[Spaceships] Missile shield vs. ramming: two questions

[weby]

Originally Posted by Anthony

It probably worse better with general GURPS mechanics to use expanded wound size modifiers. I came up with mine here and several other people have had nearly identical schemes.

Note that Kromm said in pyramid #3-70 page 15 about Damage Reduction:
"Simple, and perhaps the one thing I most regret not imple-
menting in the Basic Set. It contains the seeds of solutions to
many problems (e.g., making it harder to destroy huge vehicles
and buildings using small arms)."

So using Damage Reduction to mane large things tough would seem to fit well with GURPS mechanics too.. :)

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

I know there's a reason that Bismarck survived three shell hits from [King George V] on the 24th, a torpedo hit and at least one shell hit on the 25th, and four hunred shell hits on the 27th, before being sunk by two torpedos, or whatever the hellish battering it took was. I'm just trying to give context to the statement that it was "effectively killed by one shell".

Your point was clear and on-point to me. It also IMO is a godd example of how real ships don't largely get destroyed or not based on one "hit point" number that gets reduced predictably by every hit.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by weby

So using Damage Reduction to mane large things tough would seem to fit well with GURPS mechanics too.. :)

By itself, it makes large objects too difficult to destroy.

[weby]

Originally Posted by Anthony

By itself, it makes large objects too difficult to destroy.

No, on the contrary, by itself it makes large objects still too easy to destroy. Firing a small arm at a planet should not even do that single point of damage.

Overall it is a question of how much Damage reduction should be gained at what breakpoints AND a basic change of the mechanics so that damage being below a certain % if the IT value being ignored.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by weby

No, on the contrary, by itself it makes large objects still too easy to destroy.

It means inadequate damage by large weapons.

[(E)]

This is a slight tangent, but what about setting minimum sizes for various reactors or having size effect efficiency. That way smaller ships have to keep careful count of How much power they use while larger ships have power to spare.

[weby]

Originally Posted by Anthony

It means inadequate damage by large weapons.

Not really, even cruisers do not get destroyed by single hits(unless hit in a critical location) though the armor and in GURPS standard rules they would be destroyed so scaling it so that they do not would seem more correct.

Basically if you read any World War 2 combat account against things like cruisers and destroyers that are hit by larger ships main weapons, the hits clearly penetrate the armor and yet do not destroy the ship instantly in most cases.

As a random example because I happen to have watched a youtube video on the battle and then looked into it further: Battle of the River Plate in 1939. The heavy cruiser Exeter was hit seven times by Admiral Graf Spee and damaged severely but survived and was capable of returning to Port Stanley for emergency repairs.

In standard Gurps rules the 28cm shot would have easily penetrated the armor and thus a few hits would have caused enough hit point damage to destroy it at only 1024 HP or at least to make it dead in water.

There are plenty of other situations where the armor was clearly not enough to severely limit the damage and yet the ships took many hits by large guns and survived.

[Ulzgoroth]

Anthony isn't suggesting standard GURPS rules as the alternative.

A 28 cm shell hitting the 575-ft Exeter is proportionate to a ~3mm round hitting a SM+0 target. Which would imply that an appropriate handling of scale would give at best a 1/5 wounding modifier for the hit (Exeter being unliving), potentially less.

Giving those shells the same effective wounding modifier as 20mm shells (which should be nearly harmless to such a vessel even ignoring armor) on the other hand is a bit harsh.

[weby]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Anthony isn't suggesting standard GURPS rules as the alternative.

I would not know, as the link he posted just goes to "script hell", the page in question wants to run 22 scripts at start and does not show any content without them, so it is unusable as a website.

But, yes giving a damage divisor of about 1/5th would likely be in the right ballpark for realistic figures. (I use a LOT higher numbers on my games but that is for cinematic effect of large spaceships/structures requiring massive damage over time to reduce to rubble)

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by weby

I would not know, as the link he posted just goes to "script hell", the page in question wants to run 22 scripts at start and does not show any content without them, so it is unusable as a website.

Heh. It's actually relatively modest by the standards of script hell, though I might move it to something more vanilla. However, commenting on something you didn't read seems... odd. The basic idea is that weapons have a SM and wound modifiers are based on relative SM, so a pi+7 weapon on a SM+5 target acts as pi++, on a SM +7 it acts as pi, on a SM+9 target it acts as pi-, larger targets get larger divisors.