Re: [Spaceships] Combat Examples?
 

I'm not really sure why you wouldn't be able to mount multiple weapons in the same turret housing. It was done historically, and it's a common concept in fiction.

So yeah, for so many reasons, I'm going to continue ignoring that rule.

Re: [Spaceships] Combat Examples?
 

Seems reasonable, though I'd suggest that multiple turreted weapons sharing a turret should be a design choice rather than freely clustering turret weapons the way you do fixed weapons.

(Also, can't resist pointing out that a triple-mount is almost guaranteed to be worse than a three single mounts, except for needing fewer gunners.)

Re: [Spaceships] Combat Examples?
 

Do you say that because of RoF issues? And does that change if you have three Improved Lasers in there, with double the RoF?

Re: [Spaceships] Combat Examples?
 

Even if you have things arranged so that 3x RoF results in getting +2 to hit, it's usually not going to increase your chances to hit compared to taking three separate shots. The huge recoil on guns and the PD rules make it even more unfortunate for them, but in most cases I expect beams to do better separated too.

Re: [Spaceships] Combat Examples?
 

Sure, and sure. I just don't care enough to roll the dice three times in these example combats, when rolling a single attack at RoF x3 is faster to type. Yes, I'm getting less hits, but no, I don't really mind.

At the table, in competition play, without needing to take notes? I'd roll the attacks separately.

Re: [Spaceships] Combat Examples?
 

It's not as though there is any system that allows a single person to control multiple turrets. The B-29 is completely fictional.

Re: [Spaceships] Combat Examples?
 

Well, as far as Spaceships knows!

I'm not actually sure how I'd model that system in GURPS. The player-orientation friendly version would be to simply use Gunner skill and aggregated RoF from however many turrets a gunner is currently operating. But I'm dubious of that if the machine is calling the shot...

Re: [Spaceships] Combat Examples?
 

Well, let's look at some real-world reasons for multiple-weapon turrets. Usually there are two questions:
A) "Why not use one bigger weapon?"
B) "Why not mount each weapon in its own turret?"

* (A) Design, development, and other fixed costs. It may not be cost-effective to have a weapon in every size range, but instead to use multiple weapons of the smaller size for intermediate roles. So, if you wanted more firepower than one .50 cal (12.5mm), but didn't want or need to step up to a 20mm or 30mm design, you used two .50 cal rather than having to develop a 15mm-ish design.

* (A) Logistics, supply chain, and running costs, particularly ammo and other consumables (barrels or liners, etc.). Particularly in the case of upgrades and refits; if a cruiser already had a variety of .50 cal mounts for AA, upgrading them to twin .50 mounts doesn't change your ammo logistics much (pretty close to doubling your rate of fire while halving your duration of fire, which turned out to be needed for kamikaze defense). You use the same boxes, pallets, store rooms, ammo dumps, etc. as you have been all along.

* (A) Redundancy and reliability. If a single-weapon mount fails (jams, overheats) or is damaged by the enemy on a design that can only realistically have one turret covering some angle, you have a hole in your fire.

* (A) Technological limitations. At some point, you just don't *have* a bigger weapon. This might be something you can fix eventually with a research program ("We need better metallurgy!"), or it might be a supply limitation ("Laser crystals simply don't come any larger!"), or various other reasons; but at some point in designing capital ships you typically hit the point where one single instance of the best weapon available is not enough. Even if it is today, what if your enemy deploys a vehicle tomorrow with two? It almost always takes less research and development to put in multiple copies of an existing (or just-developed) weapon than to develop an entirely new one that is more powerful.

* (A) Dispersal of fire. In situations where single hits are capable of causing significant damage, but fire control is not enough superior to physics limitations and/or defensive measures that hits are common, the deliberate dispersion of a multiple-weapon mount controlled by a single targeting suite may result in a higher rate of effective hits than individual weapons. Whether a 4x 40mm Bofors AA trying to hit an incoming aircraft, or a 3x 16"/50 trying to bracket a hostile BB in heavy sea state, there are frequently situations where it's more important to increase one's chance of hitting once via dispersal of fire.

