I'll kind of echo Ame.
I get a feeling this article takes to long to get to the point. I was reading and re-reading it, trying to dessiminate the point, and was thinking it probably could be lightened to a degree. Especially if it's meant to patch the DRv3 article (which is already pretty big).
I'm having a hard time tracking the self-guide projectile part. I get that the distinction is made that missiles are faster/frail, and torpedoes slower/tougher. I get that there's role-warfare being encouraged, with point-defense being for missiles and evasive maneuvers more feasible for slower torpedoes (how slow is slow, exactly? To me, torpedoes are like
Star Trek photon torpedoes and those don't seem slow).
I'm not enchanted by torpedoes being typecast as slow because I personally view missiles as a non-starship weapon and torpedoes as a starship weapons (essentially, 'missile' has been the prevalent term for any guided warhead generally not meant to kill a ship so far); but if I'm a minority, I can deal with it. The torpedo/missile distinction can bring about a strange loophole: power armors carrying mini-torpedoes?
I can see this being in, because it covers how tough a torpedo/missile is - which is a defining purpose of DRv3. Hopefully it can be more more comprehensible.
* * *
I'm not surprised to see the 8-same-tier weapon concept show up as a maximum weapons fired limit. I still view Wes as being inconsistent in his previous ruling of it, and it shows to me that at least Cadetnewb found the work previously leading to its creation sound, even if the straightjacket adherence to it in the NTSE wasn't. It achieves painting it as a guideline much more strongly than any previous iteration, which pleases me.
What doesn't please me is that I still think it's a weak and lame rationale... but I don't exactly have something better to propose, so please consider that a peanut-gallery-level nitpick on my part. After all, I do find this convenient. It does solve some submitting issues with my own creations. I should be going "Yay! \o/ " but...
This actually brought about notions of another matter which remains poorly covered: lethality is not the definitive expression of a weapon's damage potential; rate-of-fire seems to play a large role in the perception too. That's still not addressed. But it seems thematically taken into account here, which is why I bring it up. This needs to be solved, though: if there's going to be a metric for calculating how much deadly crap you can send out, Rate-of-fire can't be ignored. It'll be brought up again. So will ammo. Shots fired at once simultaneously. And ultimately the room it'll take inside a vehicle, like Cadetnewb groused about in Frost's submission.
And this is what, I think, actually compounds on the problem of maximum loadout. It's not a good reflection of it, because it doesn't deal with DRv2's damage-per-interval value. Again, DRv3 was not meant for ship-building in its scope.
Therefore, on the same basis that Wes denied Frost's submission, I can't endorse this facet of the article. If you want a maximum allowed weapons to be fired kind of thing, it doesn't belong in the DRv3 article.