Here's what may be a silly question:

Q: When calculating Agility under Classic Traveller, Book 5 should one use "batteries" or
"batteries bearing" for energy consumption?

In more depth, if I'm designing a 75,000 dTon ship with bay mounted meson guns, I can only
fire 75% of the meson guns in one combat round. If I put 20 x 100 ton factor 9 meson guns in
the bays, they would need 4,000 EP. But only 30 of the meson guns can fire in a combat
round. For calculating agility, do I note 3,000 EP consumption?

Subsidiary questions:

Q: Did I miss this in the rules or was it addressed in an Errata?

Q: Do later editions of the rules address this?

Where I lean:

I lean towards "batteries bearing" rather than batteries here. My logic is that the bigger
ship is already at enough of a disadvantage due to it's size. If we compare two ships, my
original 75,000 dTon ship, and a 20,000 dTon ship and both of them pack the same weapons
complement, then the 20,000 dTon ship would be able to fire 19 / 20 of its weapons. Taking
things to their logical conclusion, the 20,000 dTon ship can be made much stronger by
diversifying it's weapons complement at a relatively small cost in EP. E.g. change the
weapons complement of the smaller ship to be 10 x 100 dTon meson bays + 10 x 100 dTon
particle accelerator bays. Now, the smaller ship can divide up 20 batteries...

--
Chris

      __o          "All I was trying to do was get home from work."
    _`\<,_           -Rosa Parks
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Christopher Sean Hilton                    [chris/at/vindaloo/dot/com]