Astroduel

[Michael Thayne]

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.

[David L Pulver]

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne

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.

Glad you liked the article, and thank you for spotting the errors and pointing them out.

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...)

[Steven Marsh]

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.

[Michael Thayne]

Originally Posted by David L Pulver

The standard missiles are realistically expensive...

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?

[David L Pulver]

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne

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?

Well, I had three reasons:

(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).

[Michael Thayne]

Originally Posted by David L Pulver

(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.

Hmmm, interesting. It would be helpful to have rules for ships built "like aircraft"–since building them that would make a lot of sense for attack drones and aerospace fighters. I thought there might be something like this in the mecha article in Pyramid 3/40, but it doesn't look like it. In particular, the rules for "efficient design" only affect SM for attack/detection purposes; they don't affect mass.

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.

[Phantasm]

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne

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.

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. ;)

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne

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?

Proximity warheads get +4 to hit, equivalent of the RoF bonus from 17-24 shots, so that's spilitting into 20-odd submunitions. However, as it's just a fuze setting, and not a specialised warhead, I've always assumed that the missile was detonating early, showering the target with fragments, and those fragments would tend to not have great shapes for penetrating, thus the loss of the bonus.

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.

[David L Pulver]

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne

Hmmm, interesting. It would be helpful to have rules for ships built "like aircraft"–since building them that would make a lot of sense for attack drones and aerospace fighters. I thought there might be something like this in the mecha article in Pyramid 3/40, but it doesn't look like it. In particular, the rules for "efficient design" only affect SM for attack/detection purposes; they don't affect mass.

Well, I didn't write those rules (3/40) so can't really speak for the author there... For realism's purpose the rules would benefit from a few ways to let you build somewhat overly expensive aircraft or fighters, though the real cost of this tends also to be in higher maintenance as well.

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.

[Michael Thayne]

Originally Posted by Rupert

Proximity warheads get +4 to hit, equivalent of the RoF bonus from 17-24 shots, so that's spilitting into 20-odd submunitions. However, as it's just a fuze setting, and not a specialised warhead, I've always assumed that the missile was detonating early, showering the target with fragments, and those fragments would tend to not have great shapes for penetrating, thus the loss of the bonus.

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.

David has said before he had something rather complicated in mind for what "proximity detonation" represents–actually rather more complicated than I had remembered:

the missile detonates a considerable distance from the target releasing a cloud of missile debris and seeking submunitions (like those used in the smaller gun warheads) which themselves detonate at much closer proximity. The impact effect is an abstraction of multiple smaller objects. About 20-50% of the missile's 2nd stage mass has the potential to hit the target, though much less will do so.