* (A,B) External design constraints. Perhaps your ship has to fit through a canal, or a stargate, or some existing ship's launch tubes, or some other limitation that controls certain dimensions more strongly than others. Perhaps streamlining for water, air, interstellar medium, or hyperspace efficiency requires certain critical dimensions; typically, a ship that is long and pointy. The Iowa-class BB had to both fit through the Panama canal, and meet certain speed targets; there's no way a single 6x 16"/50 forward turret would have fit, and they didn't have any single more powerful weapons. So, 2x3 forward, with one super-firing, was the best fit; in this case the dead zone from the superstructure meant that the turrets didn't loose very much more coverage angle.

* (A,B) Continuity of fire. In difficult fire-control situations, being able to maintain "continued fire" with multiple smaller weapons may be more likely to score hits than fewer, larger shots with a much lower RoF. In circuit terms, this has to do with the feedback parameters of your closed-loop feedback compared to its tuning weights, and controls how fast you converge on a changing input, or even whether you do at all.

* (A,B) Mitigation of side effects, or leveling of surge. Two obvious examples would be recoil in a projectile weapon, and capacitor charging in an energy weapon. In many cases design of a support system (recoil buffers and reinforcing, electrical supply harness, etc.) has to handle the peak net load; a staggered recoil or charge cycle may result in considerably less overhead for a multiple-weapon turret than twice that of a single one, or of one sufficiently larger weapon.

* (B) Commonality of high-cost components. This could be human gunners, analog fire-control computers, targeting AIs, coaxial fire control sensors, or any other situation where in a particular setting, the weapon *accessories* are a significant expense concern in some critical way (cost, mass, volume, power, cooling, etc.) compared to the weapon itself. In the previous cruiser example, putting more trained gunners on board has all sorts of knock-on costs (more bunks, more heads, more kitchens, more food stores, more oil to lug all of that around, etc.); whereas simply giving each existing gunner a paired weapon to manage has far less infrastructure overhead.

* (B) Field of fire. A single turret with N weapons, optimally placed, can cover an arc of fire with all N weapons; individual turrets can't fire through each other, and so there will be sub-arcs that you have at best N-1 weapon coverage, and possibly less. This is considerably worse in 2D than 3D (and probably even less so in 4D or higher dimensions, for those very few of you doing native-hyperspatial weapons design; on the flip side, Flatland turret design is problematic.) In situations where the turrets are a significant fraction of the vehicle's volume, this tends to become more of a problem.

* (B) Armor and other surface-area defenses. To a *very* rough approximation, in many settings weapons take up mostly volume with some surface area, ammo takes up volume alone, and armor, force screens, etc. take up mostly surface area. To get the same protection (thickness of armor, etc.) over N separate turrets of volume V takes up considerably more mass/power/etc. than getting that same protection over a single turret with N*V volume, even if there's some inefficiency (N*V)+k.

Try to imagine an Iowa-class BB with nine separate 16"/50 turrets; where would they go? How would they shoot around each other? How many more tons of armor would you need to get the same level of protection? When you have to consider fitting through a canal (stargate, etc.) and being "fast" on top of all that, it's a complicated design optimization issue... but throughout the history of deployed turreted warships from the USS Monitor onward, the *usual* answer has been turrets with 2-4 weapons each for ships with significant numbers of heavy guns.

Re: [Spaceships] Combat Examples?
 

I would like rules for mounting weapons in a single turret. THe way I see it, any given single turret of a given SM is a single very large gun in an appropriately housed turret. As a design option, you can replace a single battery of any size with a triple mount of an SM-1 weapon system. So, if I'm SM+15 and I have a Medium battery normally with 3 300 GJ beams, I can replace one of those with a double/triple/quad mount of 100 GJ beams.

Of course, all that really is is the completely standard Smaller Systems rule in action for weapons, right? So, maybe this kind of detail is simply beyond GURPS Spaceships resolution.

OTOH, I see the point--I'd like to be able to mount weapons in turrets to get the RoF bonus. That's an easy enough house rule, I"ll just "ignore the RAW" like Mark is doing.

Re: [Spaceships] Combat Examples?
 

