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I noticed that the Pact Worlds ships still adhere to the basic weapon arcs listed in the basic starship frame rules, even though you do see mounts added and ignored (in allowable arcs) on example ships.
I'm pretty convinced now that you're not allowed to add a mount in an arc that your base ship doesn't provide. Looking at the overall ship capabilities (arcs, mounts, maneuverability, hull points, expansion bays) I think arc deletions from some frames (usually the aft) is a balancing point to make up for advantages in HP and expansion bays that aren't fully covered by the relatively minor build point and maneuverability differentials.
Thus battleships and destroyers get all arcs and decent maneuverability, but poor expansion bays and often weaker mounts than their same size competitors. At the same time, their maneuverability and all around coverage is an advantage over their bigger competitors, the cruiser and dreadnought. Get in that aft arc and whittle down those superior HP (and absorb the hits from their combat shuttle/fighters).
On a separate note, no one is imposing a common philosophy on how many officers and supporting crew members are required on big ships. The Iomedaen carrier has HUGE numbers of officers (18) with a complement of 145, while the Idaran carrier has less than half (8) with a complement of 120. The Hellknight battleship has 22(!) officers with a complement of 200, the Thamtech battleship has only 11 with a complement of 200.
This is kind of bad. I wonder if the inevitable ship book will provide guidelines or rules setting minimums and maximums on this sort of thing. It's pretty unclear (but important for large parties!) to know whether a destroyer can have 6 officers running the minimum of 6 crew, or if you need supporting minions to get that many actions. My feeling is that these numbers for the big ships should have been between the two extremes, and a destroyer probably needs something like 10-12 crew to have 6 actions available, and probably needs a cap at 7-8 actions with a full crew of 20. It certainly shouldn't get 20 actions with 20 crew.
I'm pretty convinced now that you're not allowed to add a mount in an arc that your base ship doesn't provide.
Does Paizo actually come out and say that?
The Sunrise Maiden, of course, brakes that rule right out of the box.
I'm pretty convinced now that you're not allowed to add a mount in an arc that your base ship doesn't provide.Does Paizo actually come out and say that?
The Sunrise Maiden, of course, brakes that rule right out of the box.
No, it’s not explicit. It may not even be right. Sunrise Maiden having an aft weapon mount hurts the theory, but they’ve broken their new and not fully digested rules before, especially in the first AP volume before the core rulebook was finalized.
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It's not explicit, but we decided it was intended to be allowable (and we don't think doing so is going to lead to any imbalance).
There's an implication that you can add weapon mounts to an arc that doesn't have them in the base configuration:
p305 - last paragraph of the "New Weapon Mounts" section:
"Tiny and Small starships can have only two weapon mounts per arc (and per turret)." implies that Tiny starships can add turrets, despite none of the three tiny base frames beginning with one.
The alternative explanation is that they were future proofing against potential tiny frames which do come with a single-mount turret.
Sounds like you need to take a page from old Traveller and add a rating for additional hard points on frames for adding weapons.
I thought it obvious that ships could have weapons installed in any arc. The alternate interpretation never even occurred to me.
I'm reluctant to post as I'm 3PP for Starfinder, and have already published an optional rule supplement for starships. That said, having created 21 new ship frames really to accommodate different paradigms like bio-hybrid ships or zoomorphic ships, I don't think we solved this diversified weapon arcs problem (if it is a problem). In some homebrew built ships, I have placed a heavy weapon mount on the aft of a ship, because I needed the heavy mount to use for something other than a weapon, where existing frames often doesn't include a heavy weapon mount on the aft of most smaller ships.
I thought it obvious that ships could have weapons installed in any arc. The alternate interpretation never even occurred to me.
I used to think that. It may just be that they're being boring and pedestrian in their example ship designs. I do think the missing arcs are a balancing factor, but I guess they can still do that via a BP tax rather than a straight prohibition.
One final thought, I can imagine arc deletion (and possible prohibition) being related to the number and presumed placement of expansion bays. A dreadnought has a huge number of expansion bays - in this model they are presumed to be heavily built placed in the aft arc, which is why there aren't (and perhaps can't be) any weapons mounted there. Similarly, a bulk freighter might lack port and starboard arcs because that's where all the extra bays go. An explorer has the same number of bays as the larger destroyer. How? Maybe because they eliminated the ability to mount aft weapons to pay for it. If you could pay BP to add an expansion bay or two I'd feel better about the ability to add mounts to an arc that the base frame doesn't ordinarily provide.
This strikes me as the sort of thing that might not have a consensus intent by the design team and we might never get a straight answer on. With the exception of the (pre-rules finalization) Sunrise Maiden, we don't seem to have any Paizo approved ships (makes note to check Corpse Fleet and other late AP ships) that break this design philosophy. Do the PFS ships adhere to the basic arcs?
At lower levels/tiers the model/examples they use follow basic guidelines since generally they don't have the BP to break from the example. But once you gain a few levels then you do have the BP to add things like turrets and other mounts not originally placed.
With regard to my comment on large ship crew sizes and supporting crew for officers, yeah, the numbers for Destroyers are all over the place in both the core rulebook and Pact Worlds. Both have examples of destroyers where ever member of the crew is an officer, and both have examples where every officer has and needs supporting crew.
If there were actual sophisticated rules rather than random assignments for this sort of thing you'd see minimum/maximum officers in given roles, minimum/maximum crew supporting those particular officers, and fixed "aid another" type bonuses provided to the officer for a given number/quality of crew. As it is, apparently each author can just make up what he or she wants without worrying about internal consistency.