Space combat experiences

[Stormcrow]

Spaceships will also help you with spaceship construction, fuel, delta-v, and travel times. It's not JUST combat. You could very well build spaceships with the system but then ignore the combat system. Just be aware that the vehicle stats in Spaceships are slightly different than in the Basic Set, though they give you an explanation on how to convert.

If you're not going to use Spaceships and you're not going for great detail, you can create new spaceships just by looking at the two sample ships in the Basic Set and modifying the numbers. You want a destroyer instead of a freighter? Increase the ST/HP, DR, and possibly the HT and Hnd, change LWt, Load, and Occ to better reflect a destroyer's mission, give it better weapons, and maybe tweak the other statistics as it occurs to you. It's not like you have any real-world vehicles for your players to point at and accuse you of getting it wrong.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by JaJacob

The other part of the problem would be figuring out some ship stats for combat. I'm not sure if it's worth it to just get Spaceships anyway only for that, though I assume it's a big part of the book.

Afaik there are only 2 ships in the whole basic and no suggestions on making them. I was thinking to make the ships as characters and their equipment either as advantages and innate attacks, then just convert the points to $ or use the one from ultra tech.

Ships as characters is actually quite complex. It's as complex as building an entire character (and usually a Super one) for every ship and there are Campaign-level decisions about what you want ships to look like in the first place.

It also does not lead to any support about Delta-V.

Building ships in Spaceships is almost certainly the simplest system Gurps has ever used for that purpose. There are basically only 20 decisions to make and no calculating masses or volumes ever.

[Kelly Pedersen]

Originally Posted by JaJacob

I'm gonna start with Chase and see what I can get.

In addition to the Chase rules from Action, I'd strongly recommend picking up Pyramid #3/53 for the article "Dogfight Action", which expands the Chase rules for aerial and spatial dogfights (blowing my own horn here, but you could also get Pyramid #3/112 for my article "The Thrill of the Chase", which adds rules for terrain and obstacles to the chase rules).

The Chase rules, particularly once you add the dogfight rules from the article above, work pretty nicely to model one-on-one spaceship fights in fast-moving vessels, or even more, as long as either all the ships on one side are pursuing or being pursued, or you model it as one ship being pursued by a second, who is, in turn, being pursued by a third. Unfortunately, the rules don't actually work that great for the Star Wars-style "giant furball" fights, where many ships are all intermixed and taking opportunistic shots at one another. If that's the sort of thing you're going for, and you want to use the Chase rules, I'd suggest working out some way to model switching targets of a chase every round, semi-randomizing the starting range and such, and maybe coming up with a way of handing things like setting up your wingman for a good shot or shooting someone who's attacking them. I'd also recommend figuring out a way to abstract the squadron's overall performance, since rolling all the attacks for dozens of fighters is a pain.

Originally Posted by JaJacob

The other part of the problem would be figuring out some ship stats for combat. I'm not sure if it's worth it to just get Spaceships anyway only for that, though I assume it's a big part of the book.

I would absolutely buy Spaceships 1 for this. Even if you never use the ship combat system, it will help you set some reasonable stats with relatively little hassle. Getting the relevant other Spaceships books for whatever type of craft you want is also a good idea, at least for the examples they've already got in them, though if you want to come up with a bunch of new designs, that's less useful.

[Humabout]

Originally Posted by JaJacob

I'm gonna start with Chase and see what I can get.

If you have it, check out Dogfight Action (GURPS Pyramid 3/53 - Action, p. 20-22) by David Pulver. That expands Chase Rules to aerial combat and serves as a pretty good reference for writing up space combat.

[JaJacob]

Alright, gonna pick up Spaceships and most likely the Pyramid Action issue for starters.

I can see how rules for terrain and obstacles could be eventually useful for near station or asteroid field encounters.

Thanks for suggestions guys.

[JaJacob]

So, I got Spaceships and had a little bit of time to riffle through and I'm little confused about it's combat and it makes life difficult for me to well represent the combat using Chase rules.

First, I was little surprised by the number of guns in batteries. I get that a huge SM+13 ship would have lots and lots of weaponry, but..the number of guns in any battery is fixed amount no matter the size, only the caliber changes.

So unless I missed something, a smaller 20m craft could have as much guns as 500m ship. That just sounds strange to me, but I understand you can decide to put fewer than max amount of guns in the battery. Also, I didn't check the prices, which is another reason ship wouldn't have to necessarily be maxed out. Another consideration is crew, which is also mentioned in next point.

Next confusion is about shooting:

If you have 10 weapons in secondary battery and they are same kind and fixed, you just shoot them as RoFx10 attack. If they are mixed weapons, you resolve same way depending on number of individual guns. A single gunner can do it.