I added to takes on the "corvettes versus a strike carrier" scenario to my blog:
http://noschoolgrognard.blogspot.com...vs-strike.html
http://noschoolgrognard.blogspot.com...strike_21.html
(the ship designs for these examples are here http://noschoolgrognard.blogspot.com...s-bricriu.html)

The first version was played out at 3 minute turns, and was something of a disaster.

The second version was played out with 1 minute turns, and was just painful and sad.

My final conclusion was that the default dHP scaling in Spaceships may be realistic, but it isn't fun to game. In the future, I'm almost certainly going to use the "HP and Weight: an Alternate Approach" scaling from Pyramid #3.34, p25, which would scale dHP with the square root of weight and dramatically increase the dHP of the larger ships.

Re: [Spaceships] Combat Examples?
 

VERY interesting stuff, Mark. I am interested in the use of the square root dHP system and I like your suggestion on your blog to allow disabling by lower powered weapons to make small strike craft useful against large ships.

One other solution -- Spaceships assumes that weapons scale with size to no real limit. What if there ARE limits on the size of weapons? I'm pondering how to convert the Star*Drive setting to GURPS and I was a big fan of ship design under that game's Warships supplement. The largest ships are upwards of SM +20, but there were no "spinal mounts" that large in the setting. Indeed, I'm tempted to say that the maximum size of weapons is more in the SM +16 scale.

Finally, the other way to increase survivability of ships is to simply make the design decision to use smaller weapons on your ships (like in Star Wars). But that doesn't work very well when doing conversions...

Anyway, your examples are very helpful and while I was distressed to see you were distressed by the latest round, I'm hopeful that there are some good solutions out there.

Re: [Spaceships] Combat Examples?
 

Some thoughts on this.

The problem that really struck me, looking at this, was handing the escorts the first shot for free. This might not be a huge problem in the drawn-out exchange of blows you may have been hoping for, but in the actual combat it's huge. (And longer turn times aggravate this.) And it doesn't seem appropriate to the scenario described, though perhaps I'm misunderstanding that. However, I don't see a satisfactory fix. One could allow the carrier to take 'aim and wait' actions in the pre-turn, but that hands it two full rounds of fire before the escorts get to take their second. Maybe a little fairer, but not really resolving the issue. Spaceships 3's system gives simultaneous turns...

I'm not sure what the 'all or nothing' complaint about the PD is. Bricru 2 would have been a debris field instead of merely seriously damaged if the PD hadn't thinned the incoming missiles. (The guns are running into trouble, of course, because large-caliber guns are just awful.)

On the other hand, Bricru 2 didn't need to be hit at all, if you weren't aggregating all the PD turrets and then parceling out their shots in a way I don't quite understand. Each gun individually would be rolling against a 22 (with their RoF 600 in 1-minute turns), so two would have stopped the attack, three if you want to be excessively careful.

On a technical note, I think there are several places where RoF is handled wrong in the 1-minute combat. The spinal laser and KKC attacks seem to have been treated with their base RoFs of 1, 3, or 6, but in one-minute turns the spinal gun is RoF 3, the three-gun KKC batteries are RoF 9, and the 6-gun battery is RoF 18. The missile attack looks like it was treated as RoF 20 rather than RoF 6. The three-gun particle beam batteries got no RoF bonus to hit (should have been +2) but were allowed to score four hits in one attack.


If you want slugging matches and find even energy weapons too powerful, ramping up HP, or handing out ITDR, or something of the kind is probably the way to do it. I'd be very hesitant about nerfing particle beams though, they already suffering under major range and accuracy penalties compared to lasers.

Re: [Spaceships] Combat Examples?
 

An abstracted look at your designs I think makes much of this predictable, actually.

The PD batteries you've equipped all your craft with make the very casual ballistic loadouts completely pointless. There's only been one time in all your battles that you got a kinetic shot through a PD screen, right? And that one shouldn't actually have worked. Ballistic weapons that are outnumbered something like 3 to one by VRF lasers are a total waste of space, time, and dice rolls. (Even VRF guns probably aren't doing any good at those numbers.)

