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10-15-2018, 07:41 AM | #21 | |
Join Date: Oct 2008
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Re: [Spaceships] Designing the best possible fleet on a billion-dollar budget
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But weapon prices are apparently wrong *sigh* I guess I need to ditch the long range acceleration of the drones and just go with HEDM, was trying to give them some staying power, but it is really not needed in this scenario. So reducing those prices and still need to ditch some more missiles it seems. Will recalculate. |
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10-15-2018, 07:49 AM | #22 | ||
Join Date: Oct 2008
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Re: [Spaceships] Designing the best possible fleet on a billion-dollar budget
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-You can split your fire. -Split point def fire works as any other split fire: a single salvo fired by one attack maneuver is a single target, multiple salvos are multiple targets thus get a cumulative -2(using beams or guns)/-1(using missiles) That reading comes from the Spreading Fire page 58: Quote:
Last edited by weby; 10-15-2018 at 08:05 AM. |
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10-15-2018, 07:57 AM | #23 | |
Join Date: Oct 2008
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Re: [Spaceships] Designing the best possible fleet on a billion-dollar budget
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So it is not only the missiles that just require any hit even from a minimal point defense drone to destroy, but the fairly well armored drones themselves. But yes, it seems I need to go with HEDM engines as the AM engines are just too expensive. Also on salvos: You do not want too large a salvo size as a large salvo will produce less hits by far compared to separate attacks and as the missiles are so expensive you would basically want to fire them one by one anyway on separate attack rolls. |
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10-15-2018, 08:34 AM | #24 | |
Join Date: May 2010
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Re: [Spaceships] Designing the best possible fleet on a billion-dollar budget
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EDIT: I think the 1/15th of a ton weight for missiles may have been an errata on the original print edition?: http://www.sjgames.com/errata/gurps/...ceships_1.html |
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10-15-2018, 08:37 AM | #25 |
Join Date: Oct 2008
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Re: [Spaceships] Designing the best possible fleet on a billion-dollar budget
Ok, updated the task force to use HEDM on drones and the price of SM 4 weapons.
The drives and fuel being cheaper actually allowed for more missiles to be carried. |
10-15-2018, 09:34 PM | #26 | |
Join Date: May 2010
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Re: [Spaceships] Designing the best possible fleet on a billion-dollar budget
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This actually seems to contradict the point defense rules, though. The section also says, "All targets must be specified before rolling to hit." But with point defense, you might not even know how many more attacks are going to hit this round! Does anyone know if David has ever clarified this? |
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10-16-2018, 01:33 PM | #27 |
Join Date: May 2010
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Re: [Spaceships] Designing the best possible fleet on a billion-dollar budget
A serious using tertiary batteries for point defense vs. hundreds of drones is that the beam weapons rules say a system becomes disabled on a critical failure. So any batter—regardless of type—is limited to stopping about 200 attacks on average. This means that probably any effective fleet is going to have to use drones for point-defense.
It might be useful to have a very basic "bubble carrier" design that can easily be dropped into any fleet. This version, built on an SM+7 hull, carries up to 17 SM+4 drones: Front Hull [1-6] Hangar Bays (10 tons each) ($180K) Central Hull [1-6] Hangar Bays (10 tons each) ($180K) [core] Smaller Systems (three at SM+6): one Control Room (C7, comm/sensor 5, one control station); one Habitat; one Cargo Hold (5 tons). ($250K) Rear Hull [1] Smaller Systems (three at SM+6): one Fusion Rocket (using hydrogen; provides 0.00167G acceleration); one Fuel Tank (5 tons hydrogen provides 20 mps delta-V); one Cargo Hold. ($1.03M) [2-5] Hangar Bays (10 tons each) ($150K) [core] Cargo Hold Empty cost: $1.79M Fuel cost: $10K Crew: one bioroid ($200K) Coincidentally, the whole package costs exactly $2M. Last edited by Michael Thayne; 10-16-2018 at 02:23 PM. |
10-16-2018, 02:38 PM | #28 |
Join Date: Feb 2016
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Re: [Spaceships] Designing the best possible fleet on a billion-dollar budget
Well, turrets function independently as they each have their own dedicated firing systems, so I prefer them to batteries, even when it comes to primary weaponry. In the case of disabled systems, half the turrets still function. If you want point defense though, two SM+6 weapon pods can attach to the central hull of larger spacecraft and provide point defense through their turrets (two weapon pods with 8 VRF 30 kJ secondary weapons batteries with 10 turrets each are capable of engaging 160 separate targets per turn with RoF 100 each through using AI controls). While they would take the place of 20 SM+4 drones, I think that they would be worth the inconvenience.
Last edited by AlexanderHowl; 10-16-2018 at 02:44 PM. |
10-17-2018, 08:22 AM | #29 |
Join Date: May 2010
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Re: [Spaceships] Designing the best possible fleet on a billion-dollar budget
I messaged David about the point-defense rules question, but for now I'm going to take a somewhat unprincipled approach of having no penalty for the first point-defense attack in a turn, a -2 penalty for the second attack (assuming beams), -4 for the third attack, -6 for the fourth attack, and so on.
Under this approach, a gunner with skill-11 might fire 50 shots at the first attack (+6 bonus), 200 shots at the second, 800 shots at the third, and 3200 shots at the fourth, and now you're mostly out of shots of this is a VRF improved turret in 10 minute rounds. Another rules question that becomes relevant: if multiple gunners are possibly going to fire in point-defense against an attack, do they all have to declare before any dice are rolled? Or can gunner #2 wait until seeing if gunner #1 got the job done? This potentially has a big impact on the number of point-defense gunners you need to defend large, valuable targets, where a 2% chance the target gets hit by a nuke is not acceptable. Another important factor in determining a fleet's point-defense requirements is ramming. In my experiments, successful defense against ramming is surprisingly difficult. What you don't want is to fire your particle beam at a ramming SM+4 drone, and get 8 hits that average 10 dHP of penetrating damage each, and then the drone makes all its survival rolls (which it has about a 30% chance of doing), so you just barely fail to destroy the drone and your ship takes 200 dHP of damage. That happens a couple times and you're dead. An expensive but reliable solution is missiles. Otherwise, you want to make really sure your anti-drone beams can reliably inflict 90 dHP of damage. Like really, really sure. You'll either need several guns to destroy each ramming drone, or you'll have to use relatively large anti-drone beams—say a 30MJ particle beam. |
10-17-2018, 09:24 AM | #30 |
Join Date: Feb 2016
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Re: [Spaceships] Designing the best possible fleet on a billion-dollar budget
Unfortunately, the best defense against drones is other drones or missiles, though sufficiently powerful beam weapons can engage drones long before they come close enough to be a facotor. For example, a 100 MJ beam possesses an optimal range of 3,000 miles, meaning that it can shoot a drone for 15 turns before the point defense needs to engage it. Of course, bigger is better.
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