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.

Re: Is spaceship armor useless?
 

You know... that's exactly what happened in my playtest with the missile carrying fighter vs the Cargo Ship with the point defense lasers. The Cargo Ship "surrendered" and powered down, and the fighter detonated the missile he fired. Of course, it was a ruse, but using the Missile to force a surrender was the tactic used.

So far in my playtests, I find Railguns quite good at close range. They can fire faster (sometimes significantly faster) than an equivalent missile battery, so they're harder for point defense to stop... and they do nearly as much damage. In close range, the railgun rounds will reach the target before the missiles do, at least in the TL 9 to 10 range of things.

And of course, they do more than enough damage to punch through most armor. They're excellent for stopping suicide fighters from reaching your ship, for example, because of their high damage and high volume of fire.

On a separate note, I have also noted that bigger beam weapons can equal or exceed the range of missile weapons in the same TL, if they're big enough... and since a Beam weapon has the advantage over a missile in that at long range it'll hit the target many times before the a missile can cross the distance, someone with a heavy beam weapon will usually win the fight quite easily unless their opponent has enough armor to take the hits from it.

A classic battleship will have a combination of weapons... point defense lasers for defense, of course. A battery of Railguns or conventional guns for close in barrage against tougher foes that get in close (they'll wipe out suicide bomber type fighter attacks, for example), missile launchers... for obvious reasons, and very often, a Major or Spinal Battery Beam weapon which can take out lightly armored targets that like to fight at long range with missiles.

No design is perfect, of course, but I'm still convinced that a Pirate Ship could do just fine with Beam weapons, good engines and good armor alone, and be quite effective in a fight, as they could use, for example, a Spinal Beam Weapon to take out their opponent while using Point Defense VRF lasers to destroy incoming missiles. Naturally, a missile boat with enough ammo could probably throw enough missiles at the target to eventually get through any point defense, but that's what the Spinal Weapon is for, to destroy the target's weapon systems in the first few seconds of combat... preventing it from firing more than a single load or two of missiles.

Armor has a very vital place in this sort of engagement of course. If you've got 2 or 3 armor locations with hardened armor in your forward section, you can probably take a few hits, even from a Spinal beam weapon... and if you don't, you're meat for the grinder.

Re: Is spaceship armor useless?
 

Well, my issue was with the turning radius rules, and really still is, but I'd forgotten that they are very slightly ameliorated by the Pushing the Envelope rules. Having turning agility inextricably linked to accel/speed is a pretty bad fit for vehicles maneuvering aerodynamically (or based on ground friction).

The Pseudoatmospheric rules seem like they may be worse, actually, but I'd need to look again.
How do they dodge missiles in BSG?
Well, yes, of course...
If it only matters if you're launching multiple missiles per turn with one gunner I'm almost entirely disinterested because that should never happen.

However, I would contest that if you're launching two missiles to the same place, you don't in fact have double the things to do in advance...

I'd also note that you can have multiple missile salvos arriving in one turn without ever having launched multiple salvos in one turn.
The words "at close range" pretty much summarize why they're pointless. There's no reason for anything to happen at that range.

Suicide fighters can be stopped with an RF beam pretty well, I would think, though I'm not sure what the idea there is exactly. Massive, armored missiles that are allowed to dodge?
No, beam weapons cannot outrange missiles, because missiles do not have limited range.

Unless you're talking about how much range the missiles can cover before the target has time to burn more delta-V in evasion than the missile has, and thereby completely evade the missile. That can be an issue, though mostly only with high-performance superscience drives.
I think under the tactical conditions you imagine, it is not at all obvious why you would have any missile launchers at all.

However, I'm also pretty sure you're very wrong about those conditions.
They will never be within range of your spinal beam while they still have a single missile on-board. And they won't run out 'eventually', if this is a serious fight, they'll run out of missiles at the beginning, stack them all up, and hit you with every missile they were carrying simultaneously. If you are not dead, you win, but good luck with that.

Re: Is spaceship armor useless?
 

That's being picky over semantics. There are multiple possible universes where missiles have limited _practical_ ranges.

Also cases where beam weapons (such as very long range ones like X-ray lasers) can be used at ranges where missile launch will not be practical.

So no, your statement is not a universal truth when discussing practical combats.

Re: Is spaceship armor useless?
 

You mean like I addressed in the immediately following paragraph that you cut from your quote?


