I was working on a gunslinger build, and for the first time i started playing around with cyberarm rules. When I saw the Gyromount, something occurred to me.

Take a cheap SMG with an integral laser sight. The Sandler TMP will do just fine. Throw on a foregrip, a personalized grip, a gas-vent 3, and a hundred round drum and you're putting out full auto without any penalties from recoil. You may also want to consider shortening the barrel.
Now, take Krav Maga for the ability to take aim as a free action, which you'll be using to ignore range penalties.
Finally, load up that hundred round barrel with tracers. I suppose you could plausibly have the tracers at a 1 to 2 ratio with other ammo, but for my money you want a hundred tracers in the barrel (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) .
Full auto with tracers gives +3 dice when over short range (10m, or 8 with a shortened barrel), and the laser sight gives +1 dice within 50 m. You're taking no range penalties due to your free action take aim, so at ranges between 8m and 50m you're getting a net +4 dice pool... and even SMG damage isn't bad at full auto! While this trick works just as well with machine pistols it's less advisable, purely because Machine pistols can't get the 100 round drum upgrade (IMG:style_emoticons/default/frown.gif)

Rogue Squadron was the Nintendoo 64 one.
Rogue Leader was the RS2 on the Gamecube
Rebel Strike was the RS3 on the Gamecube.

Neither of the covers had Wedge. Rebel Strike had Luke on it. Both RS1/RS2 had an X-Wing on the cover.

My Google-fu was strong today.

http://content.ytmnd.com/content/0/c/2/0c2...f3f0b16d299.jpg

You're right, it was Rogue Leader (probably the best game of the series). And thank you for that, I laugh every time I see it.

Sadly, I cannot view while not at home. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/frown.gif)

There are other ways to protect yourself against ion blasts, yanno. And even if not...

Okay, so the pirates have ionized the ship. Now what? How are they gonna get in? Cutting through the impervious hull - nope! Ripping the door off? Too bad the bolts that lock the door and the door itself are made of the same stuff as the hull; that's never coming off.

What are they gonna do? Drag you inside a larger ship? You mean the kind of place where they wouldn't dare direct the kind of ion blasts at your ship that it would take to knock it out? Great, you just sit tight while they try in vain to pry into your ship, wait for the power systems to come online, and start shooting up their vessel from the inside.


Gonna sit in space ionizing you until you starve? What will that get them, if you leave the ship locked up tight? Not a whole lot, really, and a lot of time wasted that they could have been going after other things.



Even if - and this is not exactly a big if, I'll concede - the super-impervious armor is too expensive to use on random cargo ships, you would still want to replicate it for use on very, very important ships - transports carrying critically important people, for instance. Your flagship, perhaps, or even just to armor your very best fighter squadron.

Your death stars...

Or at the very least, their reactor cores. So if a lone fighter does get through and lobs a missile down the exhaust pipe, the explosion doesn't tear the whole place apart.

Or just put a grate there, so a missile can't get an unobstructed path to a reactor core. Also, don't put the antenna for your shield on the outside of the shield.

Best. Called Shot. Ever.

Starships don't. That's why the traditional way to take the shield generators down is to span proton torpedoes at them; overwhelm the shields and pop the juicy grapes underneath.

For ground-based installations... Yeah, I got nothing. That's as derptarded as derp gets.

You mean like the empires bright idea to put their shield generators in two very detectable targets as two balls above the command bridge...

Can we actually find anyone who says that the Empire was any good at designing things for military purposes? I mean, they had excellent weapons tech, excellent materials, great usage of energy in the form of the shields, but they leave tons of fairly easily exploited weak points.

I think that the Empire was very good at designing their Military Technology. Nothing is perfect. *shrug*

I think that the Empire was very good at designing their Military Technology. Nothing is perfect. *shrug*
And really, anything the size of the Star Destroyers will have weak points. Same with the Death Star. In that particular case it was never expected that ANYONE would have the chops to actually exploit it (the one and only exploit that was found, if you remember). *shrug*

Having shield generators outside, or being extremely obvious and easy to hit is a huge weakness. The missile to the reactor was not the main weak point. That they were even able to send fighters against it was.

Sucks when the superstructure is not finished, doesn't it?
As for the original Death Star, well the exhaust port was shielded, just not against proton torpedoes. As I indicated, it was the ONLY weakness of the Deathstar, and was not abvious without detailed schematics. *shrug*

I'm going to jump in and suggest that maybe that specific configuration of heavy shield NEEDS to have big spherical generators outside of the main ship... after all, how much do we really know about shield generator physics? sure no other ship needed them, but maybe they were settling for inferior shields as a trade off?

as to the death star's exhaust port... a better point defense grid across the death star's surface would have been a good idea. After all, if someone had decided to simply rig up some photon torpedoes with remote control and guidance systems, then launch them at the death star using the same target then the anti-capital turbo-lasers would have been even less effective!

MonCal cruisers have external shields as well. They're just not obvious as those on a Star Destroyer, because they're housed in (some of) those ubiquitous blisters on the surface of the ship - they're also much more redundant than is typical for a ship's shields, and many of those blisters house things which are not shields.

They also don't have standardized plans, so targeting their shield generators is more or less impossible. Imagine if the surface of a Star Destroyer was covered with like, ten huge geodesic domes, two of which were the primary shields and two of which housed backup shields. And which ones were which (as opposed to being filled with a fat lot of nothing) is random on any given ship.


But that's an excessively inefficient way to design ships.

Since we're on the subject anyway, which do you think is better (assuming mutually exclusive): cloaking or shielding?

Shielding. Unquestionably shielding.

interesting...
My money was on cloaking provided you can fire while cloaked. the problem is that cloak technology is rarely consistent even within a single setting *cough*star trek*cough*, so it's hard to really define how good it is.

EDIT: of course there's those that want it both ways, IE traveler. Their black globe generators are both shields AND cloaks (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

I'd go with Cloaking. If you aren't being shot at, that's better than soaking damage.

But yes, it depends on implementation.

It really depends on a number of factors. Duration and strength being primary. A cloak needs to be sustained nearly indefinitely for it to be effective, while there's a minimum level of strength for a shield to be effective (whereas a cloaking system that only partially cloaks will still be effective to avoid detection at longer ranges)
If we assume it's between perfect cloaks and perfect shields, I'd rather the shields. Someone can get lucky against a perfect cloak, not so with a shield.

I find that comment Interesting. If it is Perfect, they will never get lucky, and therefore Cloaking is the choice. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)
Assuming Imperfect, I would go with the Shields.

I don't think that susceptibility to area suppression fire is an imperfection of a cloaking device, per se. If your shields are perfect, then no shot will penetrate them. If your cloak is perfect, someone might get lucky and lob a 50 kiloton nuke/RKV/Hungry Giant Space Hamster along a constant bearing (decreasing range, natch) to your heading, and fast enough to prevent countermeasures/evasive action.

I based my answer on FTL: Faster than Light.


Even with the upgrade that lets you fire while cloaked, having no shields is a recipe for getting your ass beat. Granted, I wouldn't want to go without cloak either, but given the choice between the two, I go with shields.


And conceptually, I agree. If someone knows you're there but can't see you - or if they even suspect you're there - they can hose you down with area fire and get lucky. Getting "lucky" on someone unshielded is usually the game-winner.

Space is big. very big. you won't believe how mind-bogglingly big it is! you might think it's a long walk down to the corner store, but that's just peanuts to space!

In other words... Area denial and suppression fire in space is very very difficult. The amount of firepower you'd need to have even the remotest chance of hitting someone with a good cloak through saturation fire is way more than you'd need to overload a comparably good shield.