Weapons

Created Saturday 26 August 2023

Weapons are organized into grades/magnitudes:

Personel Combat

Building, Vehicular, & Ship Combat

Special Rules for Different Weapons & Weapon Types

Ballistics

• Weapons that use mass & kinestic energy to cause damage (um, in case you didn't know...)
• Range is reflected in their magnitude. Every increase in mag is a mang increase in range

• Most ballistics of mags 1 — 3 use chemical propellants. And so go boom and eject a pretty visible puff of heated gas. And so always reveal themselves upon firing.
  • An unrevelaed defending unit using ballistics can either opt (a) to stay unrevealed but loose 1 AP (to lost opportunities) in the next turn or (b) reveal itself & not loose that AP (by using opposing fire)
• Modern ballistics use rails and so don't suffer the reveal that other ballistics do
• Ballistics in space are only ever 1° or 2° in mag & range

Flashbacks

• Flashbacks gain 1 OP for every magnitude of distance Flashback (or maybe 1 per X hexes of distance to nerf this enough to allow for bigger maps?)
• Flashbacks only shoot if they hit/suppress, and thus only reveal when they hit---not whenever they attack

Dousing Rods

• A Human machine gun of the same degree as inter-offers.
• Some can indeed fire it on the offing.
• Suppresses on any hit.
• They are expensive, especially to tfr jumps, given their delicacy and ammo requirements.
  • Although they can usually process the surface of Rocky planets into a sufficient stream of slugs,tm they still need their own factory to process it and supply the other resources for its steady flow of rounds to target.
  • They are also rather light (helping shed extra heat) and can be moved quickly. They are thus no more likely to reveal themselves than other modern ballistics.
  • They do, however, cause a bloom in the host hex at 1/3 the rate of gamma guns (and so wet units that use them usually have abti-vloom armor, further adding to their jump costs)

γ-Guns

Hunter-Seekers Least Weasels

• Ferrets are standard-issued six Least Weasels. These are drone, really. Ferrest can fire them as any normal attack.
• Once fired, Least Weasels navigate the map like any air-born unit.
  • They have normal (ambient info) vision.
  • They are detected at -5° recon rolls, and the detecting unit must actively decide to use a AP to detect without knowing when to do so
  • Because otherwise Least Weasels travel the map invisible to all units but the launching Ferret (and those it's in direct communication with)
  • Least Weasels may attack at any time, but only get one attack before they are destroyed (they are destroyed on attack). This, of course, can be at melee rules for an attach from the same hex.

Nukes

AM converters

Humans do chemistry well (it turns out). And one of the innovations was macroscopic conversion between matter and antimatter. Normally done in very controlled settings, specialized converters can nonetheless be made that cause a self-perpetuating wave of partial conversions from matter to anti-matterpropelled forward by the energy of the anihilaiton of that matter/anti-matter stew right behind it. It's a very wonky technology, though that usually fails, so (outsicde of those used by the Chocolate Elvis), their chance roles are inverted (antimatter, get it?), needing a 1 (not a 10) to succeed.

Jump flashes

A system that either is really pissed off or has it back against the wall may use its jump point like a really long range artillery gun, firing raw mass through points calculated to be within the lethal range of populated points in the target system. Outsude of telegraphic snapshots from entangled sensors sent through as part of the "progjectile," it's hard to tell how accurate these massively expensive rounds are. So, although they're deadly if accurate, their usage costs loads of OPs to use. In addition, the player has to spend OPs (not APs) to recon, part of which is to prepare and send a robot with sensors enough to read the ambient information to send back. Outsdie of these, the attacker is firing on a constantly foggy map.
Still, would make for a cool late-campaign battle scenario.

Bloom

• Energy weapons the fire from/into/inside gassy environments (inside a planet's atmosphere, inside a gas cloud or accretion disc, etc., into a dust shield) can bloom that gas
• Any gassy hex is fired through by any energy weapon travels into/through twice in a row blooms. Blooming happens regardless of the success/failure of the attacks/defenses
• Blooming reveals all units in the bloomed hexes due to the generation of ambient radiation (i.e., information about this automatic reveal travels at the speed of ambient info)
• Any energy weapons firing into/through a bloomed hex gain -1 attack mod for every time an energy weapons fired into/through it.
  • I.e., -1 mod for the turn in which that hex blooms (second time an energy weapon fires into it), then an additional -1 mod for any other turn that an energy weapon fires into/through (so -2 on second round of fire, -3 for third, etc.)
  • This attack mod loss is separate from possible damage as described next
  • Optional rule (for Worlds or single battlefields): Blooms reduce energy weapon ranges:
    • Pre-bloom: No distance mod
    • -1 blooms: Range reduded to 1/2
    • - 2: Reduced to 1/3
    • Etc.
    • (Note actual range is usually infinite line of sight, so half would still be longer than most planetary battleflieds outside of army-level battles)
• As of now, the only two energy weapons are γ-guns and Flashbacks
• Some atmospheres are more conduscive to blooming than others.
  • Battlefields can have a bloom mod for all hexes
  • Some hexes can have/gain/loose differnt bloom mods due to passing storms, dust devils, etc.
  • Possible mods include:
    • Shorter of longer number of turns of subsequent attacks until bloom
    • No adding of OP demerits, just -1 forever
    • A max number of -1 OP stacks
    • And, of course, faster mod stacks, say counting by 2s instead of 1s

Incandescent Blooms

• A little bloom fluoresces, a lot incandesces.
• Any hex with a -3 or greater energy attack mod from blooming also has:
  • -1 attack from any weapon into / out of / through that hex
  • A 1° attack at the beginning of each round from the environment on each unit in that hex. This roll can be modified with OPs/APs and is often also modified by anti-bloom defenses, but isn't usually modified by the environment
  • Obscures lines of sight into / out of / though the hex:
    • Any units so obscured are automatically concealed and become re-concealed after the end of the round
    • Recon rolls made into / out of / through -3 or greater blooms have a -1 mod

Bloom Dissipation

• Bloomed hexes loose 1 level of bloom at the end of any round during which no energy attacks pass into / out of / through a bloomed hex
  • E.g.,
    • A hex with -2 bloom (from being fired into with energy weapons three times in a row without a break) will become a -1 bloomed hex at the end of the round
    • It will become "pre-bloomed" at the end of the next
    • And bloom free at the end of the next