02-01-2019, 04:17 PM | #1 |
Join Date: May 2010
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[Spaceships] Fixing ballistic weapons in tactical combat
The way ballistic weapons work in tactical combat contains a number of oddities, both in terms of internal logic and in comparison to the basic space combat system:
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02-01-2019, 06:04 PM | #2 | ||||
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Wellington, NZ
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Re: [Spaceships] Fixing ballistic weapons in tactical combat
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I just assume that in the basic system ships are assumed to avoid salvos of shells. If firing at ballistic targets (stations, drifting ships, etc.), I'd not apply a range limit. Quote:
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Problems I do have with tactical combat: The scale factor table (p.32) is wrong (the factors for 1-minute and 10-minute turns is x5 too high). The range tables in tactical combat scale at a different rate to the range assumptions in Basic Space Combat. The final row on the Laser table is also weird, which I presume is just a cut/paste error.
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02-01-2019, 06:23 PM | #3 | |
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: [Spaceships] Fixing ballistic weapons in tactical combat
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Point 1 is not a problem in the tactical rules, it's a simplification in the basic rules - the 'hard' range limit is representative of how far away the weapon is effectively capable of generating hits. For guns, this is totally fine (though the numbers in principle should be more context-dependent), though it's a big problem for missiles that are capable of throttling (and re-igniting) their propulsion for a boost-drift-attack flight plan. Point 2 is a bit of a rules hash, but your 'fix' is not technologically justifiable. That kind of guidance system is relatively obsolescent for planetside missiles that engage targets faster than tanks. And space ranges make it much, much worse. Space missiles can't make effective terminal maneuvers without on-board homing. On the other side of things they almost certainly have the guidance capability for off-bore firing, because the range also means that the missile's on-board sensors likely won't be satisfactory for the initial stages of the flight. My recommendations: don't try to fix 1, it's fine. For 2, don't use turrets with conventional missiles, only fixed tubes. Modern ships can have VLS, spaceships not being able to would be weird. Your call whether to let them have the +2. There's points where I consider Spaceships rules to be catastrophically broken or literally impossible to follow. But it's probably not productive to drag things there.
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I don't know any 3e, so there is no chance that I am talking about 3e rules by accident. |
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02-01-2019, 08:46 PM | #4 | ||
Join Date: May 2010
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Re: [Spaceships] Fixing ballistic weapons in tactical combat
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OTOH halving caliber might be to harsh. As a compromise, you could reduce caliber by two steps instead, with a minimum initial caliber being 24cm. So 24cm becomes 16cm, 28cm becomes 20cm, and so on. |
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02-01-2019, 08:51 PM | #5 | ||
Join Date: May 2010
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Re: [Spaceships] Fixing ballistic weapons in tactical combat
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02-01-2019, 09:09 PM | #6 |
Join Date: May 2010
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Re: [Spaceships] Fixing ballistic weapons in tactical combat
It's worth spelling out the logic around missile delta-V for TL9+ missiles. They do the same damage as a same caliber bomb (per Spaceships 4), and a bomb weighs 1/3 what a missile weighs. A standard-sized upper stage also weighs about 1/3 of the spaceship's weight. So you can think of a missile as a very small spaceship with a "bomb" upper stage. To get 10 mps delta-V from a single lower stage using HEDM rockets, you need 13 fuel tanks (13 x 1.6 x 0.5 = 10.4 mps). That leaves only one "slot" for the engine, which would yield an acceleration of only 5G, but this can be justified as a variant engine optimized for use in missiles. It would make sense if the higher-thrust version cut some corners, such that it couldn't be shut down or otherwise was difficult to use for boost-drift-attack flight plan.
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02-01-2019, 09:30 PM | #7 | |||
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: [Spaceships] Fixing ballistic weapons in tactical combat
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At some TLs there are definitely technical rationales for missiles to be one-burn-only. But there are also very strong motivations for them to be built to be able to boost, drift, and perform terminal attack maneuvers, and that's achievable at any TL where you'd have spaceships firing missiles... I can't think of any that are introduced by the tactical combat system. Aside from the 'stack up literally every missile in your fleet in one barrage' trick, which is a bit of a feature-or-bug situation.
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I don't know any 3e, so there is no chance that I am talking about 3e rules by accident. |
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02-01-2019, 09:37 PM | #8 | |
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: [Spaceships] Fixing ballistic weapons in tactical combat
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(Of course, that or indeed many other imaginable corner cuts would invite the question of why you don't cut the same corners for disposable STO boosters.)
__________________
I don't know any 3e, so there is no chance that I am talking about 3e rules by accident. |
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02-01-2019, 10:36 PM | #9 |
Join Date: May 2010
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Re: [Spaceships] Fixing ballistic weapons in tactical combat
If shells have no burn points even on a 10 mile scale, that means they can't correct for initially being 10 miles off-target. But if you're using a 100 mile scale, and a shell happens to enter the hex of an enemy spaceship purely by accident, that's totally consistent with the shell being 10 miles off from the target. Or even 50 miles off. Maybe you could adopt a rule that if a shell and ship cross paths totally accidentally, the shell attacks on a 6 or less on 3d?
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02-01-2019, 10:53 PM | #10 |
Join Date: May 2010
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Re: [Spaceships] Fixing ballistic weapons in tactical combat
Revised proposal for limiting the range of ballistic weapons: shells and bombs can drift for up to 10 minutes before their odds of hitting anything drop dramatically (in most cases the GM should just remove them from the map). For standard TL9+ missiles, their powerful HEDM engines cannot be shut down until they run out of burn points. After that point, they become bombs, with sAcc in space equal to TL-11, and in most cases removed from the map after 10 minutes.
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