Some questions on Spaceships
 

I'm trying to read through Spaceships, and I'm having some difficulties (it feels I'm doing more referencing and turning pages than actually reading). I read most of the rules, and decided to try a simulated fight between simple fighters. In the process, I was driven to such a despair that I went through any errata I could find in hopes that something was missing (alas, I couldn't find anything helpful).

First up, a straight-forward question: is it possible to fire identical weapons of different batteries at the same time without multitasking penalties? I assume it is possible to at least do with penalties, but there's a sentence that didn't make sense to me: "identical fixed mount weapons in a major, medium, secondary, or tertiary battery". Afaik, a major battery can only have one weapon, so it would be redundant to include them in that list, so I was thinking maybe it's supposed to be "identical fixed mount weapons of [a] battery" (ie that if they're identical they're considered to have the same trigger). Failing that, are there any ways to link them? I couldn't see anything in the book, so could that be done with Basic or something?

Secondly, do missiles only do "normal" damage? They would logically be ex and/or burn, also with some AD, but I couldn't find that info about missiles.

In general, is there like a "Guide to Spaceships", that gives some easy to follow examples or something...?



I'll be back... (with more questions, probably)

Re: Some questions on Spaceships
 

I see no reason why they couldn't be fire-linked, even if there aren't explicit rules to allow them to do so.

They are entirely impact weapons, without a significant explosive payload (they might have something akin to such to allow them to be used as proximity warheads) - largely because in space you can get up to sufficiently high relative velocities that your impact alone exceeds the power of any comparable mass of conventional explosive. They simply do crushing damage. Do note that when not used as proximity warheads, they have a (2) Armor Divisor.

Re: Some questions on Spaceships
 

By the rules, I think it has to be all in one weapon battery system, but I'm always tempted to ignore that and allow a single gunner operate all identical weapons that can be brought to bear with no penalty (including turrets and weapons in different locations). Spaceships seems to think that slaving multiple turrets to a single director is impossible, despite it being pretty standard as far back as WWII.

As for missiles, they are assumed to be kinetic impactors, not explosive warheads. At the speeds involved, the most effective way to kill something is to hit it with something heavy. Be sure you are using the basic damage for the warheads and the multiplier for the impact speed.

Re: Some questions on Spaceships
 

I'd interpret the rules as disallowing multiple batteries to operate "as one", even though it's a bit counter-intuitive (an X-Wing would be less useful, for instance). Multiple engines can be considered to be an engine plate or simply a bigger one for the added effects. Imo, it'd make sense if multiple batteries could be combined to the same battery (at least with enough complexity or something). Do linked weapons fire at a higher RoF, or are they considered individual rolls, btw? And if they're separate, are they Dodged together (ie the Dodge MoS "spills over" to the other linked shots)?

Right, I missed that note on the missile AD. But regarding missiles, why are the base relative velocities different based on what scale the encounter is at? That makes no (intuitive) sense to me, or does a missile continuously accelerate (or at least is considered to do so in space)?

Re: Some questions on Spaceships
 

Longer distance scales, like shorter time scales, are used when the drives are higher performance. That is, the ships (and missiles) are normally moving faster. If you had slow ships, you wouldn't choose the Distant scale over Standard or Close. Or to look at it the other way around, if you have slow ships, short-range weapons, and Distant scale, you're going to have a long, boring combat as the ships aren't fast enough to close the distance and get into range.

It's not that the longer scale makes the missiles move faster, as it is that if you're using that scale, the missiles would have to be moving faster to hit such distant (and fast) targets (or else there'd be no point in using them). It's not a direct cause-and-effect (distance makes missiles go faster), but a correlation (fast ships means Distant scale, but also means faster missiles which along with the faster ships means relative velocities are typically going to be higher).

The basic combat system (as well as the SS design system) is meant to be fairly abstract and simple. It's not a system of solving Newtonian mechanics equations to determine the actual speed from exact known positions and elapsed times. Lots of values are approximations and averages, not hard engineering numbers.

Re: Some questions on Spaceships
 

By the book? No, it's not possible. At all. It's clearly not possible with penalties, because "A single character may never perform more than one gunnery task per turn" - it's either one task with no penalty, or impossible.

This is, obviously, not how the people writing the example ships in Spaceships 4 understood things. Or, based on testimony, how at least some of the playtesters understood things.

Regrettably, Spaceships has a really bad problem with not paying attention to its own text. I don't know what anybody can do about that at this point.

