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Old 07-26-2012, 11:00 PM   #21
Lamech
 
Join Date: Mar 2011
Default Re: [Spaceships] DS-1 Orbital Battle Station

Oh, and the GURPS spaceships weapon engeries must be an abstraction. A 1MJ laser hitting a person by GURPS rules would vaporize the guy. In reality a 1MJ hit would increase someone's average body temp by less than 7 degree's kelvin. Certainly spectacularly lethal, especially since it will mostly be on the skin, but not even close to enough to cause bodily destruction.

Math: A person has 40 liters of water. Each liter of water takes a kilocal to raise a degree or roughly 4kj. For all 40 that's 160 kj. 160kj*7>1MJ.
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Old 07-26-2012, 11:08 PM   #22
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Default Re: [Spaceships] DS-1 Orbital Battle Station

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Originally Posted by Lamech View Post
Oh, and the GURPS spaceships weapon engeries must be an abstraction. A 1MJ laser hitting a person by GURPS rules would vaporize the guy. In reality a 1MJ hit would increase someone's average body temp by less than 7 degree's kelvin. Certainly spectacularly lethal, especially since it will mostly be on the skin, but not even close to enough to cause bodily destruction.

Math: A person has 40 liters of water. Each liter of water takes a kilocal to raise a degree or roughly 4kj. For all 40 that's 160 kj. 160kj*7>1MJ.
They aren't even an abstraction, rather outright fabrications. They are numbers provided instead of names like "big, small, medium, huge" because otherwise the author would have run out of names before it ran out of weapons to list. I can try finding the author's post indicating this if you'd like?
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Old 07-27-2012, 07:19 AM   #23
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Default Re: [Spaceships] DS-1 Orbital Battle Station

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Originally Posted by Sunrunners_Fire View Post
They aren't even an abstraction, rather outright fabrications. They are numbers provided instead of names like "big, small, medium, huge" because otherwise the author would have run out of names before it ran out of weapons to list. I can try finding the author's post indicating this if you'd like?
Ah, cool so it was even intentional then.
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Old 07-27-2012, 09:52 AM   #24
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Default Re: [Spaceships] DS-1 Orbital Battle Station

Its disappointing if Spaceships fudged its numbers for weapon energy. Wasn't David Pulver involved in the design? He is a geek for mathematical modelling.

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If it isn't enough in a short enough span of time to explode the planet, then "all" you're doing is melting it.

Besides, isn't killing everything on it and making it uninhabitable for geologic timeframes enough?
Indeed, the firepower of even small Star Wars spaceships is terrifying. Watch Slave 1 shattering all those asteroids in episode 2 and imagine those bombs dropped on a city without one of SW's incredibly powerful shields. A big ship should be able to render a planet uninhabitable given time and no shield to stop it.
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Old 07-27-2012, 01:38 PM   #25
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Default Re: [Spaceships] DS-1 Orbital Battle Station

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Originally Posted by Lamech View Post
Ah, cool so it was even intentional then.
Found it.

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Originally Posted by Polydamas View Post
Its disappointing if Spaceships fudged its numbers for weapon energy. Wasn't David Pulver involved in the design? He is a geek for mathematical modelling.
He is the author of the book, yes. I assume that means he wasn't merely involved in the design, but that it was entirely his design with a degree of input from others via playtest and whatnot. (It did get playtested, didn't it? I don't keep up with that side of things.)
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Old 07-27-2012, 01:54 PM   #26
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Default Re: [Spaceships] DS-1 Orbital Battle Station

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Its disappointing if Spaceships fudged its numbers for weapon energy. Wasn't David Pulver involved in the design? He is a geek for mathematical modelling.
Part of the problem is different ways of delivering energy will have different effectiveness. 100 kJ of energy spread out over my body as thermal energy will make me a bit hot. Not good and the sudden change might cause some damage, but not lethal. 100 kJ of kinetic energy is the equivalent of a over 100 meter fall. I'm a smear on the pavement several times over. So eating a 100kJ from a particle beam? The knockback alone would kill me several times. Eating a 100kJ from a heat ray. Eh.
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Old 07-27-2012, 01:54 PM   #27
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Default Re: [Spaceships] DS-1 Orbital Battle Station

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Originally Posted by Flyndaran View Post
If it isn't enough in a short enough span of time to explode the planet, then "all" you're doing is melting it.
While that's true, that isn't quite what I'm talking about. Yes, firing multiple beams can accumulate to a similar effect as firing a single beam. However, what's important is the total energy deposited - the planet doesn't really care if the energy is delivered in a single massive burst, or 100 million converging beams over the course of a short time span (ie, short enough that it can build up without significantly dissipating). A longer time span will let the energy disperse more, for a less localized and somewhat weaker effect.

The problem with the way GURPS treats damage is that the hundred million beams have an effect that is obviously far too dramatic, dealing damage tens of thousands of times too quickly. If anything, multiple beams should be less efficient at damaging a planet than a single beam.
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Old 07-27-2012, 03:33 PM   #28
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Default Re: [Spaceships] DS-1 Orbital Battle Station

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. . . Besides, isn't killing everything on it and making it uninhabitable for geologic timeframes enough?
No! I must see all the little grains of sand flying off into interstellar space!

Or I won't be happy. So there.
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Old 07-27-2012, 06:56 PM   #29
Fred Brackin
 
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[. (It did get playtested, didn't it? I don't keep up with that side of things.)
Each volume was playtested by a closed list. The tests were long and hard and had some impact on the final manuscripts. Particularly the first one thrashed out some stuff. There's just no guarantee is's the stuff you're interested in now.

It probably is important to note that even more than mainstream Gurps, Spaceships was never intended as a reality simulation.

Spaceships is supposed to be a fun little game of ship design and combat. That people keep trying to use if for other things is something I take as an indicator of some market for those other things.
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Old 07-29-2012, 06:33 PM   #30
Peter Knutsen
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Default Re: [Spaceships] DS-1 Orbital Battle Station

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Even basing HP and damage on the square-root of mass/energy makes it too easy to destroy massive objects through attrition. Using the default cube-root calculations grossly exaggerates this effect. To even approach a reasonable damage amount, you'd need to total up the energy output of all beam weapons, and use that to determine the effective output. For example, 1000 x 1GJ beams deal 4dx5 dDam each, or 4dx5000 if they all hit (and don't even get me started on the Rapid Fire rules at this scale...) If used together, they should more reasonably deal damage comparable to a 1TJ beam - 2dx100, just 1% of the sum of their damages. It's barely better with square-root damage, 1000 x 6dx15 (6dx15,000) versus 6dx500, or 3.33% of the sum.

Firing literally hundreds of millions of shots per turn cranks this disconnect way past 11. Together they have an output of 126 TJ, or around 2dx500 dDam (6dx5000 w/ sqrt scale) but if tracked separately they deal 6dx110,000,000! I suppose this is a fundamental flaw in attrition-based damage systems, the "death by a thousand (or hundred-million) papercuts" dilemma.
BESM 2nd Edition tries to handle this issue, by giving large objects, such as moons and planets, a very high "DR" in addition to a not-too-high Hit Point total. That way it mostly becomes about being able to overcom the huge DR, in order to be able to do anything at all. Except of course that BESM weapons can be defined as having Armour Divisors, very much as in GURPS.

But it is an attempt at handling the issue, and the presence of DR (which is totally non-ablative) means that you are encouraged to use a few large weapons to do the job, instead of many small ones.
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