Andy Brown wrote:

Swiftbrook wrote: Looking at the paperwork, the ships have four field of fire (forward, aft, starboard and port) and/or four shields. Shouldn't space ships have 6? Or are ship battles going to be 2D like in Star Trek?

My first thought was similar, then i thought maybe the four sections are slices of a sphere and they cover above and below the ship as well... and then i realized that if those four segments are hard set than you cant have overlapping fields of fire from your various batteries :( Otherwise the best position possible would putting your belly to their side to get all four of your batteries on their single one.

As is, I worry that you cant have side mounted turrets trained forward which immediately makes me sad for game mechanics trumping "common sense".

Any thoughts on weapon cycling times? It would force you to maneuver ships to bring other sides into the fight while the weapons you just fired prep again. also you would be moving fresh shields against incoming attacks while you recharge your battered sides.

A quick summary of where i am at from seeing pages with quadrants on ships:

- If you can have all weapons on a ship trained in the same direction than you end up with stationary ships alpha striking each other in a series of opposed rolls. Maybe realistic but really boring.

- If you have to swerve and weave your ships around to bring different banks of weapons onto your enemies and trade out which shields are taking hits than you have a far more mobile combat than we have seen in Pathfinder and it is probably a lot more fun but it makes me wonder why we dont just build a ship like in the example above to knock out enemies in the firs salvo.

Maybe we can get a mix of huge spinal mounted forward weapons that cycle over a period of turns during which you use faster cycling batteries to wear down a section of shields so that you can get a kill shot with the main gun the next time its ready? position and weave to set up the knock out.

so many questions...