View Single Post
Old 04-15-2018, 04:40 AM   #19
Polydamas
 
Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: Central Europe
Default Re: [Spaceships] Missile shield vs. ramming: two questions

Quote:
Originally Posted by Michael Thayne View Post
I'm trying to figure out how to build a space combat paradigm where large warships make logical sense, as opposed to being the result of mindless aping of naval warfare. Not that we don't want to ape naval warfare, we just want to do so in a thoughtful way. Here "large" = SM+9 at a minimum, or ideally SM+10 or higher.

The basic problem here is that cost scales with volume, while damage, armor, and HP scale with length. The main thing that large warships have going for them is that (1) they can potentially have enough DR to be immune to beam attacks from smaller ships (2) they can have beam weapons powerful enough to penetrate such armor on enemy craft. Unfortunately, this logic doesn't apply so much to kinetic attacks, because kinetic attacks can do incredible amounts of damage, especially when using the tactical combat rules where you aren't arbitrarily limited to a scale-based velocity.

The missile shield design switch from Spaceships 3 seems essential here, to stop large warships from being missile bait. But what about ramming? A couple things are unclear to me. First, if your RoF is higher than the number of ramming ships, do you get one hit per ramming ship, or one hit per point of RoF, which can be divided freely among attacking ships? I can't quite tell from the wording of the rule ("Beam weapons that are assigned to point defense may therefore automatically hit a number of incoming ballistic weapons (or ramming spacecraft) up to their maximum rate of fire.")

Second, would it be reasonable to use the "missile shield" rules not just for beams but also missiles? It seems like this could be extremely helpful, because (1) dedicated suicide drones can have very heavy frontal armor, enough to bypass point-defense guns designed for unarmored missiles and (2) by the standard rules, a point-defense gunner has a minimum 5% miss chance. Point (2) means an SM+10 warship (weighing in at 10,000 tons) can easily be destroyed by a swarm of a dozen or so SM+4 drones (10 tons each).
It is always good to remember that game rules are only an approximation and that people in the setting make decisions based on their reality not the rules. The 'machine gun vs. HMS Victory' problem is a classic example.

There is a post from David Pulver around 2008 talking about how he might scale HP to better represent the properties of large vehicles in WW II and the Falklands. I think that your thoughts about force screens are on the right track: settings with many big ships, such as Star Trek or the Schlockverse, usually have some kind of 'force field' technology, and that can allow big ships with big power plants to shrug off attacks.

(Similarly, I don't know whether Spaceships assumes the kinds of armour arrangements which specialists talk about- many thin spaced plates and things like that- or the intuitive 'great solid hard masses' which 90% of gamers will envision).
__________________
"It is easier to banish a habit of thought than a piece of knowledge." H. Beam Piper

This forum got less aggravating when I started using the ignore feature
Polydamas is offline   Reply With Quote