I was playing with the ship design spreadsheet for the first time in a long time and I have a a question.

When I was building a weapon and mounting them on ships, I found that it was cheaper to buy a weapon without an AP cost or cool-down and buy either when I mounted it on the ship. Why is that?

Is it because no weapon on a mount may fire during the cool-down turns even if it did not fire when the other weapons did? If that is the case, then I can understand the lower cost for the mount for cool-down.

For APs It would seem to me that it should be more expensive to buy an AP cost for the mount rather than for the individual weapons. For example, if you mount three weapons each with their own AP cost to fire it takes three APs to fire all three, while if you put identical weapons, except no AP cost, and give the mount an AP cost, then it takes only one AP to fire all three weapons. Despite this, the second mount is cheaper.

Can someone help me understand this?

Thanks

For AP costs on weapon mount rows, remember that capacitors cant be used to pay for Weapon Mount APs. Only for APs on the weapon itself (range band and trait). Also, unlike arming APs (ie: cool down 0 and an AP cost for cool down), you spend the AP to activate a row of weapons each turn. The APs used to activate a row of weapons is used up whether you fire the weapons or not (or only fire some of the weapons in the mount, etc).

AP on weapon mounts are prorated across the number of weapons in the mount. So, only time Ive ever seen AP on mounts be cheaper is when you have only one weapon in the mount.

Generally, AP/Cool down on the Range bracket ~= AP/Cool down on the weapon mount, if you only have one weapon (or if you multiply AP/Cool down on the mount by number of weapons). Arming AP/Cool down is slightly less discount. The largest part of that discrepancy is the ability to hold the "armed" status turn to turn on Cool down APs. Range Bracket AP/Cool down is a teeeny bit less of a discount, likely due to being able to be paid for by the capacitor. Obviously, Range Bracket and Weapon mount only come close to each other on single shot weapons alone in their weapon mount. Range bracket is MUCH more of a discount on high ROF weapons, and Weapon mount APs let you do things like spend 1 AP to charge 4 weapons, a sort of fractional AP cost you cant do on the weapon itself.

I've tried to replicate this problem.

I made an RoF 1, 7 band weapon, ranges are 5, 10, 15 ... to 35
Accuracy is 4 in all bands, Pen is 3, Dmg is 4.

Weapon 1 has no AP costs. Weapon 2 has 1 AP in all bands.

Weapon 1 costs 388.71. Weapon 2 costs 330.56

Putting weapon 1 in mount S1 and giving S1 an AP cost of 1 gives an in mount cost of 330.41.

Putting weapon 2 in mount S2 and not giving it an AP costs gives an in mount cost of 330.56

(In this case, to avoid confusion, I did not put any windows in the firing arc.)

The 0.15 hull space discrepancy is cumulative rounding errors on the weapon table...but I suspect that you're not really concerned about a difference of 5/10000ths

What may be happening here is that you're putting a weapon that has AP costs in a mount that has AP costs - the two effects are cumulative - you pay the AP costs for the mount in addition to the AP costs of the weapon's range bands, and in that case, there should be a steeper discount.

Likewise, cooldown times on mount rows are in addition to the cooldown times on weapons (and if you use the drop downs, they will keep you from doing a cooldown of greater than 3 turns.)

Jared's site. Not in his profile for some reason.

I like "Die-Rebel-Scum" as a desriptor.