Questions About Siege Weapons

[Stockvillain]

I've got a couple of questions about the siege weapons section of UC; they may have been answered elsewhere, but I'll ask anyway.

1) I noticed that there are weights listed for the ammunition for the siege weapons, but not for the weapons themselves. Might not be important information for everyone, but it could be useful in certain situations [i.e. carrying capacity of the critters being used to haul them around].

2) Targeting Platform. Where be? Mentioned on p160, but that's it. I can kinda figure what one is used for, and probably how it works, but I'd like something solid to look at [also with weight for logistics purposes].

Thanks for your patience with my inane questioning!

[Ravingdork]

I found a FIRING PLATFORM mentioned twice in the Skull and Shackles Player's Guide. Could that be it? Relevant quote below:

For an additional 8,000 gp, a galley or warship can be fitted with a ram and castles with firing platforms fore, aft, and amidships. Each of these firing platforms can hold a single Large or Huge direct-fire or indirect-fire siege engine. Siege engines on the fore and aft firing platforms can be swiveled to fire out the sides of the ship or either forward or aft, depending on their position. A siege engine on the amidships can be swiveled to fire out either side of the ship.

[Ravingdork]

Or not...

James Jacobs wrote:

I don't use this tread to track possible errata; those types of threads need to be placed in the product's errata folders. I strongly doubt that "targeting platform" was speaking to something from Skull & Shackles, since that AP didn't exist at the time Ultimate Combat was being built. In fact, we wanted to use Ultimate Combat to present vehicle rules for ships, but the design team, alas, went in a direction with vehicle combat that made it too impractical to use ships or other vehicles on that scale for nautical conflicts, so we had to build a new system.

In any event, a "targeting platform" is NOT a "firing platform." As far as I can guess (and it's just a guess since I wasn't involved in Ultimate Combat's creation apart from designing the 1st draft of the gunslinger and working a little on gun rules), the targeting platform was something that was cut from the book but then not cut from being referenced elsewhere, and the "or use a targeting platform (see below)" section you bolded above should just be cut from the book.

But again... this isn't the appropriate thread to bring that to our attention. We need to keep our house in order, as you know, so please post this observation over in the rules forum for the designers to see and note and consider.

Relevant link.