Re: Is spaceship armor useless?
 

So there are two situations here. Fast pass, and a fixed point of interest.

On a fast pass, you fire all your missiles soon enough that they'll arrive before you're in laser range, and if the target survives, you hope they're taking surrenders because you're almost certainly going to wind up in their kill zone.

At a fixed point, one side or the other has to approach the fixed point. If you're approaching it, you can stop short at a safe distance and take your shots. If you're defending it you may not be free to stand off to your desired distance...but you can still fire off as many missiles as you want during your enemy's approach, just like on the fast pass, with the bonus that if you run out of missiles before you run out of enemies, you may be able to withdraw.

The key either way is that the missiles don't have a maximum range. However much time you need to unload, you can just start shooting that much ahead of the time your beam-armed adversary could possibly attack you (plus a safety margin, of course).

This doesn't mean missiles automatically win (though it helps), but I do think it deals with any concern of having beam warships swat them before they can launch.

Lightly protected missile boats do have to take an aggressive attitude about not letting any potential laser-armed threat get close to them without being neutralized.

Re: Is spaceship armor useless?
 

So far as I can tell the only way to use (physical) missiles (assuming you'll be able to resupply before the next engagement) is to launch a full salvo of everything you got, then finish off surviving opposition (if any) with the beam weapons you were using for point defense.

Re: Is spaceship armor useless?
 

Another thing to consider for armor: take the Upper Stage rules and expand them. No books with me, so off the top of my head, each time you reduce the size of the command vehicle relative to the whole vehicle, reduce the handling and maneuver. So just take that and say that your "upper stage" never separates. This allows you to have a heavily armed ship but still have the necessary bits to keep people alive.

I looked up the rules later, and upper stages don't impose any penalty. So use as many "stages" as necessary to get the armor ratio correct. Thrust and acceleration may suffer, but we're designing space tanks not space race cars.

I'd also recommend finer gradations of the armor-volume modifier, too.

Re: Is spaceship armor useless?
 

Multiplies your DR by 4.5 at a given armor weight...

The easiest fix for armor is to just allow more than 20 modules in a ship, as long as all extra modules are armor (extra armor modules have no location; you must have at least one armor module actually in the armored location), and then multiply thrust and delta-V by (20/total module count).

Re: Is spaceship armor useless?
 

You'd also need to multiply the number of fuel tanks by (20/total module count) to figure out the delta-V multiplier.

Re: Is spaceship armor useless?
 

Just ignore delta-V multiplier for any ship using that rule, it's not likely to be relevant.

Re: Is spaceship armor useless?
 

You have to calculate the true fuel fraction anyway, so why bother to ignore that?

Re: Is spaceship armor useless?
 

I was originally going to start my own thread, but this seems like a better place for it.

I've been playing in a TL11-12 campaign (Limited TL 12, mostly stuff to keep people alive, yes super-science, but not grav lasers or AD(10) type stuff.), and I'm trying to figure out how to retrofit my ship.

It's the first one I've ever designed and so it's fairly simple. Defensively it has 3 Diamondoid armor, 1 Heavy Force screen, and 3 Defensive ECMs. Offensively it has 1 300MJ X-Ray Laser, 1 14cm Electromagnetic Gun, 2 100MJ X-Rays, and 1 Rapid Fire 30MJ X-Ray. Stealth wise it has a Cloaking Device, a Chameleon Hull, and a Stealth Hull. (All the Stealth stuff is TL 12).

I'm at the point though were I've been realizing that space combat is very immediately lethal. My original plan then was to remove 2 Diamondoid armor sections and replace them with weapons. (Or maybe 1 weapon, 1 power plant.) But in our campaign we've decided to just not use missiles because of all the reasons you've spent 6 pages talking about how useless armor is against them.

So I'm unsure as to how I should proceed. My only comparison combat wise I can make is against my own ship (We've not actually had any space combat yet). So this link shows the relative probabilities based on my ship shooting one exactly like it (assuming all shots hit)
http://anydice.com/program/4d29

It seems to me like if you do what I've done and taken "Hardened" for both the armor and force screen you can actually manage a defense against ships your own size. Add on my ECMs and stealth abilities and my ship seems to be in good shape. (Let me know if I'm totally wrong)

Obviously this doesn't address armor itself, it requires both the addition of a force screen and a level of armor hardening for everything involved. But it seems like it kinda works if you just totally forget that missiles exist.

Re: Is spaceship armor useless?
 

Beam Point-Defence can be extremely effective in defeating missiles.
A Tertiary Battery (30 mounts) of Very Rapid Fire, Improved (for the double RoF) Laser or UV Laser (damage doesn't matter for PD) - gives you an RoF of at least 6000.
Each Mount can fire an RoF or 200, so if you can allocate 2 or 3 crew members to Point Defense gunnery (or perhaps an AI program), 2 or 3 bursts of Rof 200 PD on each wave of missiles should stop them; and you can take on 10 to 15 waves per round.
If mixed mounts are allowed/supported, you could even put say 10x such Tertiary Beams in Fixed (for the extra +2) Mounts, in a mixed battery in each of the 3 hull sections - with 2x Medium Mounts in each of the Batteries for 'other' weapons - your ships would seem to have sufficient capacity to have a partial PD Battery in each Hull Section.

Re: Is spaceship armor useless?
 

The problem with force screens is that they're outside of other armor, so they can be sandpapered off instantly by a bajillion tiny attacks.