EDIT: So I ran some numbers. With TL9+ missiles using 10 mps to close and reserving 10 mps to cancel out evasion, shooting from rest, against a ship with 5 high-thrust TL10+ fusion pulse drives, the effective range goes down to a bit over 30k miles, which can be covered by a 100 GJ UV laser (SM +12 major battery). That's a bit extreme, but not impossible. They'd pretty much have to be battleriders of some kind, since they only get 20 mps per tank at TL 11 and at TL 11 that's embarrassingly bad for travel, but it's doable. High-thrust water antimatter plasma gets moderately longer legs but lets the range slip to over 50k miles, requiring a 3 TJ beam (SM+15 spinal).

Orion or nuclear salt water of course can get it to fairly short ranges (8k miles or less), but burning 10 mps to dodge a missile volley is brutally expensive when you get at most 8 mps per tank. So the tactic there would be to use missiles to force the beam-ship to exhaust its maneuver reserve at a safe distance, rather than going straight for the kill.

Bringing in superscience, cosmic power beams or grav lenses let you cover a bit more range. Super drives smash the whole thing, obviously, but shouldn't be used with regular missiles. Reactionless drives certainly hammer it too, though again I'd argue they're also rather unfair to the poor missiles. I have to admit, though, that even fusion torches (preferably TL 11+ for the delta-V) severely limit the effective range of missiles against evading targets.

Re: Is spaceship armor useless?
 

Well, you can probably say that some vehicles have a higher effective acceleration for purposes of turning in a gas/liquid. Not strictly RAW.


Well, they do perform evasive manoeuvres (on small craft, mostly); GURPS sees all anti-ranged dodges as mostly similar (with some modifiers). But it doesn't take an asteroid thicket to make a dodge of some sort.
Really, why are we even assuming that thickets are required for evasive actions?

Ah, so you're assuming one gunner per missile. Fair enough. That's still a requirement.

Well, if you're launching them in a single attack (RoF), sure. You seem to want the best of both worlds, though.

Possible, but puts extra demands on timing and acceleration.

Re: Is spaceship armor useless?
 

Might work.

Basically, for typical cinematic space fighting what you need is a decent air combat maneuver system, with altitude-based elements stripped out.

(Interestingly, while B5 has some fighters that look more like reasonable spacecraft, the ludicrously low speeds that you pointed out that they move at arguably makes them make less sense than airplanes-in-space.)
I'm not, sorry. That was a strictly non-rhetorical question.
It is, though it's also a requirement for point defense.
I do, because I can't see any good reason for multiple missiles with a single operator to be basically worthless, but multiple missiles with one operator each be awesome. It's not like a handheld firearm where there's actually a good reason for the effectiveness to drop. (I'm pretty sure we've discussed that before.)
Pretty trivial ones. You just puff out one missile per turn, keep the existing missiles stacked with your ship if it's under thrust, and once you've launched them all fly them as one big shoal.

(I forget, do nukes clear all missiles in a hex? If they do, it'd be worth spreading the shoal out a bit.)

Re: Is spaceship armor useless?
 

You put an idea in a paragraph by itself and people will think it's an idea that stands by itself. Especially true if the idea is expressed broadly and the separate caveat is quite narrow.

In fact your successive paragraph was no narrow as to be of no relevance to the point I was making and I was not addressing it. That's why I cut it.

There are _many_ possible situations where missiles are not practical weapons. On the other hand the only situation where missiles have no practical maximum range is when they are being fired at targets that will be expending no delta-v like planets or some space stations.

Re: Is spaceship armor useless?
 

I was speaking about GURPS Spaceships... you know, the book?

Where they list the "range" of missiles pretty specifically, pretty close to where they list the range of all the other types of weapons listed.

Missiles can technically hit targets past their range, they just automatically miss if the target can manuver, since at that point the missile is out of fuel and can't maneuver.

I'm honestly not sure what you mean by "missiles don't have a range"

Just as an example, smaller missiles (I believe they were referring to missiles in the 20 to 28 cm range) are listed as being able to reach long range, and bigger ones X (or extreme) range.

There are beam weapons that can reach the same ranges, and do so instantly, instead of taking a couple hours of flight time, for the extreme examples.

At TL 10, a SM+8 ship can hold a spinal beam weapon capable of hitting you 50,000 miles away 1/3rd of a second after they deside to do so, while a volley of missiles accelerating up to 10 mps will take more than 5000 seconds (over an hour) to travel the same distance, and will be out of fuel upon arrival. I don't care how many missiles you carry. 5000 seconds is a LONG time. Your target has tons and tons of time to deal with your missiles after killing you, if you don't have some armor to take the beam weapon hits.

