[Spaceships] Piercing And Other Damage Types
 

OK, I might only be noticing because I'm looking up the rules to see how spaceships engage in melee combat, but I've noticed a problem: Spaceships doesn't actually say what sort of damage it's weapons do. Oh, it gives things like burn, but not pi- to pi++ (Which I think ranged burning attacks need, or at least they can have it).

Now this is kind of important because unless an attack has pi++ it won't do full damage against a spaceship and attacks that are pi- get a wounding modifier of 0.2 against machines.

Re: [Spaceships]Piercing And Other Damage Types
 

The smallest possible spaceship projectiles are 2cm - well above the threshold for pi++. Of course, at the velocities they fire at, their impacts tend to be explosive rather than penetrating, so they should be treated as crushing explosions. Either way, that's a Wound Modifier of x1 against Unliving ship hulls.

Re: [Spaceships] Piercing And Other Damage Types
 

That's odd, I could have sworn the conventional warheads were listed as crushing. If you're willing to extend the pi categories, a 2 cm warhead would be Pi+2 (Pi++, x2 WM), 2.5 and 3 cm would be Pi+3 (x3), up to 5 cm would be Pi+4 (x5), up to 7 cm would be Pi+5 (x7), up to 10 cm would be Pi+6 (x10), and so forth. If we assume the projectiles are solid steel, then above 3 mps or so (speed of sound in steel is 3.7 mps) the projectiles are just going to explode upon impact, for cr ex rather than Pi+n. The projectiles are probably made of a great deal of stuff other than steel, with a lower speed of sound, so the minimum 1 mps velocity of conventional weapons is probably sufficient for this effect to occur. With that in mind, you might as well just have all of them be cr.

Also, burning weapons don't have a damage type other than Burn, not even Tight Beam Burning. lwcamp's houserules, change this, with a Beam category that's basically "burning piercing" for Tight Beam Burning.

Re: [Spaceships]Piercing And Other Damage Types
 

I could swear I read somewhere that all shells were explosive, because involved in space, you're not actually hitting your target with giant slugs.

But all "bullets" are guided too, which makes the differentiation between "guns" and "launchers" largely a matter of size rather than function of shell.

Re: [Spaceships]Piercing And Other Damage Types
 

Using (non-nuclear) explosives in space projectiles is generally unneeded. The amount of energy contributed by conventional explosives is pretty miniscule compared to the energy of the impact itself, and there's no atmosphere to carry concussive shockwaves. Warheads can be set for "proximity burst", but that's more of a shotgun effect - showering the target with numerous sub-caliber slugs.

Considering the overall level of detail of the Spaceships line, I wouldn't worry about whether shells are technically pi++ or cr ex, and just stick to Wound Modifier x1.

Re: [Spaceships]Piercing And Other Damage Types
 

Agree. When it comes to cannons, I'd really rather have armoury and vehicles anyway, though those (especially Armoury) will never come out in my lifetime, so that's just dreaming. Still, beams have a million different types, and guns just have "proximity or not" because APEP or hyperdense rounds aren't a thing in space, I guess. Or plasma lance rounds or vortex shells or whatever.

Hmmm. I wonder if you could work out a semi-reliable system for making alternate shell-types work.

Re: [Spaceships]Piercing And Other Damage Types
 

Some of the warheads from UT could be used as-is. The main problem is that they tend to be lackluster compared to standard kinetic rounds. For example, a 10cm Plasma warhead deals 6d dDam, compared to a normal 10cm's 15d dDam (at 1 mps). Specialty rounds may look more promising, but again it can be hard to make use of them. A 10cm Psi-Bomb warhead has a radius of 16 yards, meaning you'd need a dead-center hit to engulf an SM +7 ship, and larger ships would only be partially affected. These would still be useful for capturing enemy ships intact.

EDIT: Decided to drop by the Designer's Notes to refresh my memory on the Plasma Lance warhead. That's one that could actually be competitive with some projectiles, because of its high basic damage and armor divisor. A 10cm Plasma Lance deals 12d(10); a kinetic warhead would need a relative velocity of 4 mps to achieve the same penetration. Of course, spaceships tend to have far weaker armor than what's found in UT, so there may not be much demand for it. Plus, the Plasma Lance is TL11^, by which point spaceships may be packing Gravity Guns with a minimum velocity of 5 mps. These warheads may still have a niche as cheap bunker-buster bombs (using the bomb rules from SS4).