled a 66
) -> he used tin from the roof of a stable to build wings to get some sailing abilities on top; he wanted to make a welding torch out of his blaster but his result was so low that he got a cigar lighter instead;....).
I would have appreciated some more detailed guidelines on the difficulty of the associated maneuvers, especially what happens when one of the many required engineering skills only partly fails and so on.
And for those who are interested: the result of the fumbled driving maneuver was that the grav tank found itself inside an office building on the first floor, with a desktop computer hindering the drivers vision (and everyone got an A impact criticial) - and since the building was made of wood, the character on the cannon set it on fire, which resulted in danger of everyone getting roasted as the driver was still staring at the desktop computer...).
BR
Juergen