Sorry for the delay in combing back to you.
If that were the case, fighters would be all but useless. And given that fighters are intended to be a superior weapon in Starfire, forcing fighters to just be small starships and be targeted on the normal starship vs starship weapons table would make them useless, and thus is a non-starter.
And that was the point, I was trying to make. Once you start to apply logic to the starfire rules, a lot of things would simply not make sense or be useless. But you (and me too, make no mistake about that) _want_ fighters to be there _and_ for them to be useful, so logic has to take a backseat.
When the quote refers to "interference" it should be read as "attenuate". If the drive field attenuates a beam on the way in, the distance left before the beam hits the target is minimal and the attenuation will also be minimal. But a beam that is attenuated on the way out (from the ship where the beam was fired), the distance from the firing unit to the target unit is vastly greater and the beam will have had all that distance to have its effects reduced by attenuation.
I am with Paul on this.
If this is the case (and you adress the bouy problem yourself in the part I cut from the quote), then not only buoys, but also bases, PDCs and ships with their drivefield down should make more damage.
And again, I am not arguing to introduce more rules to adress that. I don´t want a rule to cover every single eventuality. I have fun with 3rdR as is right now (even if some things don´t make a lot of sense) but it was you who asked for logical reasons for some things to not be possible.
I stand by what I said about buoys. It is simply unlogical that I can build a weapon for a buoy, that does regular damage, but is only 1/80 the size of that regular gun (not to mention that the buoy has also to carry some form of target aquisition gear, sensors and a frame to hold all that stuff.
If a force beam is 4 HS, then it is 4 HS, no matter where it is mounted.
I could see shaving off 1 HS for the fact that the buoy has a much smaller power plant and uses a large battery to power the gun, but not more (there is that _big_ battery and there still is a power plant, and of course, there still is the beam itself, not to mention the sensor/targeting gear).
If you ask me, how useful size-3 bouys would be, I can´t answer that, as I don´t have a lot of experience with them, but probably a lot less than now. The logistical effort to move hunderts of them around lets me shudder, as my standard FT-6 can now transport some 12 or 13 bouys per trip.
A similar thing with mines. A MF patters is supposed to be 50 individual mines. Those mines have a fusion warhead, an engine, that allows them to move 37.500km (half a tactical hex, assuming the MF is in the center of the hex), they also have station-keeping drives, short range sensors and a target aquisition/navigation system (otherwise, how can they hit a moving starship?)
Those 50 mines take up 0.2 Hull Spaces - realy? Why then is my regular Gun/Missile launcher, which is basicly the targeting system + launch rail for the missile, 3 HS in size? If the targeting system can be made so small, I´ll put them on my missiles and strap a couple thousand on the ouside of my small escorts - Macross missilestorm, here I come
Of course, that would totally break the game, so I don´t want that either
The point is: We want some things to be there and be useful, therefore they are in the game in a way that makes them useful, logic has not a whole lot to do with that. We might come up with arguments, why things are as they are, but that only comes in _after_ those things are already there. If you want stuff to stick to logic, it would have to be the other way around
And I say it again: Game balance beats laws of physics - as long as it is not too blatant, of course.
Because on GB's those inline racks cannot be combined for mounting items larger than a single inline rack's capacity. Simple as that. Those inline racks are like a tube. You can mount four 0.25 csp items or two 0.5 csp items or one 1 csp item. But you cannot combine the capacities of two inline racks together. That would be like wanting to fire a double sized (call it 2 csp) wet navy torpedo and wanting to be able to launch it from a 1 csp torpedo tube. It can't be done. A 1 csp torp tube can only fire ordnance that's 1 csp or smaller, and you can't combine the capacities of two tubes to fire something larger. And the same is true of inline GB racks.
Ok, then _my_ race will build their gunboats with a single, size-4 rack (basicly, a huge tube and the gunboat is build around it, similar to how the A-10 is build around the GAU-8), giving me all the flexibility I can ever want
Of course, if we follow that wet-navy example, launching below-size ordnance goes right out the window, because I am pretty sure, you can´t launch a 53cm torp through a japanese long-lance 61cm tube
As for your line of reasoning regarding HAWK and a lack of guidance, I see where you're going, but missile pods' usefulness would drop considerably if all of their fire was at -5 to hit. Thus, there must be some other factor below the radar screen that we're not seeing (which could be nothing more than handwavium, of course).
And there is your reason why pods, for logical reasons, shouldn´t exist
because "there must be some other factor" is just hadwaving "it is as it is because that is how it is"