Originally Posted by Michael Thayne (Post 2171244)

The missile shield design switch from Spaceships 3 seems essential here, to stop large warships from being missile bait. But what about ramming? A couple things are unclear to me. First, if your RoF is higher than the number of ramming ships, do you get one hit per ramming ship, or one hit per point of RoF, which can be divided freely among attacking ships? I can't quite tell from the wording of the rule ("Beam weapons that are assigned to point defense may therefore automatically hit a number of incoming ballistic weapons (or ramming spacecraft) up to their maximum rate of fire.")

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne (Post 2171244)

Second, would it be reasonable to use the "missile shield" rules not just for beams but also missiles?

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne (Post 2171249)

One issue here is that VRF beams have 1/100ths of the output of regular beams, so those won't be 1GJ VRF beams, they'll be 10 MJ VRF beams. So those guns won't be very useful against a well-armored drone. Devote most of your front hull to hardened nanocomposite, and it will be difficult to impossible to so much as scratch the drone.

As for the big gun, that can be overwhelmed by sheer numbers. The big gun might have a range of 50,000 miles. With TL10 or TL11 drives they can easily travel at speeds in excess of 25 MPS. At that speed, the big ship will have less than one hundred 20-second turns to destroy incoming drones. So 100+ drones will overwhelm the big gun. They'll add up to a mere 1% of the tonnage of the monster ship.

Look at the Nightgaunt dogfight drone in Spaceships 8 to see now this is done in detail. If you tone down the armament, you can give them a fifth front armor system for extra protection against the little guns.

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth (Post 2171283)

It's an SM +4 bot with a spinal particle beam and 6g worth of high thrust water fusion torches. If you can extrapolate how SM +4 works, you can probably fill in the gaps yourself.

Originally Posted by Agemegos (Post 2171289)

6 armour components on the front for a AKV. I guess that SM 4 hardened nanocomposite armour has dDR of 5 per system, so six of that is dDR 30. 2ddice × 5 ought to mess them up.

2 fusion torches on the rear gives 0.5 gee times 2 for high thrust times 3 for water which is 6.0 gee.

1 control room in the midships hull.

11 tanks of water giving 15 divided by 2 for high-thrust divided by 3 for water = 2.5 mi/sec each. Total 27.5 mi/sec of delta-vee. Takes each one 7272 seconds to cross the range of a range X laser. Perhaps a better design for this purpose would be to dump the high-thrust and the water for 1 gee at six times the delta-vee, and take a run-up from outside range.

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne (Post 2171249)

Look at the Nightgaunt dogfight drone in Spaceships 8 to see now this is done in detail. If you tone down the armament, you can give them a fifth front armor system for extra protection against the little guns.

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth (Post 2171290)

You can't have 6 armor components on the front when you're armed with a spinal (or lesser fixed) weapon, only 5.

Originally Posted by Agemegos (Post 2171291)

Indeed, but a KKV designed for ramming doesn't need a spinal (or lesser fixed) weapon.



Yes, but a KKV doesn't have any powered systems.

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth (Post 2171292)

Sure, if you're building a big hardened missile rather than an AKV or drone.

Which you can do, but seems to come a little out of left field here.

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne (Post 2171244)

I'm trying to figure out how to build a space combat paradigm where large warships make logical sense, as opposed to being the result of mindless aping of naval warfare. Not that we don't want to ape naval warfare, we just want to do so in a thoughtful way. Here "large" = SM+9 at a minimum, or ideally SM+10 or higher.

The basic problem here is that cost scales with volume, while damage, armor, and HP scale with length. The main thing that large warships have going for them is that (1) they can potentially have enough DR to be immune to beam attacks from smaller ships (2) they can have beam weapons powerful enough to penetrate such armor on enemy craft. Unfortunately, this logic doesn't apply so much to kinetic attacks, because kinetic attacks can do incredible amounts of damage, especially when using the tactical combat rules where you aren't arbitrarily limited to a scale-based velocity.

The missile shield design switch from Spaceships 3 seems essential here, to stop large warships from being missile bait. But what about ramming? A couple things are unclear to me. First, if your RoF is higher than the number of ramming ships, do you get one hit per ramming ship, or one hit per point of RoF, which can be divided freely among attacking ships? I can't quite tell from the wording of the rule ("Beam weapons that are assigned to point defense may therefore automatically hit a number of incoming ballistic weapons (or ramming spacecraft) up to their maximum rate of fire.")

Second, would it be reasonable to use the "missile shield" rules not just for beams but also missiles? It seems like this could be extremely helpful, because (1) dedicated suicide drones can have very heavy frontal armor, enough to bypass point-defense guns designed for unarmored missiles and (2) by the standard rules, a point-defense gunner has a minimum 5% miss chance. Point (2) means an SM+10 warship (weighing in at 10,000 tons) can easily be destroyed by a swarm of a dozen or so SM+4 drones (10 tons each).

Originally Posted by Polydamas (Post 2171301)

I think that your thoughts about force screens are on the right track: settings with many big ships, such as Star Trek or the Schlockverse, usually have some kind of 'force field' technology, and that can allow big ships with big power plants to shrug off attacks.