[Spaceships] Missile shield vs. ramming: two questions

[weby]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Heh. It's actually relatively modest by the standards of script hell, though I might move it to something more vanilla. However, commenting on something you didn't read seems... odd. The basic idea is that weapons have a SM and wound modifiers are based on relative SM, so a pi+7 weapon on a SM+5 target acts as pi++, on a SM +7 it acts as pi, on a SM+9 target it acts as pi-, larger targets get larger divisors.

I did not comment on the contents, only offered an alternative way to do it as proposed by Kromm.

You are the one who started to comment on that proposal.. :)

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by weby

I would not know, as the link he posted just goes to "script hell", the page in question wants to run 22 scripts at start and does not show any content without them, so it is unusable as a website.

But, yes giving a damage divisor of about 1/5th would likely be in the right ballpark for realistic figures. (I use a LOT higher numbers on my games but that is for cinematic effect of large spaceships/structures requiring massive damage over time to reduce to rubble)

It loads without difficulty on my browser, as it turns out, though I'm finding it incredibly unclearly written. I believe that it would rate the 28 cm shell as pi+7, then subtract off 12 for the SM of Exeter and 2 more for Unliving to 'pi-7' for 1/15 wounding factor. (Not clear to me what effect the shells' follow-up explosion would have.)

I hadn't clicked the link until now. Anthony's in-post description was more than sufficient to inform what I had posted previously.

[Michael Thayne]

Originally Posted by Anthony

It probably worse better with general GURPS mechanics to use expanded wound size modifiers. I came up with mine here and several other people have had nearly identical schemes.

Checking if I understand your proposal right: if a ship fires a major battery at a ship 1 SM smaller than it, the attack has a x1.5 wounding multiplier. 2 SM smaller, a x2 multiplier. 1 SM larger, a x2/3 multiplier. Etc.? Is that just for beam weapons, or does it cover kinetics? I *think* you mean kinetics to have a wounding multiplier based on caliber, but I'm not quite sure I follow how to calculate it. Also not sure I follow how ramming would be affected.

[Michael Thayne]

A worked example could really help clarify the expanded wounding modifiers proposal. Writing up how it could affect the bajillion ASATs vs. Gibraltar scenario could be helpful (with the ASATs both firing missiles and trying to ram).

[Ulzgoroth]

Interfacing it with Spaceships takes a little more work than just using it - you need to decide what the final caliber of the kinetic weapons is (you could just use the face values, but in theory probably shouldn't), and how beam spot size varies with weapon size.

[Michael Thayne]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Interfacing it with Spaceships takes a little more work than just using it - you need to decide what the final caliber of the kinetic weapons is (you could just use the face values, but in theory probably shouldn't), and how beam spot size varies with weapon size.

The way it's written seems to imply you don't need beam spot sizes, that you can simply go by SM of an equivalent Major Battery. Not sure I 100% understand the details, though.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne

The way it's written seems to imply you don't need beam spot sizes, that you can simply go by SM of an equivalent Major Battery. Not sure I 100% understand the details, though.

The problem with missiles is mostly that they don't scale the same way as beams, for reasons that are not entirely obvious. In general 7-10mm should be considered SM+0 for projectiles.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

... you need to decide what the final caliber of the kinetic weapons is (you could just use the face values, but in theory probably shouldn't)...

Is there a good reason not to use the face values? I know the Spaceships bullets/missiles are complicated, multi-stage affairs, but is there any reason in a vacuum to have them start out wider than the payload? The only one I can think of would be if you want to make them not as long, but I'm not certain a wider-but-shorter missile is any easier to store/load, and the fact this makes the missile an easier target while it's en route seems like it would negate any potential benefit.

Of course, the projectiles from proximity detonation should have smaller WM... but then they should presumably also do less damage*. Anyhow, +4 corresponds to roughly RoF 20, and 1/20th the mass is typically going to mean a bit over 1/3rd the diameter (assuming the fragments are around the same shape as the original warhead), so between -3 and -2 to SM (and thus WM) would be appropriate.

*As GURPS typically has collision damage scale as the cube root of mass, assuming something between 4 and 5 fragments per "hit," and between 80 and 100 actual fragments, you actually get the equal damage and +4 to hit you see in Spaceships. Of course, at that point the armor divisor should be something like 0.5 (if the fragments maintain the AP quality of the original warhead) or 0.25 (if the fragments don't maintain the AP quality, or if up against Hardened armor)...

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne

The way it's written seems to imply you don't need beam spot sizes, that you can simply go by SM of an equivalent Major Battery. Not sure I 100% understand the details, though.

Oh okay, yeah. That's rolling in some kind of assumption about what those sizes are, at least implicitly, but is easy to implement.

It means that an SM+4 drone shooting a spinal beam at a SM+10 frigate would have a wounding scale of +5-10 = -5, resulting in 1/7 wounding modifier to make any damage they manage to drill through armor that much more disappointing. Meanwhile a major battery on the frigate would hit the drone with a scale of +6 for x6 (suggested) or x10 (pure log scaling) wounding, which is largely gratuitous considering it's got 30 dice of base damage. But a tertiary RF weapon on the frigate, being 10MJ, would only rate as SM+5, giving it a +1 factor against the drone for a WM of 1.5x.

From the bit about the sizes of holes made by projectiles, we can conclude that if one of the SM+4 drones rams it should have a wounding scale of its SM+4 + 13 = +17. That hitting the SM +10 frigate would do x7 or x15 wounding, which is...again largely gratuitous considering how much base damage it'll be bringing.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Varyon

Is there a good reason not to use the face values? I know the Spaceships bullets/missiles are complicated, multi-stage affairs, but is there any reason in a vacuum to have them start out wider than the payload? The only one I can think of would be if you want to make them not as long, but I'm not certain a wider-but-shorter missile is any easier to store/load, and the fact this makes the missile an easier target while it's en route seems like it would negate any potential benefit.

Because the warhead may not be the part of the rocket that's setting the lower bound on cross section. Long and narrow isn't a bad profile for a kinetic-kill warhead, but small diameter isn't great for rockets and fuel tanks.