From The Depths - Forum

What about say a different version of the bomb chute but have it be a mortar instead. I get we have up to a 2000mm cannon but they are direct fire and often close range.

This could a a valuable weapon and possible cheaper weapon to use to take out large slow vessels or fortifications. And balanced by medium-long shell flight time and weight of the mortar itself.

So one could opt the cheaper route by equipping a mortar instead of spending a lot of resources on a medium to short range 2000mm cram cannon that can be difficult to mount on a smaller ship due to the bulk the gauge increases take up along with many of the other parts.

Use short barrel and get what essentially is a mortar.

I'm looking for higher than 2000mm encase the hidden message there isn't clear. Sure that's a quick fix but you still need a lot of gauge increases and other parts still ending up with your entire hull filled with cannon instead of armor engine. That's why modified bomb chute would work because it requires much less space.

Bomb chute still needs all the cram guts. It is just another, specialized type of barrel, isn't it? As it says on a tin: reduces and locks projectile speed to that of thrown stone, cancels recoil and spread, and that's all. What it throws still created by regular CRAM setup and takes same space.

Short barrels aren't quick fix. As i see it, that is exactly the way they meant to be used. If compared to real world's armament, Cram fills roles of heavy bombardment artillery, from howitzers up to mortars and doomguns, while APS is everything from howitzers, through cannons down to MGs. Unbalanced as hell, but in theory that's it.
So, FtD-ish mortar is essentially short CRAM. And giant fast-firing mortar is huge short CRAM with gauges. Size in exchange for rapid sending of explodey things towards enemy, more size for more boom, speed and accuracy of those for falling from above i guess... well, not sure why you want to make mortars, but that how they work?

And as for bigger guns... just why? 2000mm thing already capable of punching through effectively everything and then evaporating every single block in range, why ask more? Bigger will divide things by zero.