I'm really not sure where the "missiles don't have ranges" idea is from. A different book?

Re: Is spaceship armor useless?
 

We could create a whole new forum for "Are Railguns Useless" as well.

My opinion is that, like any weapon, they are quite useful in the right conditions. At TL 9, when they first become available, they seem quite good. (And in practice, in my playtests so far.)

And while it may be possible for some ships to always stay in deep space far beyond the range of such pedestrian weapons, I do wonder when such lone wolves ever manage to get fuel or resupply. Of if they live life in universes where no ship ever approaches 10,000 miles of another for fear of sudden death. Where the "hidden weapon" modification is never used to lull someone into close range. Where speed, armor, ECM, and point defence lasers on a bunch of small but deadly fighters never combined to be able to rush into range of these invunerable missile boats and blow them to pieces with their rapid fire Railguns at point blank range.

I do wonder about those things.

Re: Is spaceship armor useless?
 

Low speeds are likely a result of needing to stick to 'stationary' objects like space stations during combat, while also having low accelerations as compared to ΔV.

Ah. In BSG, missiles seem to be either exclusively or mostly a big capital-vs-capital weapon. There was I think one Raptor (two-pilot craft) that used a missile launcher, firing something like 8 missiles, each a nuke. It was a big deal.
But the fighter craft do perform many dodges against non-missiles, and don't seem to hide behind asteroid thickets.

Another setting came up: WH40K. From what I remember about Rogue Trader, big ships can opt to fly dodgy style, but in addition to making it harder to hit them, it also makes it harder to shoot the enemy out of them.

Is is. This branch seems pretty long now . . . I'm already forgetting what it started with. Anyway, point defence gets more shots per shooter/turret due to VRFness, right?

You're getting benefits of extra hits as compared to shooting them in one salvo:
Assuming that your skill after all modifiers except RoF is 10:
300 missiles in one salvo: chance of scoring at least one hit is 98%ish, and your average hit number is 9 missiles.
300 missiles in 300 salvoes: chance of scoring at least one hit is enormously close to 100%, and your average hit number is 150 missiles.

Either you need to change the way Rapid Fire works (I'm in favour of this for a hypothetical Alternate GURPS IV / GURPS 5e / G4e Revised), or you shouldn't let missile users benefit from gigantic bonuses at no drawback whatsoever.

Again, one big shoal is either flying as a shoal (suffering from RoF issues), or it's controlled as 300 or whatever number of independent 'piloted' vehicles.

Re: Is spaceship armor useless?
 

More shots per weapon, and more per shooter assuming you aren't doing something you really shouldn't, yes. But what is the significance of this?
I don't think GURPS 4e has any obligation to use RoF mechanics on every possible opportunity, no matter how inappropriate they are.

I agree that it's bad that there is this difference between one salvo and many salvos, but I don't see any reason to think the one salvo answer is even slightly sensible.
Independent salvos, as I've said at every opportunity. Heck, if you have one shooter per launcher, you literally don't have a choice about that. The definition of a salvo requires every missile to be its own.
Spaceships 3, which is also the book where the idea that missiles take time to arrive comes from.

You can't have this both ways. If you're using the Spaceships basic system, missiles have actual range limitations, but they also hit the target instantly. Flight time is abstracted away, so your 'beams hit first' doesn't happen. It is quite true that if you're under the Spaceships 1 system in a regime where targets can actually maneuver (harder than it sounds, that means enough thrust to generate a non-zero acceleration bonus), small missiles have less range than large beams.

If you're using the Spaceships 3 tactical system, missiles (and gun shells potentially) do take time to reach their targets and in the launching ship can potentially be killed before they arrive. But in Spaceships 3, missiles are capable of smart maneuvering, like independent, agile ships. They can burn and drift and then burn again when they need to. So they can cover completely unlimited distances and still be fully able to maneuver at the other end, though given sufficient time a target that can accelerate and has more delta-V than the missile does can put on an evasive vector the missile can't match, and thus prevent it from getting to attack.

It sounds like you've been actually using a version of Spaceships basic combat, houseruled to nerf missiles... In the basic system as written, missiles actually aren't particularly bad at short range. They do hit for twice as much damage at longer range, but that (and the possibility of being outside the enemy's range to shoot back) is all, and their damage is high enough that that's usually not necessary.