Re: Some questions on Spaceships
 

[QUOTE=FeiLin;2271096]I'd interpret the rules as disallowing multiple batteries to operate "as one", even though it's a bit counter-intuitive (an X-Wing would be less useful, for instance). /QUOTE]

Why would an X-Wing have more than one battery?

Re: Some questions on Spaceships
 

Because you want the guns on it to be bigger than secondaries, presumably.

And/or because you're using the Starhawk (SS4 p12) as the blatant X-Wing take that it is.

Re: Some questions on Spaceships
 

The batteries on the Starhawk are fixed mounts. It's got one missile system and four X-ray laser systems. The gunnery task lets you choose "a single turret weapon; a single spinal weapon; all identical fixed mount weapons in a major, medium, secondary, or tertiary battery." So you can take a single gunnery task to fire all four of the Starhawk's X-ray lasers simultaneously.

But you can't multitask at all with gunnery. "A single character may never perform more than one gunnery task per turn (with the exception of spreading fire)."

As for tying together all the turrets in a battery, or all the turrets in every battery, why not? Spaceships doesn't expect you to take its rules so rigidly that you can't make them conform to your ideas. If tying together turrets is a thing you can do in your setting, then do it.

Re: Some questions on Spaceships
 

It says "in a battery", so that probably means you can only group the weapons that are in a single battery.

Re: Some questions on Spaceships
 

Given that the Star Hawk only has one pilot I would consign the idea that its X-Ray lasers are separate batteries to errata. It would be impossible to target those weapons individually.

Re: Some questions on Spaceships
 

That makes no sense. There's no possible way they accidentally wrote in four Major Batteries when they meant four fixed guns in one secondary or tertiary battery. That's completely ridiculous. It's not errata.

What it is is a larger-scale rules issue where the authors, either negligently or knowingly, wrote content that clearly isn't based on the rules as actually published. Maybe, like Stormcrow, they don't think that rules text is meant to be taken 'rigidly'.

Re: Some questions on Spaceships
 

So...how does the pilot shoot his guns?

Re: Some questions on Spaceships
 

Ok, so I reread the relevant parts, and this makes no sense to me. So, they are explosive, just not represented by the ex modifier when they actually hit something? Instead they get +4 TH and can deal MoS (max x10) hits (presumably only to the target).

Also, why the lack of variety of missiles? Afaik the only choice I have is barrel size and "nuke, super or neither" (disregarding warp, which seems not to behave like missiles). What if I want ion missiles that stun ships, more penetration, or different range? Maybe even different speeds depending on ammo. I could, of course, just go in and add/change it, but then I'd have to open the can of worms of adjusting costs, etc, which I'd rather wait with.



Sure, there's a lot of approximations, and that's fair. I also agree that missiles need higher speeds if targets are faster. But that still doesn't really make sense that individual missiles will differ in lethality depending on this, unless the scale is fixed by setting (or at least campaign). This may be implicit, since choosing TL and what (super)science is allowed may make one engine type far superior to others, even if it's not explicitly the case in the rules.

Accepting this accepting this phenomena, however, incurs other headaches. Are then the Spaceship rules balanced with regards to weapon types, DR and HP? I dont see the other weapons change depending on their "relative speed", so that makes me wonder if I need to start out by outlining a few basic ship types and see what their move ranges are and thus what the most likely scale will be, and then go back to swap/plug in their weapon holes.

What I'm opting for is a solid foundation of beam weapons, with the occasional missile, but how would you start out if this is decided from the start as opposed to "finding it out" along the way? I could, of course, start meddling with costs, etc, but I'd prefer to keep it "as vanilla as possible".



Again for this issue: balance. I'm on the verge of just ruling that identical beam/gun weapons can fire even if separate batteries, if they're fixed, same facing and same target. But maybe that makes

Also, would you treat this as a higher RoF or make separate attack rolls, and (if separate attacks) would you Dodge only once and let MoS surplus cover more than one attack or Dodge once per attack?

Re: Some questions on Spaceships
 

Consistency with the rest of the rules would make such a grouping work like any others - they are all lumped together in one attack, with a rate of fire equal to the total RoF of all the guns added together. See SS, p.57-58 "Rate of Fire".

I don't see any reason why multiple major batteries can't be grouped together like this. Then again, I'm cool with ships being designed with some or all of a medium (or smaller) battery's guns being placed into a turret and all being fired together. Naturally such a set-up would prohibit those guns from engaging separate targets.

