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Old 12-22-2017, 03:31 PM   #1
Michael Thayne
 
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Default [Spaceships] Can a dead gunner control a missile salvo in tactical combat?

At first glance, Spaceships treats missiles as guided rather than homing attacks. They use gunner's skill + Acc, rather than 10 + maybe Acc (if the gunner's skill check succeeds).

However, guided attacks require a series of concentrate maneuvers to steer. This does not appear to be true of missiles in Spaceships. The issue doesn't come up in the standard combat rules, because missiles are assumed to hit on the round they're fired, but because salvos can stay live for many rounds in Spaceships 3, it becomes an issue. Pp. 29-31 refer to gunners deciding if and how a missile will accelerate, and declaring attacks, but doing so doesn't seem to require any maneuvers.

A natural interpretation of this is that missiles are guided, but controlling guided attacks is a free action in space combat. Even though it doesn't require a maneuver, a dead or unconscious gunner can't do it, so if a gunner is killed or incapacitated, any missiles under that gunner's control drift uselessly. This mostly seems to make sense, but it has the odd consequence that a gunner might well control 30 distinct salvos simultaneously, even when using 20 second combat rounds.

The other interpretation is that missiles are really homing attacks. They just happen to calculate effective skill as if they were guided attacks. The gunner's skill is in a sense "imparted" to a missile when the missile is fired. References to decisions being made by a gunner really mean the gunner's player, or the GM in the case of NPCs. Therefore, you can't stop a missile salvo by destroying the missile boat that launched it. This approach avoids questions about how one gunner can control 30 salvos at once.

A third possibility is that not needing to use maneuvers to control salvos was an oversight, and gunners should be required to take concentrate maneuvers to control them.

Which approach is the intended one?
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Old 12-22-2017, 04:06 PM   #2
Michael Thayne
 
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Default Re: [Spaceships] Can a dead gunner control a missile salvo in tactical combat?

Another option: GURPS Traveller: ISW doesn't seem to require gunners to take maneuvers to control missiles, or limit the number of missiles that can be controlled by a single gunner, but it does limit the number of missiles that can be controlled by a given ship--basically a ship can't control more missiles simultaneously than it could launch in a single turn. There's also a range limit on how far a missile can be from a ship and still be controlled by that ship.
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