01-18-2018, 02:27 PM | #1 |
Join Date: May 2010
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Astroduel
The "Astroduel" article from the latest Pyramid is a cool concept, with some nice new crunch to support it. However, I noticed a couple apparent errors in the article.
First the Paladin's turret is listed as having a 1MJ laser. I think that was probably meant to be a 3MJ laser–or maybe a 300KJ rapid fire laser. Second, the damage listed for 16cm dueling missiles doesn't fit the pattern of the rest of the table. Was it intended to be 6dx2? I'm less sure about this one, since it may have been a deliberate decision to make missiles scale down poorly to the 16cm level. I'm also curious about the "behind the scenes" thinking behind dueling missiles. Was part of the thinking that GMs who think RAW missiles are overpowered could make "dueling missiles" the only missiles available in a campaign? Given that missiles (both by Word of David and inference from their SS3 performance stats) appear to use staging, they probably shouldn't inflict as much damage as shells. |
01-19-2018, 12:27 PM | #2 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: In the UFO
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Re: Astroduel
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The turret weapon should be 300 kJ rapid fire laser (though as you say, 3 kJ works out as well). The missile should be 6dx2. The standard missiles are indeed somewhat overpowered, but another big motivation was simply making the missiles cheaper so that duelists might have better justification to use them. The standard missiles are realistically expensive; the dueling missiles are still expensive, but using them in an "arena" duel with a big prize or in a life or death starway duel is perhaps more sensible now! But making the missiles cheaper should have a justification, and this was "they use lower TL mass-produced propellant". To make up for that more of the missile is stages and the final terminal stage is smaller. Well, that was the off-the-cuff justification anyway! Arguably the guns might use a similar process with a sabot releasing a smaller projectile... I didn't look that closely at them for purpose of this article (mostly because I was running out of space and time: it is a long article...)
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01-19-2018, 12:36 PM | #3 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
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Re: Astroduel
Just to give our fine readers a heads up, this errata is on my radar. I'll probably update the issue early next week, to give a bit more time for any other errors to pop up.
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01-19-2018, 02:12 PM | #4 |
Join Date: May 2010
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Re: Astroduel
I'm curious about this. On the one hand, yes, in the real world a Sidewinder missile is very, very expensive. But in Spaceships, very few technologies cost $1M/ton. I think fabricators are the only real-world technology that costs that much, though ramscoops, antimatter fuels, and a few superscience devices also cost around that much or more.
Pricing missiles at $200K/ton makes them similar to defensive ECM and tactical arrays, which feels more believable. Arguably, military-grade electronics should be more expensive than the prices listed in Spaceships, but taking other prices as a given, it seems like missiles are overprices. Or is there some behind-the-scenes logic I'm missing here? |
01-19-2018, 02:23 PM | #5 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: In the UFO
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Re: Astroduel
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(A). The ship components assume a fair bit of "dead mass" for cheaper hull structure in the total cost per ton: the ships aren't built like aircraft, but more than ocean going ships, so even the electronics arrays include a lot of mass for structural support, cooling systems, hull, and so on. The usual ultra-tech cost of electronics alone (based on UT) is $1M to $2M per ton. In contrast, the missiles are essentially all hardware, high-energy density fuel and expensive light-weight hull material. (B). Real-world high performance missiles are pretty costly per ton compared to ships. The newest AMRAAM is $12M per ton, and even the older models are about $2M per ton. So $1M per ton is a bit conversative. (C). As many people have observed, missiles in SPACESHIPS are deadly due to the harsh physics of kinetic energy. Keeping the cost high is a partial balancing factor against excessive creation of arsenal ship designs like that, say, six missile batteries and nothing else. (This is also a real world naval limitation).
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Is love like the bittersweet taste of marmalade on burnt toast? Last edited by David L Pulver; 01-19-2018 at 02:33 PM. |
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01-19-2018, 03:11 PM | #6 | |
Join Date: May 2010
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Re: Astroduel
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On a somewhat tangential note, this article has me wondering about other ways of nerfing missiles that would arguably be more realistic. For one thing, if the superior performance of 32cm+ missiles comes from using more stages, shouldn't that reduce effective calibre for purposes of damage? Similarly, since "proximity detonation" seems to actually mean "contains 10 full-blown sub-munitions", shouldn't proximity detonation reduce damage rather than losing the armor divisor? I'm less certain about the second point, but it might go farther than anything else towards preventing space combat from being dominated by small missile ships with as many 16cm missiles as they can carry. |
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01-19-2018, 04:36 PM | #7 |
Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: On the road again...
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Re: Astroduel
Then again, sometimes you want to have more missiles than should reasonably be carried, for pulling a Macross Missile Dump as a finishing move in a dogfight. ;)
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01-19-2018, 04:59 PM | #8 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Wellington, NZ
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Re: Astroduel
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The problematic thing, to me, is that this makes using them a no-brainer whenever the enemy has hardened DR. This reduces meaningful choices,and it's not a something where keeping the choice would lead to problems.
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01-19-2018, 07:18 PM | #9 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: In the UFO
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Re: Astroduel
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However, to avoid producing odd break points, it would probably have to be done on a case by case basis. Also, the system is a bit too course to accurately reflect the diminishing returns you get for increased spending. Paying 10x as much for jet and reaction engines in exchange for, say, twice the acceleration, or a similar increase in comm/sensor and EW for an extra +1 bonus, or to allow the benefit of "improved" for beam weapons without increasing the TL, might not be unreasonable , but that's just an off-the-cuff assessment and is not really intended to reflect a serious analysis of the rules.
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01-19-2018, 10:35 PM | #10 | ||
Join Date: May 2010
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Re: Astroduel
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