Re: Some questions on Spaceships
 

This isn't an explosion dealing damage directly, but the penetrator bursting to create more (but less effective, thus the loss of armor divisor) submunitions.
While it has some superscience technology, the Spaceships core book largely avoids outright magic like Star Wars style "ion" weapons. If you want to introduce something like that, you would probably need to come up with the stats yourself.
Actual movement is abstracted, but at Distant/20 sec, ships are assumed to be moving very fast relative to each other, while at Close/10 min, they are assumed to be very slow. When you launch a missile, it starts at the same speed as the launching vessel. At Distant/20 sec, the engine is primarily used for maneuver, not velocity.

Re: Some questions on Spaceships
 

You're right, and it doubles down on this on page 57, where it says "All identical fixed mount weapons in the same battery may be fired simultaneously..."

I think the idea of fixed mounts changed between the Basic Set and Spaceships. In the Basic Set, you aim the weapon by aiming the vehicle, rolling the lower of your Gunner skill and your vehicle control skill. In Spaceships, there's no sign of using Piloting to aim a fixed-mount weapon: you just roll Gunner or Artillery, and "superior focusing or stabilization systems give fixed mounts better range and fire control (a +2 to hit)." There's also no indication that multiple fixed mounts can't fire at different targets; over the course of a space combat turn surely the ship can reorient itself enough to aim at multiple targets facing the same hull section.

My guess is that the rules for using fixed mounts in Spaceships are simplified from the Basic Set to avoid the complications of comparing weapon skill with control skill and to avoid the assumption that the pilot is also the one firing the weapon.

The fix would be to go back to using the lower of Piloting or weapon skill and to assume that all fixed mounts in the same hull section fire on the same target regardless of what battery they're in.

I still don't think the Spaceships rules were meant to stand up to intense scrutiny. They were written to cover a very broad range of possibilities in as generic a way as possible and in as short a format as possible. Some interpretation is called for and even expected.

Re: Some questions on Spaceships
 

Either they use them one at a time, making the presence of 4 major batteries fairly pointless and negating the explicitly-noted power issues of the design, or they operate on some kind of houserules contrary to the text of Spaceships. I'm pretty sure, as I said, that the second is what the author of that ship intended.
Missiles are not explosive. Things they hit are likely to explode, to a degree, in the same way that things hit by a meteor do. But the missile is no more an explosive device than the meteor is.

Little variety is in large part because Spaceships, and Spaceships missiles in particular, draw a lot on reality and not very much on Star Wars. An 'ion missile' has no real referents.
I highly recommend not worrying about preserving balance. There really isn't balance to preserve.
I hate using RoF in Spaceships passionately...and even I would use multiple linked fixed guns as one attack with combined RoF.
Because, as people keep pointing out, the rules are very very explicit that you can fire "All identical fixed mount weapons in the same battery". Not in the same hull section.
There's not really any relation. Spaceships 'fixed mounts' on a realistic ship almost certainly aren't actually fixed and aimed only by maneuvering the entire vessel - they just have a limited aiming capability rather than the broad traversal of turrets. Remember, Spaceships ranges mean you're generally attacking targets that are mostly or entirely impossible to discern with the naked eye, using aimed fire assisted by fire control computers. (See the box on SS p66.)

Re: Some questions on Spaceships
 

While this is largely true, the Spinal Battery system tends to speak against an absolute acceptance of this idea. A Spinal Battery is a fixed mount weapon and must certainly be aimed by aiming the ship. The fire control computer would assist in aiming the ship, not any kind of weapon movable independent of the ship's orientation.

And yet not even Spinal Batteries have rules related to Piloting. And if you dedicate enough systems in your ship to have multiple spinal batteries pointing in the same direction, you can and must still, by a strict interpretation of the rules, fire them independently. Again, that may, given the long space combat turns, mean that the ship is changing its facing enough to fire at multiple target one after the other, but then you give up the idea of all your fixed mount batteries firing at the same target simultaneously.

If you want to stick to the rules and have multiple fixed mount weapons fire simultaneously, then you MUST put them in a single, less-powerful battery.

The least change you can enact to make it work is to assume that, like Habitats, Hangars, Open Spaces, Armor, Fuel Tank, and Jump Gate systems, you can combine weapon systems into larger, "single" systems. This is especially true when talking about the Starhawk: it's a generic version of an X-Wing Fighter, and Spaceships page 31 explicitly tells us we can "combine several systems into one" to better fit a fictional spaceship into the rules.

Re: Some questions on Spaceships
 

Not necessarily. A spinal beam weapon could be aimed by even quite minute deflection of the beam at the aparture. A spinal missile launcher or even gun scarcely needs to be aimed in the first place - note that all projectile weapons do not experience range penalties in Spaceships.
Having more than one Spinal Battery is completely illegal by the building rules. A Spinal Battery has to pass through the core system in the center hull. You can only have one core system in the center hull, so you may only have one Spinal Battery.

