Personally I very much enjoyed holding off the forces of the Ecclesiarchy and Inquisition until a dramatically appropriate amount of time had passed, and having the Valk and laser be such hard interrupts of the main event was cool.
A Rogue Trader rather than an Inquisitor (although not entirely beyond a bit of daring-do, she's somewhat more self serving than the Inquisition generally admit to), but yes. In the absence of actual bogeymen, the Mechanicus made some sense as an antagonist there - "No touchy sacred relics".
As for inter-player conflict - I think we are perhaps all a little too friendly, yes.
If we count insults involving mothers and rubber tubing as friendly, yes. (For the benefit of those not on that table, yes, that really happened).
So blast weapons are serious business, huh?
One thing I've found when writing RIA is that blast weapons are a very fine balance to make both dangerous and not an insta-mega-kill. Because damage and armour are effectively multiplied up across every hit from the blast, you often end up with weapons that turn unarmoured targets into mist, but barely dent armoured ones.
RIA chooses to reduce the blast values of most weapons and instead trades them special damage types. This both makes them faster to resolve (because fewer hits) and allows a lot more fine-tuning to make them good against their preferred targets without insta-killing everything else.
(I have several spreadsheets looking at the statistics for several different possible statlines for various different weapons in a lot of detail).
I would have also reduced the accuracy of things like grenades in RIA, but that's very difficult to make balance well against the LRB armoury. Maybe in IRE though (see below).
Are there near miss/scatter rules for those kind of weapons?
Yes. For grenades and direct fire blast, misses scatter D10 yards, plus an extra yard for each degree (or part) of failure. Indirect fire automatically scatters, but with -1 yard for each degree (or part) of success.
For direct-fire, scatter is limited to a quarter of the range to the target, but still, a miss by a single point can still theoretically scatter 11 yards.
IRE changes this to D3 yards, plus D3 per degree of failure, deliberately putting a lot more emphasis on the degree of failure. (Which means that I've been able to change indirect fire to just a simple to-hit penalty rather than it needing its own special scatter rules).
It may also mean that when I get to the armoury that I reduce the accuracy of blast weapons a bit. Because near misses are now
actually near misses and thus likely to cause some damage, I will probably want to make hits a bit less likely.
I believe that might have been me?
It was, yes - but given my general level of tiredness*, I didn't want to attribute it in case I'd misunderstood or misremembered.
* The train ride home was not especially fun. You know the level of tiredness where every couple of moments you lose coherence for a split-second and then everything seems to melt while your brain tries to reboot? Yeah - that.
