Germany is treating me pretty well. Trying to balance the beer and sausage consuption with enough PT to keep the weight down...not sure its working.
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Back to the topic though (can you all tell I'm bored at work)...
On thing I found with the rear firing heavy weapons, at least in SFB (which is my normal poison), is that they tend to become damage pads. If anybody remembers the
Doomslayer from CL3, it had a rear firing photon, and it could cause some interesting and likely unintended effects:
1. The ship retained full forward firepower (added some actually), in addition to the rear firing weapon, but it didn't add a comensurate amount of power to feed everything. So if you wanted to really be able to use the rear firng weapon, particularly something as power hungry as a photon, the ship slowed to a crawl.
2. Because DAC hits on heavy weapons are non-directional, the rear firing weapon became a damage pad for the forward firing ones. As a result, the ship could often wait to fire until after its opponent, without fear of losing hard hitting weapons in the alpha strike. Shooting the
Doomslayer with a medium range volley was often just enough to kill that rear firing torpedo and convince her to come run you over with 5 heavy weapons while your guns where dry.
When flying a ship with rear facing photons, you get stuck in a quandry. Do you spend a bunch of power overloading the thing only to get it shot off before you can turn it to fire? Will it be in range? Will it have any chance at all to hit the same shield the forward alpha strike did? It can be an awesome deterent to prevent somebody from chasing you, but it can also be a huge power suck. In SFB, in the few cases where I've flow a ship with rear firing photons (the Doomslayer, BB, DWH), I've often only left them loaded as standards or proximities at the start of the battle, and then left them unloaded for most of the duration. Without a lot of other rear firing weapons to use with them, they sort of become little more than a single gun for sniping.
When I did the CM years ago, I tried to cut back on the number of the forward photons to balance the effects I mentioned above (I used the DWH as a model there), but the ships still has much the same problem. It is very tempting to start using the megaphasers at medium ranges, but that starts to create an every-turn power drain that rear firing weapons photons can exasporate. The ship works OK (I've used it in a couple JFF games), and it does have the right feel, but can be a bit unwieldy. If you can get those rear firing photons to matter, its all good. But if you can't, you start wishing you just had a good 'ol NCL.
