Quote:
Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth
Can you say what rules you used?
Because you probably remember all the analysis of point defense vs. massed missile fire back when Spaceships was new.
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Well, I used all of the Spaceship rules at different times.
I first went into missile salvos v. point defense during the playtest for Spaceships 1. This obviously became very important when the one shot kill quality of kinetic weapons at very high velocities became evident.
A general principle that one tertiary battery given over to point defense tended to cancel out one missile battery.
A bit of fluff text in the write-up for an "Ares" battlecruiser (I think it's in the Designer's Notes) about a possible weakness v. missile boats caught my eye. So I took the Ares and swapped out the main beam weapons for missile batteries and called the new ship type the Hydra..
The first thing I discovered was that the Ares had many light guns and was unable to penetrate its' own frontal armor and this made it an almost automatic loser against it's mirror image. So I made an Ares II that swapped a secondary battery for a larger one. That one showed little special vulnerability to missile barrages mostly because it could limit engagement length by damaging/killing its' opponent..
From this we develop the principle that a big gun is better than an equivalent mass of little guns except for missile defense. This fuelled my preference for main battery/spinal mount and tertiary battery with nothing in between.
You also see support for this in the damage rules where you want weapons heavy enough to actually disable the target hit location and not just damage it.
Then Spaceships 3 and 4 were tested together and it was with the mapped rules I did the space station attack. I used a Gibraltar station in defense and a Nova carrier with a bay full of TL8 ASATs.
The Novas stated out at Mars which is how they built up that 70 mile per second velocity. What I remember was that this came to 100 ASATs. There may have been multiple Novas to get that number.
Each ASAT could fire 3 missiles so the total number of incoming targets was 400 and this was too many to counter. Just one of the missiles gave you a _hard_ kill on the SM+14 asteroid station too.
A general result from multiple test battles is that they tend to be short in terms of number of turns. I attribute this to Spaceships realistic rules bias that mimics modern naval combat with its' "one shipkiller missile to one ship" tendencies.
Even older battles that appear longer and more epic only seem that way because we tend to count shots fired rather than those that hit and almost all shells fired miss. One shell from Bismarck sank the Hood. One shell from the Rodney effectively killed Bismarck.