Re: Is spaceship armor useless?
 

Beams are always outnumbered by missile tubes because they require power. In addition to not being able to afford to fail even once, you can't afford to dedicate an entire weapon to stopping each missile.

Re: Is spaceship armor useless?
 

The ratio is not 1:1, but firepower dominance is still the overwhelming factor in deciding the outcome of space battles in G:SS. You just can't compensate for insufficient PD by filling those 'missing' weapon battery slots with more armour (to make missiles less deadly; armour tends to be not very relevant against KK missiles) or more engines (to get a significant boost in Dodge; no, you get maybe +1 MR, meh), and even adding ECM stations is kinda meh (-6 to be hit, +3 to Dodge for the maximum of three slots; this essentially reduces number of hits per salvo by 9, which, as you corrected me downpost, doesn't help much against prox-det KK salvoes). More Dakka seems like the way to go.

Lots of things make no sense in our setting, but they do in other settings. FTL and Reactionless drives are perhaps the first two that come to mind.

Yeah, but at the moment I looked into that one. Sorry.

Ah, so it is. So it's Spreading, not Multitasking, and it's -2 for beams/guns, and -1 for missiles. A single salvo of multiple missiles counts as no spreading fire, but you're offering multiple salvoes, and in that missiles indeed seem to have an advantage (though they also have less RoF to provide to-hit bonuses).

Okay, guess you're right.

Re: Is spaceship armor useless?
 

At spaceship velocities, conventional explosives don't make sense because the speed and mass of the projectile alone packs more energy than any detonation. An object traveling at 3 kps relative to it's target delivers equivalent kinetic energy to it's mass in TNT.

Re: Is spaceship armor useless?
 

Unless it uses one of them pseudovelocity drives, or non-FTL speeds are actually subsonic (as seems to be the case in Star Wars and Babylon 5).

Re: Is spaceship armor useless?
 

I...guess I consider this trivial? I figured the interesting question was what the balance between PD and missiles was, not whether you could opt out of that matchup.

In the Basic system, large ships can carry enough armor to withstand small missiles, which does get them into a different regime. (They aren't armored enough to withstand their own tertiary missiles, probably, but those missiles would be big enough to be stopped by small escorts with minimum-size VRF beams.) Missiles in the Tactical system may be likely to hit harder, though, so I'm not sure whether that remains doable. If you're not carrying enough armor to stop the missiles entirely, it's not much use against them.

(Side note: the Scale Factor table on SS3:32 is still wrong, isn't it.)

In the Tactical system it is possible, in principle at least, to use thrust and delta-V to outfly missiles, forcing them to attack at lower speeds (with more PD opportunities on the way) or even to miss their attack. However, it's probably not achievable for realistic spaceships.
But you wouldn't do any spreading fire, because you would have one gunner per weapon.

Aside, I think it's very unclear when, if ever, Spreading Fire modifiers apply to ballistic weapons under the tactical rules.

Even if you did accrue Spreading Fire penalties for a gunner who is controlling more than one Ballistic Attack in a turn (which I don't see any indication that the rules direct, it's just the only way I can see to involve that penalty at all), that would a) as you note, not be too much of a problem and b) only apply once the missiles are actually attacking, so after any 'shoot down the missile bus' point defense efforts.

Re: Is spaceship armor useless?
 

Ah. Well, for me it was: not all settings have missile combat decided by more dakka; some focus on needing to switch to evasive manoeuvring or something.

Speaking of Tactical, it produces one funny advantage for missiles: it essentially grants them a +2 sAcc by allowing even Rear Fixed Mounts to be used in attacks against front-arc enemies.
That being said, much of the dV dancing and kiting depends on what engines are available for ships and what engines are for missiles (upscaling/downscaling isn't always trivial).

Either you're performing multiple Attacks, or not. Letting a person do 300 Attacks in a turn at full skill is kinda cheating, neh?

Re: Is spaceship armor useless?
 