Even if the gun was aimed by turning the ship, frankly, Piloting wouldn't enter into it - it's a minuscule angular adjustment that's completely trivial to tell a computer to do (though not necessarily trivial for the computerized maneuver system to execute) and impossible to do manually. The part where Piloting factors into the use of fixed weapons is in placing the ship so that they are oriented to bear on the target.
I suspect that was meant in a different sense, like making a reactionless drive that is also a shield, or a weapon battery that is also a mining assembly, rather than deviating from the foundational 20-systems rule.

Re: Some questions on Spaceships
 

Yes, you're right, I forgot about the need to go through the core system of the central hull.

I'm not talking about deviating from the 20-systems rule. By the rules you can take, for instance, four habitat systems and consider them as a single habitat space, even while it game-mechanically functions as four systems. So you could take four major battery systems and consider them as a single weapon battery, even though game-mechanically it functions as four systems. With this most minor of modifications in the name of replicating the ship you have in mind, as the book encourages you to do, you end up with the desired effect.

Re: Some questions on Spaceships
 

I think you're right, though using the 'larger systems' rule from SS7, p.5, you could use three systems to mount an oversized fixed medium battery of three guns the size of a normal major battery gun, which would then allow you to fire them all together quite legally. Given that this is the case, there's no reason other than the text in SS to not allow it for any number of guns as long as they are fixed and bear in the same direction.

As I said, I allow guns to be mounted more than one to a turret, and to fire as a single attack, subject to the other limitations (identical, etc.), so I'm a heretic anyway.

Re: Some questions on Spaceships
 

Well, I allow multiple turrets to be fired as a single attack. This was routine on ships in the 1930s, so I see no reason to assume it would be impossible at TL10.

Re: Some questions on Spaceships
 

I'm pretty sure that's the intent behind the Starhawk design since it's the only way it could work.

Re: Some questions on Spaceships
 

Actually, it was routine before WWI for battleships.

Re: Some questions on Spaceships
 

Oh, I agree that there's no good reason for the restriction. As has been noted, a single operator firing multiple turrets, spread out across the hull even, is perfectly realistic at tech levels lower than Spaceships usually goes to.

It's just that it is, as you say, the text in Spaceships.

Re: Some questions on Spaceships
 

Knew the firing solutions were calculated and the guns triggered centrally, buy couldn't quickly find any explicit reference to guns being automatically laid from central control that early. I knew for sure the Mk. 33 did this.

Re: Some questions on Spaceships
 

They weren't fully automatic, but I don't see having humans work controls to line up the gun's azimuth marker with the marker controlled by the director is any different from having a machine do it, aside from one of tech level.

Re: Some questions on Spaceships
 

There SHOULD be variety of missiles. For instance countermissiles should cost about a fraction per salvo of a shipkiller (or why didn't they throw them at the other formation in the first place). Missiles for delicate stuff like gunboat diplomacy, policework, and piracy should be more surgical. Conversely shipkillers should have better armor penetration capability than either countermissiles, or missiles made for light units or for skirmishing (the latter two can often be the same model). There should be different warheads like EMPers, Nukes, Laserheads, recon (and possibly conterrecon) drones, different attack plans and so forth. Some of these can be several apps put in the same guidance computer as options. But at the least there are reasons to have different sizes to make an expense worth the target.

Re: Some questions on Spaceships
 

It's fairly hard to justify countermissiles rather than point defense beams or cannon. (Except for countermissile nuking.) You could have 16cm countermissiles used to shoot down larger 'shipkiller' missiles, but it's difficult to make larger shipkillers useful.

A 'short ramge' missile that cut off half the mass and probably 2/3s to 3/4s of the delta-V would be a helpful option, if you do want to use missiles for defensive fire.
How do you do 'surgical' a gigantic hypervelocity impactor?
No Spaceships kinetic weapons have useful penetration factors, assuming warship armor is hardened.

The text has nukes and laser heads (though it doesn't really give instructions on how to play out the laser heads), and EMP missiles seem like a dubious proposition. Nobody's stopping you having drones, but drones aren't really missiles. SS5 does have sensor drones that are stated as missile replacements, though they're intended for exploratory/scientific use, not tactical recon.

Re: Some questions on Spaceships
 

Having a missile that counters an opposing, larger missile gives a ship a larger envelope in which to perform the intercept, and allows dedicated counter-missile ships to free up mass on other ships to mount more anti-ship weapons. It might end up below the resolution at which Spaceships operates, but in principle having a missile that could engage multiple opposing missiles may be useful - something like a 32cm laser head that can engage up to 16 incoming missiles.