So it comes down to the energy batteries. The Bricrus have an overwhelming edge in weight of fire. Each of their medium batteries throws more dice of damage than the Valiant's big gun. They suffer more from armor, but not enough more without you fielding ships with much more serious defense layouts than these. Each escort individually outguns the carrier. Its only saving grace is range...but you're scaling the battle to allow dramatic maneuvering and disallow the carrier casually lighting up the escorts like targets on a range before they can get off the starting blocks.

Re: [Spaceships] Combat Examples?
 

I'm enjoying reading the Spaceships combat examples, and they are very informative. Discussions on the forums had pointed to missiles being unbalanced, but without seeing the actual effect in play I wasn't sure how bad the problem was, so thanks for these.
Having played around with building Spaceships, and converting designs from another system, a lot (see the GURPS thread link in my sig.), it had made me wonder how effective the designs were, in particular, did I have enough Armour on the various sizes and designs of ship, and how did their weaponry balance out. I hadn't gotten around to playing out the numbers yet, so thanks again.

One thing I did make a lot of use of when doing the spaceship conversions was the standard sequences used for spaceships - basically:
{1,3}= 1,3,10,30,..
{1,2,5}=1,2,5,10,20,50,..
{Armour}=1,2,3,5,7,10,15,20,30,50,..
With a few multipliers (which I find easy to work with), I compressed the Spaceship Design down to 6 pages, including all component specs.

Looking at using the square root of weight scaling for HP doesn't exactly give a nice progression, but with a little fiddling I think I've found a couple of possible progressions which may be useful.

Using square root of mass (tons * 2000 for lbs) *0.85, double for Unliving, divide by 10 for decade scale gives:
(from SM+5): 41.6, 76.0, 131.7, 240.4, 416.4, 760.3, ..
'Rounding', this could conveniently be:
(Spaceship dHP from SM+5): 50,75,150,250, 500,750,1500,2500, ..
Not as nice a progression as the others, but fairly memorable.

Dropping the 0.85 (I missed that at first when just using square root of mass), with rounding gives:
(Spaceship dHP from SM+5): 50,100,150,300, 500,1000,1500,3000, ..
Which I prefer because it's closer to the {1,3}, and its actually the same as the (0.85) calculations for Odd SM's !

Re: [Spaceships] Combat Examples?
 

This thread made me realise I'd never run even a experiment combat in Spaceships, so I thought I'd try the same scenario as mlangsdorf, using his ships and with no house rules.
I quickly got the same result in an ambush, the Vigilant instantly destroyed, so I ran it again giving the Vigilant enough advanced warning for a full pre battle turn. It turned out quite differently.
For this combat I'm going to ignore all crew casualties and damage control.
3 minute turns, standard range.

The Vigilant saw the Briciu's at sufficient range that she got a full Pre Game turn before they engage.
The Valiant is up against 3 ships each one of whom would almost be a fair fight, so is fairly desperate.
All skills are 14, the Pilot of the Vigilant has Combat Reflexes; I miscalculated the first few Dodges for the Vigilant by adding +1 from being motivated by command, so to avoid having to go back and redo things I retconned in CR. Which explains why in this alternate universe the Vigilant saw the enemy coming in time to react :)

Vigilant(pre game turn)
Command Task : Motivate Pilot against a target of 14,rolled 12 Pilot has +1 to all tasks
Engineering: Allocate all power to weapons.
Navigation: Tactical Navigation, rolled a 6 +1 to Pilot skill (so it will be 15 for the rest of the turn), for the rest of the combat I'll use a format something like BaseSkill+x(reason)=target_number rolled (margin of success, of margin of failure if negative). e.g. Fast Talk 14+1(I like this guy)=15 13(2) is a roll of 13 against a target number of 15.
Pilot: Really doesn't want the enemy to be able to close, so uses feeds some water through the fusion torch to get the maximum bonus for Hold Course 1.5g 1.5 mps (+3), can put either the front or the centre towards the enemy, the front has arguably fewer important systems so front towards enemy. 3.5mps of water remaining
Gunners: All weapons Wait(Point Defence), could have used Wait(Aim and Attack) on some weapons but this gives the most defensive fire. This was a mistake, putting the main weapons on Wait(Aim & Attack) (Wait(Aim) throughout the example) would have allowed the Vigilant to do damage to the enemy as they closed (or attempted to), now that I've run the combat I suspect the Pre Battle turn is important to why ordering the turns isn't a big deal - the side that moves second isn't a sitting duck and can't often be hit big without responding.

