Re: [HOE] Concerns with a Junker power... [LONG]

[Robert Holland <robert@macauley.com>]

I haven't gone through and checked every bit of your math, partly because I
don't have my Junkman book handy. But here's a few thoughts from a quick scan.

>Okay, to start with, I picked an damage and an ammo size.  I went with 5d8,
>which has a fairly easy ammo size of 1 to deal with.
>
>Moving to stream-based weaponry in Flash Gordon, it says that the first
>thing to do is give the weapon an arc of fire, using the explosives table
>for warheads.
>
>AH!  But, Iron Oasis went and revised these.  So, flipping to the back of
>Iron Oasis, I see the new modifiers; the one I happen to pick is a 60-degree
>arc that's 5 yards wide.  The modifier is -50%.  My ammo size is now 0.5.

It's good that you bothered to read the Iron Oasis update, but maybe you should
have read ALL of it. :) The burst radius modifiers for warheads are drastically
reduced, but the effective number of dice is now figured as the *factorial* of
the actual number. So the base size of a 5d8 warhead is

5! * 0.2 = 15 * 0.2 = 3

...or 1.5, after the -50% modifier. Triple all your calculations from here on.

Thus you have 30 (!) drain per shot, 32 slots, and a total cost of about $105.

Of course, this is still pretty damn cheap compared to market weapons, which
makes perfect sense to me. Would you pay the same amount for a working firearm
as you would for several large chunks of raw steel, plastic, and alloys in the
same proportions that compose that firearm? Of course not. You buy a gun, you're
not just paying for the materials, you're paying for the luxury of having all
those materials stuck together in a functional shape. The cost of components is
the cost of *raw materials*, which are damn cheap, but you take on your own
shoulders the cost in time, effort, and the very real danger of taint or
backlash, not to mention the risk of instability. Also, you say "this is
ignoring the battery". Have you actually thought about how much that battery is
going to cost? At $10/ounce of ghost rock, even using your original
calculations, the battery is going to cost $10 per shot capacity to build and
*$20 per shot* to charge--and the gun has ROF 3...now triple those for the
corrected calculations. Evens things out pretty quick, unless you've got an IGR
reactor, and I'm not even going to go into the cost that one of those things
requires.

--Robert Holland