You make it less gigantic and hypervelocity. Consider a missile intended to close at high speed and shower a target ship's engines (or other subsystem identified on or after launch) with 2cm kinetic projectiles while missing with the main body, gaining accuracy from the close approach but attempting to leave it drifting in space rather than a sphere of expanding plasma. It should even be possible to adjust the relative velocity of the projectiles depending on the desired probabilities of damage / crippled / destroyed results. That might be veering into the territory of tube-launched single-use drones rather than missiles, though in some sense there isn't much difference between the two.

Re: Some questions on Spaceships
 

That's "use a smaller missile", but when it comes down to it, beams are probably a better choice for PD fire simply because they don't use up ammo.
You're throwing lumps of matter around at multiple miles per second. There's nothing surgical about it.
They do - it's called not using proximity detonation, or it would if hardened armour didn't make using one-piece warhead attacks on warships pointless.
Nukes and laserheads exist. Recon and drones, well they should probably be made as small unmanned spaceships. Different attack plans means 'close more slowly, but hope that this makes the PD miss', and really, that's already assumed (otherwise the PD would never miss). As for EMP, tricky when most target ships are metallic and are thus Faraday cages.

Re: Some questions on Spaceships
 

Use a small missile, from behind, aim at the engine systems. All doable, though probably easier in the tactical rules where you can move missiles around to get them behind a ship more readily.

Re: Some questions on Spaceships
 

What does a larger envelope actually do for you, though?

You don't need to be using missiles for one ship to provide cover to another. Any space weapon has range that trivializes the size of ships and the space between them needed to stay out of each others' way. It might be possible to have a defensive missile ship provide cover to ships in a separate maneuver element. But that would require relatively long-legged (and thus not cheap) countermissiles and some reason for actually having separate maneuver elements.

You don't want to try to engage incoming missiles with a single beam each - unless you're using the Missile Shield rule, I suppose, but at that point you definitely don't have any need for antimissiles. VRF (improved) lasers delete all incoming while barely even trying.
Yeah, that's not a missile, it's a drone. And it probably doesn't want to be closing at overly high speed, that limits engagement time and (greatly) increases the damage done by the impactors.

Frankly, it's not clear why it's a drone rather than a armed cutter with boarding parties. If you wanted to disable the ship mostly intact, presumably the next step is boarding, ideally conducted as quickly as possible after the disabling.

Re: Some questions on Spaceships
 

The most unconventional missile I ever saw was the boarding missile from Gall Force. It punched through the hull of the Star Leaf and then opened up to release it's passenger. Of course that the passenger was a mass of invertebrate goo was the only reason it could survive the trip.

Re: Some questions on Spaceships
 

Sure it can be. If you want to assassinate President Evil, your missile can be programed to drain off velocity before entering atmosphere. Then it can approach his glorious palace at a speed no greater than a pre-starflight missile and explode wrecking the whole place but carrying no bigger a load than needed for that.

Re: Some questions on Spaceships
 

...And are you proposing that this incredibly inefficient, hyperspecialized, not-really-a-space-weapon missile is something that 'should be' present in Spaceships?

(Also, you cannot "drain off" velocity in space. 'Slowing down' and 'speeding up' are the same task of acceleration, and both are brutally expensive.)

Re: Some questions on Spaceships
 

I'd think that you would want a drone because you're concerned about the ability of your target to shoot it down. It's a lot easier to throw a bunch of drones at a ship and hope one of them gets through, and then demand that the now-crippled ship receive boarders or be destroyed than it is to throw a bunch of boarding parties at a ship and hope that one of them gets through.

But that seems like the answer to what FeiLin was asking - if you want complex missiles, build them as drones and use 'hangars' to launch them rather than weapon systems. Given that a 16cm missile only masses 1/10 of a ton you'd need to scale a lot of the systems down to SM-1, but that means that the cost might actually compare favorably with the $100K a normal missile costs. As a GM I might even both allow you to launch them out of weapon systems as a special option and give a cost discount for 'single use' - I'm sure that there are all sorts of corners you can cut if you expect an operational lifetime measured in hours at best.

Re: Some questions on Spaceships
 

That works if your problem is a ship that can fight small craft and can run away from but can't fight your ships. I'm not sure I see that as a likely problem, but yeah, in that case some disposable 'bola' drones to shoot out the propulsion could be called for.
I don't think drones really address anything FeiLin was asking about. I do think that a ship (unmanned or otherwise) of appropriate SM being designed to launch from missile tubes is quite reasonable, though.