Those settings, insofar as they have technical assumptions at all, have technical assumptions so far from the ones underlying Spaceships that tremendous changes to a bunch of fundamentals are clearly needed to represent them.
Fixed mounts provide no benefit for ballistic weapons. That +2 is only for beams. (Unless you count being allowed to use the whole battery as a single high-RoF weapon as a bonus, which I don't.)
Of course it does.
I don't particularly see that it is, no. Although that may be influenced by the fact that I can't imagine how the actual ballistic attack could involve much realtime participation from the missileteer. (Well, it could with outright remote-piloted missiles, but then it would be impossible to control more than one at a time regardless of whether they were in the same salvo.)

(You capitalized Attacks, but I don't think there's really an applicable word-of-art here. If there is, can you point it out?)

Re: Is spaceship armor useless?
 

Between GURPS and SS being non-setting specific, and the sorts of other stuff that G:SS has as options (up to and including hyperdynamic cosmos), that doesn't seem like something unusual to expect.

I'm capitalising them to distinguish between making one Attack Roll at +x RoF bonus, and doing two at +(x-1) RoF bonus + whatever penalties apply. Examples for non-SS situations distinguishing between one or multiple Attacks / Attack Rolls include: Spraying Fire (the penalty is increased Rcl), Ranged Rapid Strike / Quick-Shooting (RS penalty), DWA (-4/-8), the use of Extra Attacks with Multistrike with one weapon or without firing two weapons (the 'penalty' is the need to fork over [25*x]) etc.
You're rolling your missile skill, so you're not just sitting there while things work without your input.

Re: Is spaceship armor useless?
 

I think your expectations of Spaceships are a lot higher than mine are after having fiddled with it for some time...

It seems like you'd start in the right direction with pseudoatmospheric space rules, optionally plus Boost Drives. There are still some unfortunate limitations, but I think they're down to the fact that GURPS tactical combat vehicle and general high-speed movement rules are kind of ugly. And, unfortunately, you kind of have to make up how those apply to the missiles and what missiles with non-kinetic warheads do. And as setting choices, you have to disallow AI-controlled point defense guns on small ships and preferably make sure every battle occurs in a ridiculously cluttered environment so that you have props for your evasive flying.

I'd note that the 'evasive action' thing almost always applies to fighters, not large ships. Star Destroyers don't dodge missiles or torpedoes. (They also don't shoot them down, generally. Which actually makes sense if you consider that Star Wars weapons are almost never VRF and are not lasers...try making a PD loadout with only RF plasma beams and you'll give up pretty quick.) Although real, seagoing ships did try to dodge torpedoes, when the torpedoes were not effectively guided.
All of which correspond somewhat to Splitting Fire, in the sense of actually splitting your fire, but not much to multiple missiles arriving on target simultaneously.
You could be rolling your skill to represent things that you had done in advance rather than things done during the actual attack.

Looking at the Spaceships 3 weapon fire sequence, the Aim and Attack 'maneuver' is used to fire beams or launch ballistic weapons. The weapons arriving is clearly not a maneuver, since the rules recommend arranging to have gun shells arrive the same turn they're fired.

Re: Is spaceship armor useless?
 

So far, nothing seems to be better.

What about those generic rules, specifically?
As for cluttered environment, I'm not sure that's necessary. Sure, asteroid thickets are a thing in some settings (SW), but not others (BSG).

Star Destroyers and the like generally have enough DR from shields and armour that their lack of Dodging and poor PD are not a tragedy. That's actually one of the issues of 'armour is useless': armour tends to either make a ship invulnerable to a given class of attack, or has such a small effect that the lifespan of the ship on the battlefield changes very little.

Yeah, it can represent doing things in advance. It still takes twice the concentration to do two things* in advance on turn 1, even though the final effect of those things is resolved on turn 2.

Of course, none of it matters if you have as many operators as missiles launched.

* == Calculating and assigning suitable approach vectors or whatever.