04-15-2018, 10:18 AM | #31 | |||
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: [Spaceships] Missile shield vs. ramming: two questions
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But, to be fair, I do agree that the Big Gun strategy is likely to falter if you enable the Big Missile Swarm strategy, which leaves large ships facing off against thousands of KKVs and zero targets worth hitting with a 5000+ ton cannon. Quote:
Because you probably remember all the analysis of point defense vs. massed missile fire back when Spaceships was new.
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04-15-2018, 10:53 AM | #32 | |
Join Date: Nov 2008
Location: Yukon, OK
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Re: [Spaceships] Missile shield vs. ramming: two questions
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Build suicide drones that have their own missile launchers that they use once they get close enough. The drones would be more vulnerable to getting hit at longer range by big guns but once they close they unleash a swarm to overwhelm point defense. Overall though with the Missile Shield option turned on I think big ships are much more likely to survive but also escort ships that focus on point defense systems would be added. With Super science drives a fighter screen also might be an option, though they would be wiped out quickly if used offensively.
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04-15-2018, 12:13 PM | #33 |
Join Date: May 2010
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Re: [Spaceships] Missile shield vs. ramming: two questions
Continuing the "square root-based damage thread", my proposed HP progression above gives an SM+10 ship 1000 dHP. That means 100 dHP of penetrating damage disables a system, 500 dHP of penetrating damage destroys a system, and 6000 dHP of penetrating damage auto-kills the ship.
One option is to leave kinetic damage as-is. On this approach, a 16cm missile traveling at 10 mps will average 840 points of damage—usually destroying a system, but not instantly vaporizing the ship the way it does under RAW. OTOH if you want damage from kinetic weapons to be more-or-less consistent with ramming damage, there's a case for significantly nerfing small warheads. Under the second approach, a 16cm missile might have a base damage of, say, 11d. at 10 mps, that's an average damage of 385. Now you're just disabling a system, not destroying it. Either way, this is probably an improvement. I don't know what to do here partly because I think RAW missile damage is slightly too high to make logical sense–especially not for proximity burst, which should probably halve effective caliber. It does look like there's a germ of a solution to the "large ships are underpowered" problem here, though. |
04-15-2018, 12:55 PM | #34 |
Join Date: Oct 2008
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Re: [Spaceships] Missile shield vs. ramming: two questions
In my scifi-setting spacehips and other large things are tough. Basically all large things use standard hitpoints, but have a raising injury tolerance(damage reduction).
To get he IT value look up the SM and use the corresponding speed as IT. So that a SM +7/300 ton scoutship is at IT (30) and SM +11/30 000 tons ship is IT(150). (The scifi part is not the only one where I use that, I also apply it to large fantasy monsters in my current superheroic fantasy game) |
04-15-2018, 01:46 PM | #35 | |
Join Date: Nov 2008
Location: Yukon, OK
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Re: [Spaceships] Missile shield vs. ramming: two questions
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04-15-2018, 02:07 PM | #36 | |
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: [Spaceships] Missile shield vs. ramming: two questions
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04-15-2018, 03:48 PM | #37 | |
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
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Re: [Spaceships] Missile shield vs. ramming: two questions
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A factor of 30,000 in ship mass ought to deliver a factor of about 900 in range.
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Decay is inherent in all composite things. Nod head. Get treat. Last edited by Agemegos; 04-15-2018 at 04:45 PM. |
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04-15-2018, 04:14 PM | #38 | |
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: [Spaceships] Missile shield vs. ramming: two questions
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I don't know any 3e, so there is no chance that I am talking about 3e rules by accident. |
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04-15-2018, 04:35 PM | #39 | |
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
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Re: [Spaceships] Missile shield vs. ramming: two questions
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But you get trouble with slew time, and lightspeed delay eventually reaches a point where targets' random evasion can take then entirely outside the beam path (depends on their diameter, unused acceleration, and ability to orient at random). That makes effective aiming distance an issue against an evading target.
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04-15-2018, 07:36 PM | #40 | |
Join Date: Aug 2007
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Re: [Spaceships] Missile shield vs. ramming: two questions
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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.
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combat, spaceships |
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