Also, in the Basic system, point defense is only possible at the last moment, which results in frag missiles eating everybody's lunch in 20-second turns. (In more than 20-second turns, missiles are seriously nerfed because PD gets bonus RoF, and missiles don't want any bonus RoF.)
So, when should one ship approach 10,000 miles of another ship, exactly?

As your example notes, it's rather necessary for boarding. But that's a rather specialized role for which I've acknowledged the use of specialized craft. Though that isn't essential...you could use unspecialized craft together with the guarantee of annihilation from competent backup. (Also, railguns only go about 1 mps and have negligible maneuvering delta-V. They've got very, very serious problems with time of arrival, if we're using the tactical system.)

It's also necessary for docking, but you should never be docking with someone you don't trust, or in a place where anyone is even remotely likely to be shooting at you. If you do, your death is going to be because you did something that dumb, not because you didn't have armor and railguns. If the enemy is actually getting the drop on you, why would they leave you intact enough to shoot back once you know there's a fight on? This doesn't mean there can't be any two ships that don't trust each other in a spaceport, it just means they need to be trusting the port itself not to stab them and to guarantee that attempting an ambush in docking space is not going to end well.

Armor and ECM do almost nothing to protect against missiles, and a fast, armored, ECM-equipped ship can't carry enough point defense to counter a serious missile attack. It is possible, as I have noted, to close in considerably using speed (well, good acceleration and delta-V to burn) alone. However, with no in-flight delta-V, the effective range of the guns is pretty well limited to how long it takes the target to perform a one-hex per turn burn, which is probably not long In the Basic system they can get the (rather more generous) range S, but if the enemy has weapons to force the engagement to Distant scale it's fantastically hard piloting to actually get to range S.


EDIT: Also, at TL9, how are you building these fast fighters? The only things at that TL (even with superscience) that have serious thrust and any delta-V to speak of are Orion and NSW, and Orion only has 4 mps/tank, which is going to run out very fast dodging missiles.

Re: Is spaceship armor useless?
 

That missiles don't necessarily overwhelm beams easily? Frankly, I've lost the branch, and it takes number-crunching to get conclusive on the issue of overwhelming.

Either you accept multiple-projectile (i.e. RoF/RF) mechanics as sensible, or not. If you don't consider them sensible, then we can't compare 300 non-RoFed missiles against 300 RoFed recoilless beams or whatever, either. If you consider them sensible, let's deal with them as-is.

Hmm. This comparison really seems to always degenerate into comparing rosters of gunners on batteries, since the choicelessness applies to beam gunners too.

Re: Is spaceship armor useless?
 

Yes, the number crunching is the point. I've number-crunched before, for the Basic system. I still have not number-crunched yet for the Tactical system.

EDIT: I mean, it's true that if VRF weren't an option, missiles overwhelming PD would be almost trivial, but that's why I don't see the significance of pointing it out. Anyone thinking about the subject is aware of VRF beams.
I'm not sure the RoF mehanics are ever sensible, but I'm prepared to believe they're somewhat sensible (though, it is well-established, flawed) for a single automatic or shot-gun type weapon firing a single short burst. (Though attacking a salvo of missiles as one target and tagging a different missile with each hit doesn't actually fit that...but, I didn't come here to nerf beams.) For a battery of truly independent weapons, or an aggregation of bursts over time, they are obviously not.

But I am, nonetheless, dealing with them as-is. I say, use a gunner for every tube. I just note that I'm doing so under protest because I don't see any reason it should be necessary. (A gunner for every beam I'm more comfortable with, because they're all doing different things. Though the gunner being a dedicated NAI or sub-AI is reasonable.)
Er, beam gunners don't fire 'salvos' in this sense. And, unlike missile gunners, they do want to use RoF mechanics (though they may want to exploit them to the limits). Not sure where you're going with this?

Of course it comes down to rosters of preferably virtual gunners. The rules imperatives for that are fairly obvious and very well-trod.

Re: Is spaceship armor useless?
 

Much of this exchange boils down to this:
Rules imperatives are towards always focusing on the PD vs. Missiles rivalry. This is the true reason behind people being worried that armour is useless.

Side question:
Do you think an unofficial project aiming to either radically houserule G:SS, or make an SS-like system from scratch, that would be more general than the canonical G:SS, would be viable? At the very least, to make emulating different genres possible/easier?

Re: Is spaceship armor useless?
 

I think better than and more general than G:SS RAW are both doable, though some of the problems it has are not trivial to fix.

However, I think for the genres you seem to be primarily thinking about emulating, you might be better off dropping most of Spaceships and just repurposing the design rules. Giving the slightest consideration to realistic space travel and combat is actively inimical to the 'wooshing dogfighters IN SPACE' genre.

