The Torture-class Cruiser (The Soul Reaver, page 137) is listed as having 4 Prow weapons. It has 3 Disintegrator Macrocannon Clusters and then 1 selection for the final mount. One of those listed is two lance weapons. Do both of these lances take up a single mount?

Why wouldn't they? I have no knowledge of any weapon system that takes up more than one slot.

 thats why two weapons in one slot is so unusual   its not one weapon with strength 2 like a lance battery but instead is two weapons

Sorry about the previous post. My smartphone won't put capital letters or punctuation in on these boards. It works fine for most other sites, but these forums just don't agree with it. Of course, my previous smartphone couldn't post to these boards at all, so it's a bit of an improvement.

HappyDaze said:

Oh, that's different. They're not 2 different kind of lances but actually 2 copies  of the same lance? If it is the former I'd say that the fourth slot is taken by either one of the two. If  it is the latter I'd say it's a typo.

Whoops mispost,

It's deliberate - the special rules for Phantom Lances (or, any kind of DoS-based scaling on a lance weapon) make increasing the Strength awkward. There was a similar issue with earlier drafts of the Eldar Pulsar rules - increasing the strength and/or adding effects for high DoS made things inconveniently fiddly.

That weapon slot option for the Torture-class Cruiser contains two Strength 1 Phantom Lances. It's a little clumsy, mechanically, but it's the easiest option that preserves the intent of the mechanics and makes picking a secondary weapon for the vessel as simple as possible (you pick one option, it takes up one slot).

N0-1_H3r3 said:

I don't know. I don't think if would have been that fiddly making them Strength 2 lances and instead of speaking in hits, saying that the battery can roll to hit again up to two additional times (I am assuming that Phantom Lances work the same as Pulsars, I haven't got the supplement myself). Or just put two weapon slots on the ship's prow. As it is, it sounds even more iffy to have "half-a-slot" weapons.

JuankiMan said:

In isolation, sure… in context, less so.

A Torture-class Cruiser has 4 Prow weapon slots. Three are taken up with weapons batteries (equating to the single large battery that the BFG rules for the Torture depict). The fourth can mount a set of torpedo tubes, a launch bay, or a pair of lances.

Phantom Lances don't work the same as pulsars - they don't in BFG, and I deliberately chose not to make them Pulsar-like in these rules, as I feel it's a defining distinction that the Eldar and Dark Eldar don't use the same weapon technologies. Given that the Dark Lance is more akin to an antimatter projector, compared to the Eldar Bright Lance which is a precision high-powered laser, I chose to make the Phantom Lance (viewed as a starship scale Dark Lance) deal higher damage on multiple Degrees of Success. Having the weapon gain both damage and hits on multiple DoS was awkward and not intended (as demonstrated by the rules for Lightning Claws in Black Crusade, it results in an exponential increase in damage, rather than a linear one), so it was easier to present the weapon as two distinct weapons.

As the starship is presented first and foremost as an NPC vessel, the precise logistics of its construction are not a concern. Having two lances presented as a single weapon slot is, in this regard, a matter of convenience when presenting a choice between three different-but-notionally-equal options.

If it followed the precedent set by Ork vessels, it would have been listed with 5 Prow slots. The Torpedo Tubes and Launch Bays would have been noted as taking 2 selections, while the lance weapons each take 1. Same net effect, but a bit neater in the write-up. As listed, there is a question as to whether a critical to one lance disables them both since they share the same slot. Using wording similar to the Ork vessels we've seen would have made it more clear.

I even would have been happy if the Torture-class had to drop one of the three disruptors if it mounted the pair of lances as it would have better fit with what "4 Prow" is supposed to mean.