Ive been running a few sessions and I like to mix in a bit of combat in every game willing. So theres a good bit of phaser/disruptor play. All the fireing modes seem to be used and have solid applications. Except for pulse. Paying two power for +1 damage seems sort of a waste to me I mean you can fire a continuous beam for the same amount of extra energy and get a +2 to hit. Many of my players have been. Wide Beam has great applications. But pulse seems well sorta..lacking. Am I just silly. I mean in a system where a phaser can knock a man out cold or make him dust +1 to damage isn't so shiny to me. I can think of one thing only and thats if I use creatures or people with a personal scale ability/technology that functions like feedback pulse in starship combat. Not saying that dosen't have merit and might be a neat foe for my PC's actually I prolly will do it just to see if one of em is bright enough to figure to switch the settings..but still see I had to think of it as a solution not just for the sake of itself. I'm ranting now.. Was there errata about the setting? A neat home rule way to do Pulse? I mean pulse phasers in ship combat are great dare I say nasty even. though +1 penatration is a bigger deal than +1 damage maybe ill make it like +10 damage or something perhaps thats to much..
MY PCs have gotten some ship sized poloron weapons from the wreckage of an Jem'hadar Fighter. Should they add it to their ship should I add their offensive value to their phaser arrays or count as its own system. Some species who have not fought in the dominion war and are not familar with he Jemhadar may not have the shield modulation to protect against them..soo any thoughts on that?
Hmm I'll have to check my books on the damage thing
But with regards to the Jem Hadar weapons: Depends on the situation really. It's feasibly possible in the rules, but you may well say no on a practical standpoint (where are you gonna put then, strap them to the hull with Velcro!) and if you're in the middle of a war, you just might not have the time to backward engineer and put something that huge inside your ship!
In terms of technology, I can recall when they first got their hands on the Dominion ships they couldn't make head or tails of it, which means it's quite radically different to Federation technology. Their power system was completely different, so by the time you factor in a power manifold (to convert mains EPS power) it's not necessarily going to be as effective inside a starfleet ship as inside the dominion one.
On the other hand, such things could be immensely useful to Starfleet R&D, and perhaps with the correct research rolls the players may be able to modify their phasers to produce similar effects, or cannibalise the system to modify their phasers to be more effective (a prototype edge).
On the ethical grounds, except for using them to boulster a ship and give it an edge within the war: you have to think would the admiralty think it was ethical to do such things? I've never seen Starfleet strap an alien weapon to their ship, this may be more to do with practicality than anything else: The only exception was Voyager, but then that was a unique scenario, it was cut off from supplies and parts of their own. Sure during the war things like that might happen, because of need, and depseration, but then keeping them afterwards, to fight with people outside of the war seems like grey area to me.
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