B1
Command: Defensive Tactics vs Vigilant 14+2(3 min turns)=16 16(0) so +1 Dodge vs Vigilant
Engineering: Increase Power Task=14 15 failed, 4 points available. Allocate power to Point Defence Lasers, 1 Kinetic Kill Cannon battery and both Particle Cannon batteries. The book states that if the number of Power Points changes then the allocation counts as task for multitasking but that can't really include the PP shift from Increase Power or Emergency Power - since you don't know if the number is going to be different in this turn until after the roll to determine the number you have. So no multitasking penalty from the Allocate to the Increase Power.
Navigation: Tactical Navigation rolled an 11 +1 Pilot skill
Pilot: Closing 0.5G 0.5mps +1 14+1(Tac Nav)+1 (accel)=16 vs 14+1(tac nav) +1(motivation)+3(accel) = 19. 8(MoS8) vs 9(MoS10). Loss, range remains Long, front to Vigilant.
Doesn't have range.
Gunnery: PDL Wait(PD), others Wait(Aim) - fire if Valiant closes to Short. This is the critical mistake the B1's captain made, he should have used at least the KKC perform a Wait(PD) instead. And where the Vigilant could have fired it's Spinal Laser if it had performed a Wait(Aim)

B2
Command: Keep formation (actually he's hoping for a better result on the Closing, but if doesn't get it will remain in formation with B1). Motivate Pilot=14 14(0) +1 to rolls
Eng:Increase Power Task=14 9(5), success so 5 Power Points. Allocate power to all weapons, the B2 wouldn't have been using Increase Power before this turn, so this roll shows where a retroactive -2 should be applied if this counted as changing the number of Power Points for allocation.
Navigation: Tactical Navigation=14 9(5) so +1 Pilot skill
Pilot: Closing 0.5G 0.5mps +1 14+1(Tac Nav) +1 (accel)+1(motivation)=17 vs 14+1(tac nav)+1(motivation)+3(accel) = 19. 13(4) vs 11 (8). Loss, range Long, front to Vigilant. In formation with B1
Doesn't have range
Gunnery: PDL Wait(PD), others Wait(Aim) - fire if Valiant closes to Short. B2 makes the same mistake as the B1.

