Re: [Spaceships] Missile shield vs. ramming: two questions
 

When I ask what rules you used, I mean how did you actually resolve this? Because there are definitely some differences in opinion on what the Spaceships rules are, and even more so how you should employ them. Are you rolling the entire missile battery as one attack, or rolling one attack per missile? You can do either by the book, if you've got enough gunners. What about the point defense battery?
Having read about WWI naval battles...no, those often involved legitimately substantial numbers of hits (and didn't necessarily kill the recipient ship either).

Abysmally low hit rates, sure. Sub-percentile at least some of the time. But many ships took solidly 2-digit hit counts in battles.

I'm pretty sure age of sail ships really could and did get hammered by a lot of hits, but I don't have statistics on that.

Re: [Spaceships] Missile shield vs. ramming: two questions
 

On the other hand,three days earlier three shells hits from the Prince of Wales did not kill Bismarck. Neither did a torpedo hit from one of HMS Victorious' torpedo-bombers on the 25th.

In the final battle on the 27th, four British ships fired 2,800 shells at Bismarck and scored 400 hits. Then they sank it with two torpedo hits.

Re: [Spaceships] Missile shield vs. ramming: two questions
 

Attacks were rolled as a volley both for the attacking missiles and the defending PD. I believe this to be the norm for 4th ed and the author of Spaceships and the co-author of 4e did not correct my procedure(though he did catch other problems in my detailed reports). It appeared to be what was used by everyone else as well.

I just don't see this "roll every missile" imperative. It's more simulationist but 4e has gone against simulationism in ranged combat in general and Spaceships in particular is a fast and simple combat system.

Re: [Spaceships] Missile shield vs. ramming: two questions
 

This is a good story. It's pretty much why I fret so much about missile defense.

Back on the possibility of using square-root based damage and HP to encourage large ships, after thinking about it more, I think the big challenge is armor. If you don't boost armor, you strip big ships of one of their original advantages. Not quite sure how to do it, though.

Re: [Spaceships] Missile shield vs. ramming: two questions
 

Apparently, King George V's 14 inch shells were largely ineffective against Bismarck's armor, so a lot of those hits were effectively meaningless. I've heard it claimed that the RN so wanted to be sure they killed it, they closed to point blank range. While that gave them a lot of hits, most of them were high, disabling things like gun direction and turrets (and most likely killing the bulk of the senior officers early on) but not having as great an effect on the seaworthiness as would ordinarily be expected.

Re: [Spaceships] Missile shield vs. ramming: two questions
 

I'm not sure I'd call it an imperative, exactly...but it is permitted by the rules as written, if the attacker has the right features. And it increases performance immensely. (It's also actually an imperative per the text if your battery is turrets - the option to fire an entire battery as one attack is strictly for fixed batteries.)

While I don't know if I could respect it because I have little patience with the Rapid Fire rules being used in places where they're very non-simulationist, I do believe Spaceships might work better if it actually was written to enforce the spirit that you brought to the rules. But it's not written that way, and the way it is written either side of that missile/PD exchange gains a tremendous advantage by choosing to use their weapons otherwise.

Re: [Spaceships] Missile shield vs. ramming: two questions
 

The first thing I can think of to offset the increase in beam weapon power under "the square root of destruction" is give an SM-based multiplier to DR. Something like this progression:

SM+4: x1.5
SM+5: x2
SM+6: x2.5
SM+7: x3
SM+8: x3.5
SM+9: x4
SM+10: x5
SM+11: x6
SM+12: x7
SM+13: x9
SM+14: x11
SM+15: x13

This is more or less consistent with how the Square Root of Destruction rules increase the damage output of major batteries. I'm a little worried that for some paradigms it might make ships too tough, but not sure what that paradigm is.

Re: [Spaceships] Missile shield vs. ramming: two questions
 

Proposed square-root based damage progression for conventional warheads:

2cm: 1d+2
2.5cm: 2d
3cm: 2d+2
3.5cm: 3d
4cm: 3d+2
5cm: 5d
6cm: 6d
7cm: 7d
8cm: 8d
10cm: 11d
12cm: 3dx5
14cm: 6dx3
16cm: 6dx4
20cm: 6dx6
24cm: 6dx8
28cm: 6dx11
32cm: 6dx16
40cm: 6dx22
48cm: 6dx28
56cm: 6dx32
64cm: 6dx44
80cm: 6dx60
96cm: 6dx80
112cm: 6dx100

Re: [Spaceships] Missile shield vs. ramming: two questions
 

I know there's a reason that Bismarck survived three shell hits from Rodney on the 24th, a torpedo hit and at least one shell hit on the 25th, and four hunred shell hits on the 27th, before being sunk by two torpedos, or whatever the hellish battering it took was. I'm just trying to give context to the statement that it was "effectively killed by one shell".

Re: [Spaceships] Missile shield vs. ramming: two questions
 

It probably worse better with general GURPS mechanics to use expanded wound size modifiers. I came up with mine here and several other people have had nearly identical schemes.