Hello, I've been using this system for a year now in an D&D game I'm running, albeit I have had to implement a metric ton of new homebrew stuff to make this game more compatible with regular D&D 5e (such as the use of characters whom use magic, although this isn't hard science anymore with that implemented it makes it more akin to regular D&D) and more weapons, armour, miscellaneous gear and whatnot to flesh out some of the game play but it has been fun and commend you for making a good system.
I'm thrilled you've had such use out of it! Let me know any feedback you might have had on how things work, any odd interactions or balance issues. Fighting power creep has been an uphill battle for me.
Okay, I love to see debate going on in here.
My vision on the differences of laser and blaster weapons, first off, note that they are both laser weapons, and rely on similar tech, they just go about things differently. Blasters are pulse lasers that pulse their emissions in such a way as to cause nasty wounds. This is where their higher damage rating comes from.
You can read a little more detail here:
[sblock]Take one kilojoule's worth of laser energy and divide it up into 1,000 single-joule pulses separated by 5 microsecond intervals. Focus it down so the spot size is about one millimeter. The first pulse hits asteroid pirate epidermis. The pulse is fast enough and the energy is concentrated enough so that it creates a little explosion. This blasts a crater in the asteroid pirate's flesh up to four centimeters in diameter, depth of 2 centimeters.
Plasma and bits of flesh fly into the path of the beam but there is no beam there. The explosion was done by a single pulse, but the next pulse won't arrive for another 5 microseconds. The plasma vanishes almost instantly. 5 microseconds later roughly 90% of the flesh debris has cleared the beam path. Now laser pulse #2 arrives, sailing through a void with no plasma or flesh bits, and arrives at full strength causing a second explosion at the bottom of the crater. This creates a second crater. The two craters have a combined depth of 4 centimeters. Repeat for the remaining 998 pulses.
Dr. Schilling calculates you can bore a hole through soft body tissue about 30 centimeters deep before the tunnel collapses (taking about 0.005 seconds for all 1,000 pulses). Roughly the equivalent to a high-velocity pistol bullet or a small centerfire rifle.
The 5 microsecond pulse rate is optimized for soft body tissue, other rates are optimal for steel or other materials.[/sblock]
Beam lasers are intended to be the needle sharp beams that poke burney holes through things. They use a different type of laser altogether, one optimal for use in space, and have the interesting side effect of usually being invisible there (except for at the target where there is a flash of light as some of it is instantly converted to plasma). The heatgun mod converts a beam laser into a glorified flashlight of death that cooks you. That's pretty cool.
Now, game balance dictates what their mechanical stat blocks should be, and I tried to apply the science as best I could to support that. You might notice that the range for everything seems really short. This has to do with combat battle maps that play routinely uses, and wanting there to be distinct mechanical trade-offs for different weapons. If the two had differign effective ranges of 150 and 200 yards, this is not really a debate, just use the one with a bigger die, and it will probably never matter. As it is, people have to position and work around the map to get good shots in. (Yeah, I'm a minis and map guy, so this was a major concern during design for me.)
As for the rest,
I will keep up development on deeper spaceship rules, they have just been on the backburner.
Archaic arms and armor were never intended to be a major design focus, just a means to an end, of letting our intrepid heroes beat up on less advanced species, and occasionally take one along for the ride. In the strictest of terms, the savage is not as good as the soldier, in my estimation, due to lack of proficiencies and thus quality equipment. They can still be lethal, fun, and useful in a party, and anyone that choose to play a giant furry conan the barbarian in a spaceship game gets what they deserve. I do not think this is a trap option, or intentionally under-powered, just a natural continuation of reasonable statistic interpretation.
I still like my power weapons, they make sense and work for me and my mind's eye, even the power sledge. And good catch, the thing is also basically a pneumatic battering ram, thrusting with it is a fairly common tactic I would think. That being said, it's like calling a chainsaw a weapon, this is more of a tool, a devestating one when used for violence, but still more of a tool. I imagine not many spacers would carry their sledgehammer as their go-to combat implement, but rather use it as a special option when environmental conditions require.
Is the damage too high? Guns are good. Really, really good, and for this option to ever see play it has to be competitive mechanically, and doing great damage if you can get up on the enemy is one of these ways it can. I've seen a savage dodge around the battle for two rounds to get into a flank, and suddenly drop behind enemy cover and start laying people out. It was a lot of build up, a great pay off, and was really quite impressive (albeit crazy) to watch in the mind's eye.
Archaic Armors... they're bad. They have good AC for the cost, and you can apply their one mod super cheap, but they're just not that great, and the stats bear that out. 5e hp based combat is an abstraction, and a lot of this works from that mindset. We are not trying to be simulationist, just a little more grounded in reality than spacewizards swinging their laser cutlass. It was my intention that the basic weapon and armor stats as presented would let high-tech be coolly superior to archaic arms and armor by dint of base numbers, and require no further modding, but of course adjudicate it as you see at your table. I've had people with better and worse tech than what is listed as default assumptions for primitive gear.
Laser and Ballistic are damage types for a reason, primarily that I wanted a way to track what I saw as the two "post modern" main weapon damage types, letting people stack high resistances against them, then suddenly be waylaid by bludgeoning or piercing damage.