B3
Command: Keep formation (hoping for a better result on the Closing, but if doesn't get it will remain in formation with B1). Motivate Pilot=14 14(0) +1 to tasks
Engineer: Increase Power Task=14 9(5) Allocate Power 2 to Particle Beams, 2 to Kinetic Kill Cannons, 1 to Point Defence Lasers.
Nav: Tactical=14 14(0) +1 Pilot skill
Pilot: Closing 0.5G 0.5mps +1 14+1(Tac Nav) +1 (accel)+1(motivation)=17 vs 14+1(tac nav)+1(motivation)+3(accel) = 19. 12(5) vs 16(3). And the Valiant was doing so well. Attack Run (range Short) front vs Vigilant, out of formation.
Gunnery. All attack (KKC aren't likely to score, but if they do it's going to gut the Vigilant)
PC1 14+10(SM)-3(sAcc)-8(range)-2(ECM)+2(RoF)=13 12(1) 1 hit. Dodge, the +1 skill from Tactical Navigation raises the Pilot's skill from 14 to 15, and Dodge starts with Skill/2, round UP so (15/2=8)+1(CR)-2(handling)+2(turn length)+1(ECM)=10 14 no dodge. Hit1 4x5=20-(50/3=16)=4. Doesn't disable anything, surge HT=13 14 fail disable 3 Hangar bay. HP=146.
PC2=13 11(2) 2 hits, recoil is increased by 1 due to the turn length. Dodge=10 7 Dodge 3.
PC3=13 11(2) 2 hits. Dodge=10 11 no. Hit1 16x5=80-16=64 at least 15, less than 75. Disable 6 cargo hold, surge 9 no. Hit2 5x5=25-16 = 9 no damage surge 9 no. HP=73
PC4=13 10(3) 2 hits. Dodge=10 11 no. Hit1 9x5=45-16= 29 Disable 2 Water tank surge 11 no. Hit2 13x5=65-16=49 disable Cargo hold, destroyed surge 13 no. HP=-5. Array-1, Hnd becomes -4, beam attack -2. The cargo could be treated as Volatile and so need to roll to see if the Vigilant explodes, but I decided against it (wearing the GM hat - probably a Fez)
PC5=13 8(5) 3 hits. Dodge (15/2)=8+1(CR)-4(handling)+2(turn length)+1(ECM)=8 7(1) dodge 2. Hit1 9x4=45-16=29 disable 2 Water Tank, destroyed surge 9 no.
PC6=13 12(1) 1 hit. Dodge=8 9. Hit1 5x5=25-16=9 surge 8. HP=-33
KKC1 14+10(SM)-6(sAcc)-2(ECM)+0(relative velocity)+2(RoF)=18 11(7) 2 hits. PDL1(800) 14-4(SM)+0(Range)+0(sAcc)-2(damage)+10(RoF)=18 10(8) 5 intercepts. I didn't notice that the PDL were improved, but using 800 RoF on the initial interception was more than enough, reserving the remaining 200 in case one of the other intercepts rolled poorly.
KKC2=18 8(10) 3 hits. PDL2(800)=18 11(7) 4 intercepts.
KKC3=18 11(7) 2 hits. PDL3(800)=18 12(6) 4 intercepts
KKC4=18 14(4) 1 hit. PDL4(800)=18 15(3) 2 intercepts
KKC5=18 8(10) 3 hits. PDL5(800)=18 14(4) 3 intercepts
KKC6=18 11(7) 2 hits. PDL6(800)=18 11(7) 4 intercepts

(continued in next post)

Re: [Spaceships] Combat Examples?
 

(continued from above)


V
Systems Disabled: Front 3 Hangar
Systems Destroyed: Front 2 Water Tank, 6 Cargo Hold
Command: Motivate Pilot=14 6 +1 to rolls
Emergency Thrust task=14 11(3), double Accel but -4 to future Emergency Thrust. Allocate power to all weapons - the same allocation as last turn so no multitasking penalty.
Navigation: Tactical Navigation 14 15 fail but by 1, no effect.
Pilot: Closing (B1) 2G 4mps (High thrust for 1 1G but doubles deltaV used, emergency thrust takes that to 2G)=14+1(motivated)+4(accel)=19 vs 14+1(TacNav)+1(accel)=16. 9(10) vs 12(4). Since MoS 10+ will be advantaged (facing the rear of the formation) but while it could also enter an Attack Vector the captain doesn't want to be at Short range, as the rules say "may combine both advantaged and an attack vector" I'm interpreting that as doesn't have to. Range to B3 is now Long as their attack vector is over. Front vs all enemies, range L.
Gunners: PDL Wait(PD)
Missile 1 Attack B1 14+9(SM)+2(sAcc)-1(ECM against Tactical Array)+4(proximity)+0(relative velocity)+7(RoF)=33 6(27,critical) Rcl2 due to turn length 14 hits. No dodge allowed against a critical. PDLs do not bear, so no Point Defence (b2 does not bear either, since it is facing the same way as b1). Hit1 20x4x2=160-40=120 Destroy 6 Engine Room, Disable 1 Armour HP=-20. Hit2 20x8=160-40=120 Destroy 3 Fusion Torch, disable 4 Fuel Tank HP -140, death check=12 7 success. Hit3 18x8=144-40=104 Destroy 6, already destroyed so destroy 1 armour (no core) , disable 5 Fuel Tank HP=-244 death check 11 success. Hit4, location 1 (so reduce armour by 20) 20x8=160-20=140, rollover to 2 armour disable 6 rollover to 4 Fuel Tank, destroyed HP=-380 death check 16 fail. Ship destroyed.
Missile 2: Attack B2=33 16(17) 9 hits. Dodge (15/2=8)-1(Hand)+2(turn length)+1(ECM)=10 7(3) dodge 4. Hit1 19x8=152-40=112 destroy 2 armour disable 2 rollover to 3 fusion torch HP=-12. Hit2 location 3 20x8=160-40=120 destroy 3 fusion torch disable 3 rollover to 4 fuel tank HP=-132 death check=12 6 success. Hit3 location 5 8x8=64-40=24 HP=-156. Hit4 location 1 17x8=136-40=96 destroy 1 armour disable 4 fuel tank, destroyed HP=-252 death check 12 success. Hit5 location 5 32x8=256-40=216 destroy 5 fuel tank disable 5 rollover to 6 engine room HP=468 2 death checks 7 success 9 success. Adrift with all 6 locations out of action (the engine room could be repaired).
Spinal Laser: target b3 14+9(SM)+1(sAcc)-12(range)+2(spinal)-2(damage)-1(ECM against Tactical Array)+2(RoF)=13 6(7) 4 hits. Dodge (15/2=8)+1(ECM)+2(turn length)=11 16 no dodge. Hit1 damage 4dx10 14x10=140-40=100 destroy 5 ECM disable 2 armour HP=0. Hit2 14x10=140-40=100 destroy 6 power plant disable 5 rollover to control room HP=-200 death check=12 12 success. Hit3 location 2 14x10=140-40=100 destroy 2 armour disable 3 tertiary battery HP=-300 death check 11 success. Hit4 location 1 15x10=150-20=130 destroy rollover 3, tertiary battery disable 6 rollover control room destroy HP=-430 death check 5 success.