But if you have 10 turreted weapons, you need to have 10 gunners and resolve attacks individually. Even if they all target the same ship and have same weapons.
Why? Is there a good balance or other reason I missed? Are the turrets classic ww2 plane turrets? Wouldn't gunners use some Electronics Ops skills instead of Artillery. I would assume gunnery would be about familiarity with some targeting software and an AI doing all the Artillery part. Speaking of, are there any suggestions for AI gunners or it would be fine to use UltraTech guide lines?

[mlangsdorf]

Comparing hypothetical wet navy ships might help:
* a roughly 50,000 ton battleship has 3 medium batteries (3 turrets with 3x 16" cannons), 1 secondary battery (4 turrets with 2x 8" cannons), and 2 tertiary batteries (10 turrets with 2x 5" cannon and 40 rapid fire 40mm autocannons)
* a roughly 15,000 ton heavy cruiser has 3 medium batteries (3 turrets with 3x 8" cannons) and 3 secondary batteries (8 turrets with 1x 5" cannon, 20 rapid fire 40mm autocannons)
* a roughly 5,000 ton heavy destroyer has 6 medium batteries (3 turrets with 2x 5" cannons and 12 rapid fire 40mm autocannons)

each ship is devoting 30% of its mass to weapons, but the battleship has more cannons than the cruiser and destroyer combined and it has bigger cannons.

the key point is that tertiary batteries on small ships may end up being too small, so where a large ship can use a tertiary battery to mount 30 weapons, a smaller ship needs to use a medium better to mount 3 weapons of the same size. If you expect your opponents to have 40 dDR, you want 300 MJ beam weapons to penetrate, and a SM +9 ship isn't going to mount a secondary battery. It will have a medium battery with 3 weapons, while the SM+11 ship it's escorting will have a tertiary battery with 30x of the same weapon.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by JaJacob

So unless I missed something, a smaller 20m craft could have as much guns as 500m ship. That just sounds strange to me, but I understand you can decide to put fewer than max amount of guns in the battery. Also, I didn't check the prices, which is another reason ship wouldn't have to necessarily be maxed out. Another consideration is crew, which is also mentioned in next point.

It is a little strange, but not in the way you're thinking at all. There's no reason a small ship can't have a lot of guns...if they're small enough guns. And they get really small when you put a tertiary battery on an SM+5 ship.

Partially emptying batteries probably isn't the right way to go for most small combat craft. Ships like that don't need much if any cargo space! It's better as a way to get a few guns on an auxiliary or armed civilian ship without taking up too big a chunk of the ship.

What is strange is that big ships can't have little guns under the system.

Originally Posted by JaJacob

If you have 10 weapons in secondary battery and they are same kind and fixed, you just shoot them as RoFx10 attack. If they are mixed weapons, you resolve same way depending on number of individual guns. A single gunner can do it.

If they are mixed weapons, note, a single gunner can only fire one type. You could build a fixed secondary battery that needed 7 different gunners to fire easily. (Regular, RF, and VRF beam and gun plus missiles. Wouldn't make a lot of sense, but you could do it.)

Originally Posted by JaJacob

But if you have 10 turreted weapons, you need to have 10 gunners and resolve attacks individually. Even if they all target the same ship and have same weapons.
Why? Is there a good balance or other reason I missed? Are the turrets classic ww2 plane turrets? Wouldn't gunners use some Electronics Ops skills instead of Artillery. I would assume gunnery would be about familiarity with some targeting software and an AI doing all the Artillery part. Speaking of, are there any suggestions for AI gunners or it would be fine to use UltraTech guide lines?

Even in WWII, there were aircraft where a gunner directed multiple turrets. The B-29 stands out particularly, but the Me-410's tail gun system did that too. So yeah, that's weird. (But advantageous if you can muster enough gunners - 2 attack rolls is usually better than one with twice the RoF. For effects, at least, if not playability.)

GURPS skill-wise, it would probably still want to be Gunner (or Artillery) not a different skill. Using advanced tools to do the job makes it a higher-TL version of the skill and may give a bonus, but doesn't usually change what skill it is. At some point, if the actual fire direction is fully automated and the 'gunner' is just picking targets, the approach you describe may be much more accurate, though GURPS writing might be inclined to cling to giving the gunners actual gunnery skills for 'heroic fiction' reasons anyway.

AIs, yeah, use Ultratech rules or such other rules as your specific setting calls for.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

What is strange is that big ships can't have little guns under the system.

You can get around that difficulty by using the rules for "smaller systems", which are on pp. 4–5 of GURPS Spaceships 7: Divergent and Paranormal
Tech.