Re: Is spaceship armor useless?
 

Such as, aside from the various multiple-projectiles issue group?

I'm quoting those that seem to strain G:SS' genericness the most. Also, surely the line can be quite blurry, with different genres in-between the space wooshes and the THSsy predetermined exchanges.

Re: Is spaceship armor useless?
 

Not my experience. In pone of playtest battles for the tactical system the whole thing was settled by beams because all targets were destroyed before the missiles could get there.

That experience showed me that one layer of armor was inadequate for preventing major damage from a single hit from a secondary battery of the next SM down. UV lasers with a (2) divisor if anyone wonders. The particle beam major batteries on the larger ships appeared to be overkill for any tactical role. No one needed that much armor penetration.

So it's not just missiles. :)

Re: Is spaceship armor useless?
 

Hmm. It takes very roughly 3 layers of Hardened Nanocomposite to negate an average Major Battery UV LASER hit, assuming a streamlined craft; about two layers for non-streamlined. But this one hit deals 2/3 of the craft's HP at most SMs. Particle beams . . . well, Hardened Armour reduces their AD from (5) to (3), thus needing about six layers to defend against an average hit, but PBs are much shorter-ranged.

But you put Major Batteries with huge penetration in order to take down ships larger than yours, if you have to, right?

Anyway, the fact that armour layers and MB hits take up such a big chunk of HP is what also results in G:SS combats being somewhat like UT personal combat: either you're so armoured that you ignore the stuff thrown at you, or the stuff thrown at you is so scary that it can outright ignore whether you have zero, one, or three layers of armour.

Oh, and regarding missiles, another bit: just how scary or meh they are seems to depend significantly on the SM of combatants. At low SMs, they're overkill, and you hope to land just one (out of a swarm). At high SMs, they tend to be meh compared to beams. But the larger the SMs, the less likely they are to be encountered in-game.

Re: Is spaceship armor useless?
 

The space and time scale thing, which partially leads to the multiple-projectile issues.

There are good reasons to want the scale to be slidable, but it's not obvious that there's a good way to do that.
I don't really think I see a continuum there.

GURPS Spaceships sits in a place where it acknowledges that space is big and space weapons have lots of range and all that.

All things wooshy, as far as I can see, start from either not realizing or willfully denying that scale.

You can probably do things without rejecting the scale to reduce the degree to which things are pre-determined.

Re: Is spaceship armor useless?
 

Is there anything in particular that breaks down from sliding the scale other than multiple-projectile-handling-rules? Hexes become bigger, velocities and accelerations in hexes are adjusted, and everything else seems fine, as long as you use the right scale (e.g. do not use a 10,000-mile hex if your enemies need to shoot from 5 miles at you half the time). In-ship movement and repairs might be better handled slightly differently, but they don't look tragically broken compared to beams/missile/dodges.

Space is big, but something may force closer encounters - engine, weapon, or other similar parameters. Plus there's the offence/defence ratios, be they accuracy/dodge or damage/DR/HP, and they change many things.

Re: Is spaceship armor useless?
 

From SS1, there's the weird thing where the amount of thrust required to not count as unpowered varies by orders of magnitude depending on the scale. In SS3, there's the curious consequences of what the minimum non-zero range is. (For instance, in 10m/20s, you are fairly likely to get to shoot at a (non-fragmented) missile at closer than the point defense baseline range. On 10,000 mile hexes, you need a 3 MJ UV laser to be able to reach out of your own space at all!)
It'd have to be something very, very big to force the kind of closer encounters you see in the wooshy genre, and it would usually have to be something you grafted on to the setting to justify it.

Re: Is spaceship armor useless?
 

Regarding the 3MJ UV LASER: that probably indicates picking the wrong scale (as mentioned above).
As for PD range, that should probably be calculated based on relative missile velocities instead of being tied to hex-scale.

(I also consider the Basic system something of a mess. I tried playing it, and it's just too unwieldy.)

Re: Is spaceship armor useless?
 

If you set the hex scale by the smallest stuff rather than the biggest, you're going to lose a lot of the potential benefits...
As for PD range, that should probably be calculated based on relative missile velocities instead of being tied to hex-scale.[/QUOTE]
By RAW, it's just a flat value. It doesn't change with the hex scale, which is where some of what I was pointing out comes from.
I don't think I could bring myself to actually try playing the Basic system, there's too much that's just bizarre.