B1
Send debris in all directions

B2
Uncontrolled drift. Range to V long, rear facing. Won't be involved again unless the Vigilant decides to chase it down, so ignore for the rest of the combat.

B3
Command: Space Tactics (defensive) 14+2(turn length) 14(2) +1 Dodge vs Vigilant
Engineering: Emergency Thrust14-2(multitasking) 11(1) Double thrust by -4 to future Emergency Thrust. 2 points allocated to the Particle Beams, as this is a different number of Power Points from last turn (2 rather than 4 base) allocating counts as a Task but still doesn't require a roll.
Nav: Tactical Navigation 7(7) +1 to Pilot skill
Pilot: Evasive Action 2G 4 mps +4 (+8 to avoid closing). Rear to Vigilant. Range Long
Gunnery: Wait(Aim) on PC, shoot Vigilant if it comes into range. The Vigilant no longer has any ballistic weapons (shot them dry) so don't need any Point Defence.

V
Command: Space Tactics (offensive) 14+2(turn length)=16 QC vs 14 4(12, crit) vs 6(10, crit). Won with a critical, so -2 to B3 Dodge. By the book this should have not included turn length since this was a Quick Contest, but it makes no difference to the outcome.
Engineering: Allocate power all weapons.
Navigation: Tactical Navigation=14 12(2) +1 Pilot Skill
Piloting: Closing 0.5G 0.5mps 14+1(Tac Nav)+1(accel)=16 vs 14+1(Tac Nav)+8(accel)=23. 11(5) vs 8(15). Fail. Range Long, Front to B3.
Gunnery: Wait(PD) PDL.
Spinal=13 15 (miss)

B3
Command: Space Tactics (defensive) 14 vs 14 15(fail) vs 9(6). No effect
Engineering: 2 points allocated to PC, same as last turn. Emergency Thrust14-4(previous Emergency Thrust)=10 14(-4) Double thrust but then torch fails.
Nav: Tactical Navigation 9(5) +1 to Pilot skill
Pilot: Retreat 2G 4 mps +4. Rear to Vigilant, Long range
Gunnery: Wait(Aim) on PC, shoot Vigilant if it comes into range.

