Coming off the heels of the Grenades post I thought it would be a good time to talk more about weapon profiles, this post will be covering explosive weapons like grenades, rockets and missiles.
One of the core Design Pillars of MechaStellar is to offer a rules set you can use with Mecha from many different series. While having many different versions of a weapon can be fun we wanted to avoid having a weapon list spanning 50+ entries to cover every possible weapon from every Mech series. In summary we leaned more towards abstraction rather than granularity and grouped weapons into distinct profiles.
Here are the current profiles for Explosive Weapons including the newly added grenade launcher.
- Close-range Missiles
- Long-range Missiles
- Antiship-Missiles
- Grenade Salvo
- Rocket Barrage
Close-range missiles represent the missile pods on a Zaku, the shield missile launchers of a Galbady Beta or the countless micromissiles launched by a Macross Valkyrie. It can also be used for micro-torpedos launched by a Z’Gok or an Acguy. Long-range missiles are as the name suggests much longer range and they also have indirect fire which makes them perfect for suits that specialize in fire-support missions like the Xamel, these would be vertical missiles for the Armored Core fans out there. Antiship-Missiles are large missiles meant to sink ships like the one’s on the Palace Athene, or in the Pacific Rim universe Anti-Kaiju missiles. Since we’re still hammering away at Battleship rules this profile is often under revision.
Grenade salvo is meant to represent grenade launchers like on the Zeta Gundam or Efreet Custom or micro-grenade dispensors like the hip mounted ones on a Jegan or Jesta. We discussed those in the previous post. Rocket Barrage is meant to represent those high-payload ordinance that lack the fine tuning and guidance of missiles. This can be an actual rocket launcher like on the Guntank II or the boombox looking device used by the Gelgoog or it can represent several RPGs launched at once like the Geara Doga.
There is a bit more granularity for explosives on Gigas units on Short and Long range missiles. For example there might be 2-Tube, 4-Tube and 6-Tube variants of short range missiles, 5-tube and 10-tube versions of Long Range missiles, this gives you a few more options and a bit more punch for Mobile Armors like the Dendrobium Orchis or the Neue Ziel. The missiles with more shots are balanced out by a higher power-draw cost which is a mechanic exclusive to Gigas units.
Next post we’ll tackle Kinetic weapons.
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