V
Command: Space Tactics (offensive) 14 vs 14. 12(2) vs 9(5). No effect.
Engineering: Allocate power all weapons.
Navigation: Tactical Navigation=14 5(9) +1 Pilot Skill
Piloting: Closing 0.5G 0.5mps 14+1(Tac Nav)+1(accel)=16 vs 14+1(Tac Nav)+4(accel)=19. 6(10, crit) vs 10(9). Won QC so closing. Advantaged Front facing B3 Centre, range Long.
Gunnery: Wait(PD) PDL.
Spinal=13 9(4) 3 hits. Dodge (15/2=8)-3(Handling)+2(turn length)=7 11(-4) no dodge. Hit1 13x10=130-40=90 destroy 6 Particle Beam disable 6, rollover to core Fusion Power Plant HP=-520. Destroyed.

Against the odds the Vigilant wins.

Re: [Spaceships] Combat Examples?
 

Additionally, you might also want to checkout Spaceships 4
It may be under the Cinematic Cliches section, but I think this one falls under the not silly category, and seems perfectly reasonable.

Re: [Spaceships] Combat Examples?
 

I enjoyed the write-ups.

Minor note: A medium battery isn't "one turret with three weapons;" it's a battery of three individual independent mounts, which, as the rules say, can be mixed e.g., "Medium Battery (one fixed mount, two turret mounts"). As the rules for Improved weapons note, something like a WWII turret would be an improved mount (or possibly a rapid fire mount, depending on the number of weapons sticking out of it); I discussed that in the Traveller JTAS Spaceships article. Remember, each turret can have its own crew station, so a SM +6 bomber-sized design with a secondary battery could have 10 individual turrets if desired (or some turrets and a few fixed mounts to represent the bomb/missile bay).

Docking with a friendly doesn't require rendezvous. You just enter formation (choose the same maneuver and accel on your own turn as the formation leader), then (as per p. 65, under Launching Small craft) you can spend a turn to maneuver into the bay on a normal piloting skill roll (modified by extra time)

The cockpit multi-tasking is indeed useful for this sort of thing. It's probably unfortunate that the original planned Book 8 (which was to cover AI ships) did not appear, as that could have presented some simpler rules for using gunnery AI programs as point defense. A quick and dirty option is to a simple CIWS program with Gunner 10 or so and Automaton ("shoot missiles!") is Complexity 3 or so, and thus essentially a default option .

Re: [Spaceships] Combat Examples?
 

If you read the penalties the exo-armor pilots are taking, I'm already using that cinematic cliche. The argument is whether or not the pilot can take two Gunnery tasks with different weapons in the same turn.

Re: [Spaceships] Combat Examples?
 

It's been a couple of years since I last ran a space combat (when testing Spaceships 4), so I'm not sure whether I was being unduly conservative or if there was a play-balance reason for prohibiting it. It's possible the rule was actually supposed to say:

"A single character can never perform more than one gunnery task per turn with the same weapon"

I won't give an official ruling on it - SJ Games generally prefers any such go through errata channels. In this case, it's not really errata so much as "additional playtesting indicates that one man ships aren't very survivable unless they have an extra gunner or computer program to handle point defense, or a rule to cover it" . I think that's valid, but it's more an edition update.

Re: [Spaceships] Combat Examples?
 

I had missed the fact that you were already using that rule, and the author has now given an unofficial designers note to the effect that taking multiple gunnery tasks (with different weapons) is probably OK.

As you can see from my Sig, I've done a load of Spaceships conversion myself, and when I was doing them I did wonder as to how the designs would stand up to actual combat - was I putting sufficient or even too much armour on the designs, were the weapons pointlessly weak or seriously overkill. It has been on my background 'to do' list to run through some actual Spaceships Action and Combat examples to better understand such issues.

This thread, and your examples have inspired me to read through the rules in more detail, figure out what they mean and how they work, and run some numbers on how combat actually works. I think I probably need to actually go through some exampes of my own, step by step, and write them down as you have - to make sure I'm getting everything clear in my own head, because there are a lot of factors to remember, but overall it doesn't seem too complicated.

Re: [Spaceships] Combat Examples?
 

i just wanted to say that this is an excellent thread, and i'm very sorry that SS8 didn't make its way out into publication!

Re: [Spaceships] Combat Examples?
 

I think SS8 is the Transhuman Space supplement.